His father was a peasant and carpenter, and 44-year-old Yu Minhong will never forget watching him collect bits of waste brick and stones and stack them up in the small courtyard of their rural home. What use was all this rubble and debris? The day Yu saw his father transform the stones into a small pen to shut in the pigs, hens and ducks, he was amazed. At that time, his family could not afford to buy bricks.

Yu says his his father's practical determination and foresight have influenced his whole life.

"If you have a map in your head, you can always turn stones into a building."

"If a pyramid was dismantled, it would just be a pile of stones. If you live your life without an aim, it's just a heap of days." Yu Minhong, or Michael Yu, epitomizes the rags to riches trajectories of those who have been able to grasp opportunities in rapidly changing China.

He said his father's patient stone-piling lesson had influenced him at three critical junctures of his career: he piled up days and days of hard work to eventually secure admission to university after two failures; he made a collection of English words so that he could become a university English teacher; he started his own English training school.

Yu's training school, which has surfed on the obsession for studying English, has since helped hundreds of thousands of Chinese students get into U.S. universities.

The company, New Oriental Education and Technology Group, was listed on the New York Stock Exchange in September, the first private education company to achieve this feat. Yu is thought to be China's richest teacher with about 2 billion yuan (250 million U.S. dollars) of assets.

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