China’s Butler Boom
On a recent morning at a butler-training school in Chengdu, China, lessons began at 8 A.M., with an exercise in “opening the villa.”
When I arrived at the gated development where the school is housed, a middle-aged student was on her knees scrubbing the pedals of a grand piano, while another sidestepped vacuum cleaners to hoist immaculate white furniture onto a balcony. A rotating cast of young Chinese women in black blazers took turns offering me coffee. After an hour spent dusting under wine bottles and teacups (this was “basic cleaning”—not to be confused, I learned, with “deep cleaning,” which would be covered in a future lesson), the students folded matching white gloves into their pockets and took seats on red velvet chairs in a marble-walled dining room. There, Thomas Kaufmann, a forty-one-year-old Swiss butler, glided noiselessly to the front of the class—a demonstration of a key tenet of butler practice, that help should be “silent and invisible”—to deliver a lecture on catering to the needs and whims of the super-rich. As he addressed dilemmas such as what to do if you encounter your boss, or “principal,” in the nude (“Running out of the room would also be wrong, because he may need your service”), a translator repeated his talking points in Mandarin, and the pens of the nine students in attendance flew across identical leather-bound notebooks.
Kaufmann—or Mr. Kaufmann, for butlers must be vigilant in the use of honorifics—was, until recently, the head instructor at Chengdu’s International Butler Academy, the first satellite branch of a twenty-year-old Dutch school of the same name. The Chinese outpost, which was founded in partnership with the Chinese real-estate company Langji, opened its doors last July. Since then, hundreds of fledgling butlers have passed through the school’s six-week course, which includes at least fifteen hours of training a day, six days a week, to prepare students for the gruelling schedules they’ll keep in their future posts managing stables, castles, and private planes. The school advertises that graduates can expect to earn starting salaries of around twenty thousand RMB, or approximately three thousand dollars, per month. (By contrast, the average ayi, or Chinese maid, in Shanghai earns around five thousand RMB, or less than eight hundred dollars, per month).
The Academy is just one of many institutions that have lately been helping to bring the art of white-glove service to China. Among the country’s business élite and super-rich, the demand for butlers is exploding, fuelled especially by high-end hotels and luxury real-estate firms like Langji, which sometimes bundle butler services with the homes they sell. Aspiring Chinese butlers can now take courses at, among others, the Asia Butler Academy, Magnums Butler International, the International Butler Training Academy, and the Bespoke Bureau, which, for an extra fee, will provide lessons in feigning a British accent. The British Butler Institute—whose head of training, Gary Williams, previously served as a butler to British royalty and Prime Ministers, including Margaret Thatcher—has schools in nine cities across the world, five of them in China. The profession’s commitment to privacy makes it difficult to estimate the number of professional butlers, but every staffing agency I spoke to agreed that the People’s Republic is now the world’s fastest-growing market for their services. The International Butler Academy’s founder, Robert Wennekes, decided to expand his business to China after attending a gala in Beijing in 2012 where his tablemate, the Chinese Minister of Education, estimated that her country had an appetite for “in excess of a hundred thousand butlers.”