Taxi driver Hu Wei has been working the streets of Shanghai for five years. On Friday evening he picked up his most famous passenger to date, Paris Hilton.

Hilton, in town for the MTV Music Awards on Saturday, slipped away from her bodyguards and boarded the blue Dazhong taxi near Lujiazui. Hu said at first he did not recognise the superstar, as she was wearing underwear.

"To my surprise, she spoke perfect Mandarin" noted Hu, "I had heard she was a brainless bimbo, but we had a long conversation about Confucius and the poems of Li Bai and Du Fu. She really nailed the tones, unlike that Da Shan I had in the back of my cab last week. He had to look up every other Chinese word in a little electronic dictionary!"