Thousands of Chinese fans of Mandopop king Jay Chou (周杰倫) gathered on Sunday evening outside Shanghai Stadium before the final concert of the Taiwanese singer’s four-day run in the Chinese city.
Currently on the “Jay Chou Carnival World Tour 2023,” Chou has been performing at his Shanghai stop since Thursday.
Tickets to the four concerts, being held at the outdoor stadium with an 80,000 person capacity, were sold out in seconds when they became available online in the middle of last month.
Photo: CNA
Locals have described the concerts as catering to “80,000 inside [the stadium] and 100,000 outside” to express the sheer volume of “tailgaters” participating in the event around the stadium.
Those who had gathered outside the stadium were not tailgaters in the traditional sense, but were there simply to catch a glimpse of the concert’s flashing lights and hear snippets of Chou’s performance, which lasted about three hours every night.
Many of tailgaters were sporting Chou memorabilia, while others tried to gain access to commercial and residential buildings around the stadium to try and see some of the show.
The concert was one of the hottest topics on Chinese micro-blogging service Sina Weibo, with some residents around the concert venue jokingly offering their balconies as alternative nosebleed seats.
Chou’s Shanghai shows were such a big draw that local police were on high alert, setting up alternative pedestrian routes and barricades to direct traffic around the stadium.
To guarantee the rights of ticket holders, Chou’s Shanghai concert adopted a real-name system, which requires the person who purchased a set of tickets to be present when their group enters the stadium.
The system was used to try to prevent scalpers from grabbing a large number of tickets and reselling them at a profit.
On Chou’s stop in Tianjin, local media reported that tickets with a face value of 2,000 yuan (US$273.52) ended up being sold for 100,000 yuan by scalpers.
Chou is well known in countries with large Mandarin-speaking populations — including communities in the West where other Chinese languages such as Cantonese are spoken — as one of the most gifted Mandarin singer-songwriters of his generation.
Aside from creating famous songs such as Nocturne (夜曲) and Love Before BC (愛在西元前), Chou has also worked with renowned actors.
Hollywood actor Danny Trejo starred in Chou’s music video for Double Blade (雙刀), and the Taiwanese star wrote the theme song for martial arts superstar Jet Li’s (李連杰) kung fu masterpiece Fearless (霍元甲).
Many English-speaking audiences know Chou for costarring alongside Canadian comedian Seth Rogen in the 2011 The Green Hornet reboot as “Kato,” a character popularized by martial arts legend Bruce Lee (李小龍).
He also appeared in 2006’s Curse of the Golden Flower (滿城盡帶黃金甲), starring Hong Kong’s Chow Yun Fat (周潤發).
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