Actresses Shu Qi, Gong Li and Joan Chen are now leading the way as tour guides in three Chinese cities.

Don’t expect them to hold up a flag or blow a whistle to assemble wayward tour members, however.

The three are the voices of Louis Vuitton Soundwalks, downloadable audio guides created by the French luxury brand in collaboration with New York-based media firm Soundwalk ahead of the Beijing Olympics.

For S$26, travellers get a one-hour audio tour of popular districts in Shanghai, Beijing and Hong Kong, narrated by Chen, Li, and Shu Qi, respectively.

The audio tours incorporate the actresses’ insider knowledge of the cities — Chen guides visitors through her old haunts in Shanghai’s French Concession — and sound more like a sensuous aural movie than a straightforward list of places to visit.

In fact, there’s music, sound effects — chirps of birds and clicks of abacus balls in Hong Kong, for example — and even a storyline of women searching for love to evoke the mood of the place.

The MP3s are available in six languages — Mandarin, Cantonese, English, Korean, Japanese and French — at louisvuittonsoundwalk.com starting next Monday. - TODAY/ra