A crowd four people deep encircles the stage, pushed back by grey-uniformed police. Envious murmurs mingle with strains of classical piano and the constant pop of flashbulbs.
Kenneth Tsang, chief executive of the Beijing operations of Bentley Motor Cars, is overjoyed.
"Look at them," Tsang said, gesturing at the hundreds of people mobbing the British luxury car maker's exhibit at the Beijing auto show, which runs through next week.
"They are saying 'Wow! W-O-W!' That is the reaction I want," Tsang gushed as scantily clad models draped themselves over four cars whose price tags total well over $2 million.
Luxury car makers, faced with slowing sales in rich countries like Japan and the United States, are turning to relatively poor China as a new growth market.
A small but growing ultra-wealthy class is developing appetites for speed and luxury.
"We could not find a better time than now to come into China. We are looking at sustained and healthy economic growth, we have the accession to the WTO and the winning of the 2008 Olympics," Tsang said.
"We are looking at the spawning of a generation of young entrepreneurs," Tsang said. "They have not only money but also a passion for driving."
At China's largest auto show, Bentley and British sports car maker Group Lotus were among the most popular exhibits.
Thousands of people - many of whose incomes are probably just a few hundred dollars a month - elbowed each other for a glimpse of some of the fastest and most expensive driving machines on the planet.
Lotus, showing off a canary-yellow flagship Esprit and a maroon Elise roadster, used the auto show to open its first Beijing office and said it anticipated making its first sale next month.
"We've had a lot of prospective buyers," said Oh Kah Beng, deputy general manager of Lotus Cars Asia Pacific, based in Malaysia. Malaysia's Perusahaan Otomobil Nasional (Proton) owns 80 per cent of Lotus.
Lotus aims to sell just five of the 1.68 million yuan ($203,000) Esprits in China this year. Global production of the 350-horsepower speedsters is just 300 a year, Oh said.
The curvy Elise - a relative bargain at just 698,000 yuan, and more readily available with 10,000 of them made a year - is likely to attract about 50 Chinese buyers this year, Oh said.
"When we came here two years ago we had six inquiries. Only one was from Taiwan, and two were women. And they were prepared to pay cash," Oh said, referring to interest in the Elise.
Getting behind the wheel of a high-end car is somewhat of a novelty in China, where being chauffeured about has been a mark of wealth and status.
Legendary Italian sports car Ferrari cracked the China market nearly a decade ago and Germany's Porsche recently opened a dealership as well and is reported to sell several dozen cars a year.
And Italy's recently revived Maserati - under the control of Ferrari, which in turn is a unit of Fiat SpA - has wasted little time jumping in the fray.
Maserati executives, joined by the Italian ambassador to Beijing, threw open the doors to its first China showroom on Friday and peeled back a sheet to reveal a bright yellow 390-horsepower Spyder roadster in front of hundreds of curious passersby.
But it isn't easy owning a supercar in cities like Beijing, where the streets are clogged with around 1.75 million cars sputtering along, often with smokey and underpowered engines. Cyclists and delivery tricycles dart in and out of the traffic, threatening the pristine paint jobs of such exotic cars.
"I know men who get up at 3:00 in the morning and drive to the airport and back just so they know what it's like to drive at 200 kph," said Kevin McCann, executive director of the Audi unit of Germany's Volkswagen (China) operations. The Chinese pay dearly for such performance. The government has been paring back import tariffs under its WTO commitments, but high-performance cars still face duties of more than 50 per cent.
Bentley opened its first China dealerships in Shanghai and the southern city of Shenzhen this year. Since opening last week, its Beijing office has taken deposits on nearly 10 cars and verbal agreements bring the total to about 20, Tsang said.
Tsang describes his customers as property developers, manufacturers and high-tech moguls in their early 40s, meaning they grew up during the grinding poverty and political upheaval of Mao Zedong's Cultural Revolution.
Luxury sedans such as Daimler Chrysler's Mercedes-Benz, Germany's BMW and Volkswagen's Audi are familiar sights in major Chinese cities, but enthusiasts now hunger for more.
"It is something to massage the ego. It is an instrument with which to mark their success," Tsang said of the meticulously crafted Bentleys and Rolls Royces.
Cars cost from 3.68 million yuan for its 6.8 litre, 400-horsepower Arnage model, to 8.88 million yuan for a special stretch limousine. The firm hopes to sell 30 cars this year in China, Tsang said.
That would put China on a par with super-rich Hong Kong, which has long boasted of having the highest density of Bentley and Rolls Royce cars of any city in the world but is suffering yet another economic slump and has sales of 25 to 30 cars a year.
Tsang believes China's growth prospects are so strong that sales could hit 100 vehicles next year, putting it on par with Japan, which has struggled with recession for the past decade.
Bentley's strongest markets are still the United States and Europe, which each buy 400 to 600 cars a year. Bentley made 1,800 cars last year.
Other executives are more cautious, but share Tsang's enthusiasm for China and say the 100-car mark can be hit within a few years.
"This growth will not be replicated anywhere else in the world," said Richard Charlesworth, director of special customer commissions and heritage.