Jiadai: From Beijing's Hutongs to Guangzhou's Underworld

This is a hard-edged story of passion, brotherhood, and changing times.

He was a Beijing courtyard kid known as “Dai Ge.”

His fiery nature clashed with his strict father’s upbringing, and he was forced out of the army after assaulting a superior. Turning down a secure job, he plunged into the turbulent underworld of the early 1980s.

In the capital, he laid down the rules and protected his brothers, rising from a street punk to a local powerbroker. But success attracts trouble. When his sworn brother was kidnapped, he slashed himself twice in front of his enemy to save him, his willingness to risk his life striking terror throughout the eastern district. To keep his brothers from getting dragged into it, he headed south alone, carrying only his meager belongings and a third-class merit medal, and plunged into Guangzhou, the vanguard of China’s reform and opening-up.

Arriving in Yangcheng with no friends and unable to speak the local language, he had to live under someone else’s roof and start as an apprentice at a watch shop. The grit and mechanical aptitude he had honed in the army turned the skills he’d learned taking apart and assembling firearms into a knack for watch repair. In the chaotic world of business, he also spotted a lucrative opportunity in “Hong Kong-style watches,” earning his first fortune.

But the underworld is never a place you can leave or stay in just because you want to.

When his mentor, Uncle Huo, was swindled out of 300,000 yuan by the local bully “Du Da Bala,” then humiliated and thrown out the door, his life hanging by a thread, the “Dai Ge” who had once terrified countless people on the streets of Beijing awakened once more.

This time, he was no longer a hotheaded young man who only knew how to use his fists. He was now a business tycoon with Swiss watch movements in hand and a grand strategy in mind. Watch Dai Ge stir up the waters of Guangzhou’s sweltering, humid streets, wielding a watchmaker’s patience and a troublemaker’s ruthlessness to write a southern legend worthy of a northern hard man!