The Life of a Billionaire: Starting with Picking Up Scrap

When Chen Shanhe was six, a factory accident took both his parents. All he had left was a broken-down home and an elderly grandfather who coughed up blood. To get enough to eat, he was forced to leave school, hoist a bamboo basket taller than himself onto his back, and become the youngest scrap collector along the Qingjiang River. The children in town called him a “garbage bug.” The local bully, Liu Heizi, kicked over the little stall he had painstakingly set up and snatched the crumpled bills from his hands.

Everyone said the orphan would rot among the scrap heaps for the rest of his life. Then, one day, he felt his way along the cold riverbed and found a rusted copper screw. At Old Sun’s scrap yard, it earned him the “fortune” of twenty yuan. A flash of insight struck Chen Shanhe: the junk other people saw could be worth something entirely different.

From then on, he collected more than scrap metal and plastic. He unearthed wealth-making tips hidden in old books and newspapers, technical secrets concealed in discarded parts, and overlooked opportunities in the warmth and coldness of human relationships. From his first general store at the town market, to becoming a leading wholesaler in the provincial capital, and finally building a business empire spanning real estate and technology. The people who had once mocked and bullied him could only stare up at his name in the news, unable to believe that the first pot of gold earned by this man at the pinnacle of wealth had truly been gathered, one coin at a time, from piles of junk.