Yet there's something unsettling about the place. With her kids away at school and her husband often abroad on business, the house is eerily quiet. Even the TV doesn't enliven things: Xu still hasn't figured out how to use the remote correctly. Nor can she turn on the chandelier to brighten things up for fear of short-circuiting the neighborhood electricity. To pass the time, she spends hours in her darkened house reading romance novels.

Only a daily pilgrimage to the local temple soothes her loneliness. "I go to pray for my children," she says. "I wish they will find fulfillment." Most of the other worshipers are praying for something simpler: money. But Xu has that, and it isn't making her happy. "Money doesn't buy everything," she says, sitting in her family room without her family. "We all thought it would, but look at me now."

Such epiphanies are still new in China. But the realization that money may not buy happiness is spreading, fueled in part by an epidemic of divorce that is tearing through China's nouveaux riches. In Shenzhen, the joke is that the traditional Chinese greeting "Have you eaten yet" has been replaced by "Have you divorced yet?" Though low by Western standards, the divorce rate has doubled over the past decade to 20% of marriages in China's cities. Researchers at the All-China Women's Federation estimate the rate may be twice that among wealthier Chinese. Without the old Communist Party neighborhood watchdogs to monitor what is happening in everyone's bedrooms, affairs have mushroomed. And for many rich men, concubines have become the latest must-have in a life of endless toys and acquisitions.

In the suburbs of Guangzhou and Shanghai, entire "concubine villages" have sprouted up, jammed with beauty salons, karaokes and gyms to entertain the legions of kept women. Tang Ling's husband, a lumber merchant from the northeastern city of Shenyang, kept three concubines, or at least that's how many Tang knows about. "He got bored with me, then got bored with each mistress," she says, sitting in the splendid Beijing apartment she pried out of her husband after their divorce in June. "I think rich people in China have lost their sense of loyalty. They keep searching for something, but everything they find isn't good enough."

Still, China's rich keep searching, for what else is there, really, to do in life? Pan Shiyi, a philosophical real estate developer in Beijing, who has built luxury villas by the Great Wall for China's Elite, is exploring Taoism as a way to sate his soul. "I think we've realized that money is a false god," says Pan, lounging on the patio of his country retreat north of Beijing. "Houses, cars and other toys don't bring spiritual contentment." So what does? Pan, the great-grandson of an opium lord and son of a penniless party flack, shakes his head. He gathers his two toddler sons next to him and kisses each on the head. "I work so much I hardly see my boys," he says. "When Deng told us to go make money, we never expected that it wouldn't be all we needed."

Back in Hangzhou, though, President Huang isn't convinced that money doesn't buy it all. "Money is what makes dreams come true," he muses. "Without money, you don't count in China." This summer, the man who owns 22 companies—or, at least, that's how many Huang remembers owning—was busy drawing up plans to create Venice Town, Swiss Village and other European-themed wonderlands in Hangzhou for tourists to visit and live out their vacation fantasies. Next, he aims to create a mini-Las Vegas in China, complete with casinos and cabaret shows. "Las Vegas is a place made of dreams," says Huang, showing off his snapshots from a recent trip to the Nevadan oasis. "Imagine something so beautiful sprouting out of a desert. It reminds me of how China developed so quickly out of nothing."

Not so long ago, Huang himself had nothing. He started out as a cog in the communist machine, toiling away dismally in a state bookstore. But in 1987, he left with a few hundred dollars to his name, determined to fashion a small beach resort on the tropical island of Hainan. That resort spawned many others, and Huang is now a corporate titan, a budding Chinese Rockefeller. "The people who got in early had the most success," he says of China's economic boom. "No one else was even thinking about this [kind of] business, so it was completely open." One day, of course, his luck may run out. But today—feasting on deep-fried eel, braised seaweed and stomach stew in the Red Room of the White House—Huang is living the Chinese dream. And he's loving every wretchedly excessive minute of it.

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