Summer 1983, Tianshui, Gansu. 14-Year-old Zhao Xiuping ranked eighth in the county in the high school entrance examination, but faced the prospect of dropping out of school due to family poverty. She went into the mountains alone to collect herbs, and each plant of Polygonatum won her three years of high school tuition, which also led her to embark on another path - placing twelfth in the national chemistry competition and being admitted to the Natural Medicinal Chemistry major of China Pharmaceutical University. In college, she studied medicine, art, and clothing design, combining the three things. After graduation, she returned to her impoverished hometown, opened a clothing store, a clothing factory, and built a traditional Chinese medicine company. She turned the polygonatum odorifera in the mountains and fields into standardized Chinese patent medicine, and gradually rescued the villagers trapped in poverty. Along the way, some people pushed her, some tripped her, but the Huangjing plant dug out from the cliff when she was fourteen years old has always taken root in her life, growing deeper and deeper inch by inch.
