It’s 1.50am on a Friday (well, Saturday morning) and you’re still not ready to hit the sack. What’s a fun-loving night owl to do? While most city bars stop serving alcohol around 2am and kick guests out, some locales are just beginning to pick up.
Hot, sweaty and crowded, Han Lounge is an after-hours club in the truest sense of the word. Housed on the third floor of a heritage building on Yanjiang Zhong Lu, the club – with its hulking bouncers that practically undress you with their eyes – can feel a bit sketchy at times, but regulars will tell you that’s part of its allure.
Formerly a VIP enclave for Hyper – one of the city’s most happening joints and host to Steve Aoki during his 2015 visit – the club left Guangzhou partygoers heartbroken, and a lot more sober, when it shut down last year. But Han, as clubbers at the scene tell us, had a hell of a lot of dirty, dirty dancing left to go. So with a nip and tuck here and there, it was reborn last year on Christmas Day under new management.
Once inside the mammoth white building, we see svelte men and hot, busty women cluster around the main bar for cocktails. Drinks are priced at the higher end for a club (RMB68-80), but who’s counting, right?
Table service is the norm and is recommended for those who seek service in languages other than Chinese; the staff is fluent in English, Russian, French and Arabic. All bottles, generally priced upwards from RMB780, come with four soft drinks, and if you’re nice enough, a plate of carefully carved fruit to whet your palate.
The space is ostentatiously in-your-face, with gold-colored high tables, plush couches to sink into, chrome sculptures and bits of memorabilia from the heyday of the Hyper reign. Granted, the new strobe lights do the club justice; there are flashes of pink that would make a Victoria’s Secret model blush with delight.
To top it all off, fresh electroacoustics courtesy of Germany’s d&b audiotechnik equipment spit out the spins of international hip-hop guest DJs DSK, Verse@ille and Asuka, along with resident DJs Franky, Melody, Teddy and Violent. (Yes, Violent, and he’s Russian.)
Local residents are out walking their dogs by the time we leave the party at 7am, still in our heels and makeup, our feet sore from dancing. As we walk towards a taxi, we can feel the ground shake to the beat of a pounding bass. Han Lounge shows no sign of slowing down, and we feel seven years younger already.
Price: RMB200
Who’s going: Stop-at-nothing partygoers, after-hours cliques
Good for: Dancing until the sun comes up, relentless ragers
See listing for Han Lounge here.
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