HONG KONG — For generations of Western men, Hong Kong’s Wan Chai neighbourhood captured all the mystery and hedonism of this financial capital known around the world as the Pearl of the Orient.

Prostitutes, strippers and bar girls entertained visiting sailors and businessmen at all hours in these neon-filled blocks, even while working-class Hong Kongers went about their business around them. And despite all the vice, foreigners could count on being able to walk home safely in the wee hours, while many prostitutes worked independently without protection.

Now, the neighbourhood has been jolted by the killings of two young Indonesian women, with a British banker the sole suspect. Even while music and drinks continue flowing in Wan Chai’s bars, people say the murders have cast a pall on the freewheeling streets.

“If you go with somebody and you don’t know who they are, that’s what could happen to you,” said Mr Allen Youngblood, an American jazz pianist who has lived in Hong Kong since 1992. “You roll the dice and you don’t know who’s who.”

The Hong Kong police have charged 29-year-old British banker Rurik Jutting with two counts of murder in the deaths of 29-year-old Seneng Mujiasih and 25-year-old Sumarti Ningsih. The bodies were found in Jutting’s 31st-floor apartment, Ningsih with stab wounds to the buttock and neck, and Mujiasih stuffed into a suitcase left on the balcony, also with cuts to her neck. The police were alerted by Jutting himself, who was waiting in his apartment when officers arrived.

On any given night, scores of foreign men and young, made-up Asian women fill the pubs on Lockhart Road, while outside on the sidewalk, hostesses in cocktail dresses swarm passing Western men, hoping to entice them into booming nightclubs.

That seedy scene long defined Hong Kong to outsiders, even while prostitution became more established in other neighbourhoods, said Mr John Carroll, a professor who specialises in the city’s history at the University of Hong Kong.

“When they think of Wan Chai, for a lot of people, they think of Suzie Wong,” he said, referring to the fictional prostitute in a 1957 book about the city’s sex industry. “But there’s much more to Wan Chai.”

The neighbourhood on Hong Kong Island now includes middle-class apartment towers as well as blocks with some of the highest land prices in the world. Even the red-light district has been transforming, with luxury stores and shopping centres moving in and rents shooting up.

The rent for one storefront on Lockhart Road is about US$80,000 (S$103,000) a month, said Mr Steve Sayell, a former British policeman who said he had met Jutting several times.

Many of those moving in are highly paid professionals working in the city’s finance sector and eager to blow their paychecks in Wan Chai’s bars and nightclubs, Mr Sayell said. For them, spending hundreds of dollars on prostitutes and cocaine is just part of a normal night’s agenda, he said.

“They need a release,” Mr Sayell added. “In the old days, you just drank a lot. Now a lot of people are resorting to recreational drugs.”

Lisa, a bartender, also insisted the murders would not stop the party in Wan Chai.

“Wan Chai will stay exactly the same,” she said. “People will come here looking for fun, they’ll meet all kinds of different people and when they’re tired, they’ll go back safely to their homes.” AP