Make no mistakes, and you’ll have no regrets in life; make the right choices, and you’ll have nothing left to lament. Think in the long term, consider the greater good, and understand people’s hearts. Know right from wrong, when to advance or retreat, and what to keep or give up. Keeping accounts is a way of calculating one’s fate, whether to make a living or help the world. The Female Tycoons series tells the extraordinary stories of women who achieve happy lives through outstanding bookkeeping skills and financial judgment.
The Story of Zhou Ying, part of the Female Tycoons series, is set in the late Qing dynasty. Zhou Ying, born into a merchant family, becomes the head of the Zhou family business in Anwu Fort, Jingyang, Shaanxi. After her husband dies, she takes over the family enterprise as a widow and uses her precise financial judgment to revive its near-bankrupt business network. She introduces an innovative “shareholding system,” allowing employees to buy shares and receive dividends based on their performance, and boosts the businesses by making their account books transparent. When faced with the economic turmoil of the late Qing, she anticipates the threat foreign cloth poses to domestic textiles and decisively scales back the family’s cloth shops, shifting investment to more resilient industries such as salt wells and pawnshops, doubling the family’s assets. More importantly, she establishes a two-tier accounting system connecting the headquarters and branch offices. By standardizing bookkeeping and conducting regular audits, she controls the cash flow of dozens of businesses across the country, becoming the uncrowned queen of Shaanxi’s business world at the end of the Qing dynasty.
