Spring Winds Turn the Willow Banks Green Again

Yang Liufang was born into a poor family in Liunan Village, Yangshi Town, Wenzhou. After graduating from junior high at fifteen, he apprenticed himself to Yang Liugen, a carpenter from the same village. Hardworking and eager to learn, he was caught up in a misunderstanding with his master and the master's wife by sheer bad luck. Afraid that beatings and gossip would hurt his family, he left for Xizhou alone.

With not a penny to his name, he put Wenzhou's hardworking spirit to use. At the square outside Xizhou Railway Station, he found a shoe-shining cloth and earned two yuan shining shoes. Then he bought thirteen packets of needles, thread, and other sewing supplies at a wholesale market, climbed aboard an oil tanker, and rode to an oilfield in Xizhou. From there, he walked more than ten kilometers to a mountain village to sell them. After making the trip again and again, he saved enough to buy carpentry tools and went from street to street, making furniture for the mountain folk.

After a year of scrimping and working hard, he opened a hardware store in Xizhou's building materials market, then a furniture shop. He took over the market, built a department store, and ventured into real estate... Eventually, he became a local tycoon. But an unexpected fine during his rise nearly left him bankrupt. This is the story of his life.

The carpenter Yang Liufang, who started with nothing, was no ordinary man. Yet Yang Liufang, the richest man in Xizhou, was still only human. Love and hate, law and morality... all intertwined in the city of Xizhou during the fifteen years Yang Liufang struggled to make his way.