What Went Down at Trippin’s Zhao Dai Party in Beijing

We held two festival afterparties across two nights in an off-grid location in Beijing. Here’s what happened.

In the Chaoyang District in Beijing, there’s a restaurant that sits at an intersection. Its yellow sign beams five words into the night. It reads: “我爱我的家”. This translates to ‘I love my family’.

It was a warm, humid night and the streets were quiet in comparison to its daytime rush. After the stretch of a zebra crossing, we turned a corner and weaved our way around the metal bollards. Nearby, there was a corner shop that sold a vast selection of cigarettes, its plastic wrapping glinted beneath the fluorescent lights. There’s one that said ‘HAPPY’ in metallic blue on the package. On the right was a street that appeared to be like the others: relatively calm and empty save for a few revellers in the distance.

It’d be easy to mistake this for any other street within its vicinity. After all, it looked rather ordinary. But unlike its neighbouring streets, this was where the club Zhao Dai – a hub for electronic music – was located. It’s situated in an off-grid spot that doesn’t appear on any maps. There were no signs revealing its identity, simply a closed black door with a rail parked outside. A monochrome poster told people to be quiet. The pulse of the music that played out across the club’s speakers below were shuttered out by a thick, padded door. Above the entrance were the windows of apartments dotted across several floors.

We descended down the stairs into the basement club, and its smooth, concrete interiors pulsed red. The club felt modern, and the clean lines of its design matched the metropolitan city. This was the space in which Trippin threw two afterparties for Zhao Dai’s festival, named Zhao Dai On Leave, that took place in the beach resort Aranya – north of Beijing – a week prior.

Zhao Dai first opened its doors in 2017, and the team behind the venue launched Zhao Dai On Leave during the first year of the pandemic. The two community-driven affairs have since marked themselves out as vital meeting spaces for China’s sprawling underground scene. This year, the team incorporated a global approach to their curation, expanding the breadth of the festival programme. In 2023, they hosted the likes of Salon Des Amateurs’ Vladimir Ivkovic. For Trippin’s first party, Juke Bounce Werk Crew’s DJ Swisha stepped up for headline duties, followed by Nyege Nyege’s De Schuurman on the following night. Sulk, who cut his teeth across Shenzhen’s dancefloors, headed up the first closing slot. That night, a legendary skateboarder, famous across the country, was spotted by the bar. Poing Club resident and Rotterdam-based selector Kimmah played a hard peak-time set at the Beijing club on the second night, and support came from the likes of haomiiya, Nighttrain2000 and Zhao Dai’s co-founder Zhiqi.

The club has a no phones policy, but we were given the rare opportunity to take some snaps. Get an inside look into Zhao Dai and Trippin’s afterparties below.