“In its prime, this place wowed the entire city,” says real estate agent Shi Lei, who’s laying it on thick as he leads a prospective tenant through the lavish, hotel-style lobby of the Regent International Center — one of the world’s most populous apartment complexes — in Hangzhou, capital of the eastern Zhejiang province.

“Even the hallways are lined entirely with marble,” he says with a broad smile. “It’s rare to see such high-end materials used in a mixed-use complex.”

For almost a decade, selling and renting out property at the Regent was easy — it was the beating heart of the city’s burgeoning livestream e-commerce industry, attracting endless streams of internet celebrities, or wanghong. At one point, people would even joke that the building’s GDP could rival that of a Chinese county.

But those glory days are now over. In recent years, the building’s reputation has plummeted, with homebuyers and renters put off by scandals and rumors of overcrowding, safety hazards, and illicit activities.

As prices have gradually fallen, residents, landlords, and investors have largely accepted this new reality. However, things could be about to change again, as a fresh wave of cutting-edge technology takes hold.

Welcoming wanghong

At 39 stories tall, the Regent stands as an imposing landmark along the southwestern banks of Hangzhou’s Qiantang River. The building was originally designed as a luxury hotel but was later converted into an apartment complex, offering a self-contained community with various amenities. It has 1,594 residential and commercial units, including loft-style apartments ranging from 74 to 222 square meters, with ceiling heights of 4.99 or 5.99 meters.

When the building opened in 2013, the city was developing twin central business districts on either side of the river — Qianjiang New City to the west, and Qianjiang Century City to the east.

“The Regent’s highly accessible, so many young people new to the city or working at nearby tech companies choose to live here,” Shi tells his client, as he guides them into one of the building’s many elevators. “Qianjiang Century City, where we are now, is considered one of Hangzhou’s most desirable districts.”

That wasn’t always the case. In 2015, long-time Hangzhou resident Piao Pu received a call from a real estate agent to tell her that “apartments in the building were selling like crazy,” urging her to snap one up. “But in my mind, that whole area was out in the sticks, so I just hung up,” she recalls.

She changed her mind a year later, when the city was preparing to host a G20 Summit. “That’s when this location really took off,” says Piao. “In a very short time, that section of Benjing Avenue in front of the Regent had been completed, the surrounding area was beautifully landscaped, and the population was growing. That’s when I decided to buy a place there.”

That same year, China’s largest online marketplace, the Alibaba-owned Taobao, also launched its livestreaming platform, lighting the fuse for a period of explosive growth — for the e-commerce industry and the city.

Today, Hangzhou is the unofficial “capital of livestreaming.” It is home to 32 major livestreaming platforms, nearly 50,000 livestreamers, and more than 5,000 related enterprises, creating more than 1 million jobs, according to the city’s official data.

In the early years, tech-savvy entrepreneurs and many owners of traditional brick-and-mortar stores could sense that change was in the air — and the Regent was the place to be.

Hu Haili had been involved in the textiles business for more than 20 years before she invested in the Regent in 2017. She bought one apartment to live in and rented another to convert into a livestreaming studio, for which she hired an operations manager and on-screen host.

“Back then, the whole of the Regent was thriving,” she says, explaining that, as it’s a mixed-use complex, residents can legally register and run companies from their apartments. “A lot of studios opened here. Some were just husband-and-wife teams; they’d live in the upstairs of the apartment and run livestream sales downstairs. That kind of small operation was easy to manage. There were also some larger online stores based here, shipping 2,000 or 3,000 orders a day.”

With so much going on, Hu formed the Regent Taobao Shop Alliance, an online group chat that helps other sellers in the building exchange goods and information, attracting more than 200 people in just a few days.

The Regent came to symbolize a golden era of livestream e-commerce in Hangzhou. With so many big-name hosts living and working there, it earned the nickname “Wanghong Tower.”

“For people working at nearby tech companies and aspiring influencers, the Regent was their first choice to get started,” says Zhang Dayong, who runs an agency that sublets properties in the building. “Even our cleaner started livestreaming. Every evening after work, she films herself finger-tutting (a street dance involving intricate finger movements), and already has more than 4,000 followers.”

Yet, with the arrival of new property developments and livestream e-commerce platforms in 2019, the sands began to shift.

Boom to bust

The Regent stands at the northeastern end of Binsheng Road, which runs parallel with the Qiantang River. Along that same stretch today stands the 150-meter-high Jiarun Mansion, about 1.3 kilometers away, and the glitzy Ginkgo Plaza some 10 kilometers to the southwest.

Both properties became beacons for leading online influencers, and the surrounding area filled with trendy cafés, fashion concept stores, and boutique hotels, creating what some called “Wanghong Street.” By 2020, locals joked that Ginkgo Plaza alone housed half of all the internet celebrities in China.

However, a hierarchy built on status quickly began to emerge, with the Regent — being older and less luxurious — firmly at the bottom. “The people who made money moved onto better places, and those who didn’t, well … they left, too,” realtor Shi tells the reporter, more candid now that the prospective tenant has left to consider their decision.

He speaks enviously of a story recently making the rounds about two luxury apartments in one of the “nearby complexes” that had just sold for more than 30 million yuan ($4.17 million) each. “Honestly, that building isn’t even that great,” he says, his tone suddenly changing. “It’s just that, in the (wanghong) social circle, living there is a status symbol.”

Around 2020, an even more profound shift was quietly unfolding in the industry. After the explosive growth in livestream sales via Taobao — and later the short-video platforms Kuaishou and Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok — the do-it-yourself model was making way for highly specialized and professional operations. Success now required precise coordination among people, products, and platforms, with tightly integrated upstream and downstream supply chains.

As capital and traffic increasingly flowed to top-tier celebrities and brands, who could afford to spend big on advertising, the era when anyone could get a slice of the pie was over, forcing out many small-scale streamers.

Hu shut down her livestreaming business in 2021. “I was used to running a brick-and-mortar store. I didn’t understand online marketing, so I had to hire people to manage it. But the labor costs were too high and I wasn’t making any money. We just couldn’t survive,” she says. One of Hu’s employees returned home to raise cattle, while the other switched to an entirely different industry.

That same year, the city’s livestream community was also rocked when Viya, one of China’s best-known livestreamers, was ordered to pay taxes and fines totaling more than 1.3 billion yuan after she was found guilty of tax evasion.

With the industry no longer looking so easy-going or glamorous, fewer people were attempting to dip their toe, which had a knock-on effect for the Regent, where most rookies were inclined to start out.

Sales struggles

Regent resident Piao is currently trying to rent out her apartment. She’s picky about tenants, and she insists on a face-to-face meeting with all applicants, during which she lays out a few standard ground rules, such as no pets or smoking.

Piao recently felt she’d found the perfect match — the lease had been signed, and the tenant had paid a deposit. But then the tenant suddenly pulled out, saying that after doing research into the Regent they’d come across a stream of negative social media posts. Piao simply returned the deposit without another word.

Much of the problem stems back to the early days of the Regent. As units were initially delivered as bare shells, many buyers purchased them at low prices as an investment and passed them onto property management agents to sublet. These units were often then carved into seven or even 10 small rooms to rent out. At its peak, the building’s population was equivalent to a small town, with nearly 20,000 access cards issued.

This gave rise to a vibrant commercial ecosystem. With clothing stores, nail salons, gyms, beauty parlors, snack stalls, and supermarkets, residents hardly had a need to ever leave the building.

However, with such a large influx of people, many saw the Regent as “too open,” with concerns raised online about a chaotic mix of businesses, overcrowding, fires, and other safety hazards.

In 2021, as part of the preparations for the 19th Asian Games, Hangzhou’s Xiaoshan District government formed a task force targeting unsightly buildings and illicit activities. This led to three people being detained for committing prostitution-related offenses at the Regent along with one landlord and two subletters, while another landlord and three subletters received fines.

After that, social media platforms began filling with negative content about the building, often alongside clickbait captions and images of scantily-clad women.

“The Regent has been seriously stigmatized — you could even say demonized,” says Hu. “People online claim this is Hangzhou’s biggest illegally partitioned tenement building and that as many as 30,000 people live here. The worst part is that they say the Regent is the biggest brothel in Hangzhou. That’s absolute nonsense. These rumors have completely ruined us.”

The rumor mill has cast a long shadow over those owning property or businesses in the Regent, with some stores reporting that they had received several phone calls asking about “special services.”

In April, Xiao Yi, who was among the first buyers at the Regent in 2013, spotted a couple of American tourists filming inside with a GoPro. When he asked them why, he discovered they had become interested after seeing videos about the building on YouTube and wanted to see it for themselves.

Although some videos describe the Regent International Center as a “dystopian structure” and focus on its large number of residents, a quick search of YouTube generates mostly content containing neutral information on the building, such as its location and size. However, many residents, like Xiao, believe that the Regent’s negative image has also gained traction overseas.

“The Regent isn’t just famous across China, it’s known around the world,” Xiao says. “A lot of people who bought units here were overseas at the time and never saw the property; they just handed over their units directly to real estate agents to rent out or manage. Now they’re seeing news about the property even in foreign media, and it’s all negative.”

“At one point, every time I mentioned I lived at the Regent, people would give me a knowing smirk,” he adds. “When I took a taxi home at night, I was even embarrassed to tell the driver I was going home to the Regent.”

In an effort to restore the building’s reputation, the homeowners association at the Regent even hired a public relations firm to devise a rebranding strategy. “We want reporting that reflects the facts, so people can see what the real Regent is actually like,” according to one association member.

Residents and business owners take every opportunity to promote the building in interviews, especially in terms of safety, mentioning that the property management office has become increasingly strict on security since the 2021 crackdown. The lobby is now installed with facial recognition technology, while security guards keep watch around the clock.

The Regent is also now a key demonstration zone for Hangzhou’s City Brain 3.0 initiative, which aims to enhance urban governance and public services through the use of artificial intelligence. The building has been installed with an integrated AI system — involving 16 smart access gates, 24 elevators, 603 high-definition surveillance cameras, and 1,865 smoke detectors — that can detect more than 20 types of risk scenarios. This data is shared directly with the local police station.

Yet, these measures have given rise to new tensions, with some investor-owners arguing that the Regent is a commercial property and shouldn’t be held to residential standards. 

Today, the building has just over 8,000 registered residents. “Getting in and out is increasingly inconvenient, and many companies have moved out,” says Hu. “With fewer people, prices have naturally fallen.”

One typical investor-owner who purchased her 144-square-meter apartment in 2018 for about 40,000 yuan per square meter says she has seen its yearly rental price plummet over the past decade from 230,000 yuan to just 140,000 yuan.

Tech turnaround

While business has dropped off for real estate agents at the Regent, it certainly hasn’t flatlined. Sit in the building’s lobby during the daytime, and you will see a steady stream of prospective tenants being given a tour and possibly signing leases.

“This is a place for starting a business and making money. It really helps people succeed,” says Duan Haiying, a native of the southeastern Fujian province who moved into the Regent last year. “That’s why I’d rather stay in Hangzhou, even if it means living in a rental. I go back to my hometown once a month, but my heart is always here.”

Ten years ago, Duan rode the e-commerce wave, accumulating wealth and a wide network of contacts, before setting her sights on livestreaming. She later had to quit the high-intensity work due to health reasons, and has now shifted to AI customer acquisition, which involves using AI to generate video content, analyze user behavior, and develop marketing strategies to help businesses attract customers.

“It’s the age of AI now, and you have to keep up with the times,” she says, opening a livestreaming app on her phone to show an AI-generated avatar presenting a product. “AI helps businesses cut costs and increase efficiency. In the past, you had to pay people to shoot videos, edit, and add a voiceover. Now, AI can do it all — cheaper and faster.”

This time, Duan is determined to capture the wave. At the Regent, she quickly found like-minded partners. Every night, e-commerce entrepreneurs from all over the country convene at a spa on the building’s 39th floor to learn about AI customer acquisition. Between sessions, they share stories of near-bankrupt businesses revived by AI tools or multiplying their revenues tenfold.

Since early this year, the rise of Hangzhou’s “six little dragons” — AI company DeepSeek, Black Myth: Wukong developer Game Science, robotics enterprises Unitree and DeepRobotics, neurotechnology company BrainCo, and spatial intelligence company ManyCore — has heightened the buzz surrounding AI. The Regent is now serving as a nurturing incubator for rookies looking for a piece of this latest gold rush, just as it did for the early stars of livestreaming.

Like the ebb and flow of the Qiantang River, the Regent has experienced highs and lows. Residents and entrepreneurs will be hoping this new tech wave will bring more glory days.

(Due to privacy concerns, all names in this article are pseudonyms.)

Reported by Lei Ceyuan and Chen Xinyi.

A version of this article originally appeared in Original (Jiefang Daily). It has been translated and edited for brevity and clarity, and is republished here with permission.

Translator: Carrie Davies; editors: Wang Juyi and Hao Qibao.

(Header image: The Regent International Center, Hangzhou, Zhejiang province, March 2025. Lei Ceyuan/Original)