Shanghai Bund: From Rickshaw Puller to Tycoon

Chen Guangliang transmigrates into Shanghai in 1927, becoming a rickshaw puller at the very bottom of the Zhabei shantytown. He accepts his lot, but not his poverty. He works two extra hours every day, seeks out fares, reads newspapers, and practices English, earning a net seven-tenths of a silver dollar a day, yet owning a rickshaw seems farther away than ever. The rickshaw shop owner smiles with a knife behind his back, and concession licenses have long since stopped being issued. On the black market, each one goes for two hundred silver dollars.

Grinding his teeth, Chen gives up his deposit, spends five silver dollars on a Zhongshan suit, and barges into the Transportation Section of the Public Works Department. Clerk Li Chao means to send him packing, but Chen suddenly rattles off a couple of sentences in English, then turns the tables and makes an offer: "Mr. Li, would you be interested in going into business together?" Li Chao is stunned. He has never mentioned to outsiders how to get licenses that cost one hundred and fifty dollars each. More surprising still, Chen has a detailed outline of Rickshaw Boy tucked inside his coat. He sells it to Professor Zhang Qihua, and two hundred silver dollars land in his hands.

From a laborer pulling a rickshaw to saving money, recruiting partners, and opening up a path to those licenses, this seventeen-year-old is clawing his way out of the mire at the bottom. Shanghai has no shortage of ambitious people. What it lacks are people with both the courage to act and the ability to see the way forward.

This novel and its characters are entirely fictional. Any resemblance is purely coincidental. Do not imitate.