- Meeting here now
- 3F Huarong Building
178 Mintian Road, Futian
Futian station, exit 3A - Rooms on record
- Fifteen, of which eleven can be dated to the day.
- The stable years
- One building, 2009 to 2020. Then nine rooms in five years.
- Unchanged since 2014
- The 19:15 start time, set when the club moved down to room 6B.
- Never left
- Luohu, then Futian. The club has never held a regular meeting in another district.
The club has met on a Tuesday evening since 2003. It has hardly ever stayed put.
The moving is not incidental to the club’s history; it is most of it. Every room here was somebody’s problem to solve, and the arguments about them are the best-documented arguments the club has ever had. In July 2008 the president stopped the meeting and made the room itself the table topic, because the Guangshen had no metro station and guests were getting lost on the way. In July 2021 the club lost its room with a week’s notice and the incoming officers found another one in four days. Twice, members have written in the group that they were sad to leave a room they had complained about.
The map also happens to be a map of Shenzhen. The club was founded in Luohu, which is where the city’s centre was in 2003. It crossed into Futian around 2009 and put itself on a metro line, which is exactly what the 2008 argument had been about. Since 2020 it has circled the Futian CBD: Convention Centre, Shopping Park, Ping An Finance Centre, the towers that were farmland when the club was chartered. Nobody planned this. It is just where the affordable rooms were, decade by decade.
Below is every room, on a map and on a true time axis, read backwards from next Tuesday to the charter in September 2003. Scroll, and the club moves.
Not every Tuesday is on it. The club is sometimes invited out for a single evening, and those nights are on the meeting pages instead: Walmart China’s head office for #865, the HaoWei Technology Building for #936, a studio in Chegongmiao for #949.
