A Lamp of the Heart Along the Silk Road

A story about starting a business overseas: The year Cheng Dongsheng turned forty-six, his factory's gross profit margin fell from 29 percent to 6.3 percent.

He borrowed 800,000 yuan, spent 270,000 of it, and flew on a plane for the first time, bound for Pakistan.

His first shipment filled a forty-foot container and arrived at the Port of Karachi on April 17. Customs wouldn't release it. The price he declared was higher than the actual transaction price, but the System compared it against historical data. A few years earlier, a Japanese company had declared a price 40 percent higher than his.

The customs broker offered him three levels of "solutions." The third was: "Do you want to make two sets of invoices?"

He said no.

Twenty-three days later, the container was released. He lost 80,000 yuan. Then he discovered the goods had gotten damp, because he had cut a moisture-proofing step to save 1,900 yuan.

Six hundred kilometers away in Gwadar, a doctor named Amina had only four doses of artemisinin left in her medicine cabinet. She had studied traditional Chinese medicine for six years, passed an accounting exam in Changsha, and run a clinic back home for nine years, losing money all the while, but never giving up.

Her seventeen medicine chests were in his impounded container.

The two start by chasing up a shipment, then work their way toward becoming partners.

The problem they have to solve isn't "how to get the goods out," but this:

How can a clinic that treats the poor stop running out of money?