Zhang Xin

Zhang Xin was born in Beijing in 1965 and moved with her mother to Hong Kong during the upheaval of the Cultural Revolution. Money was scarce, and at fourteen she began working in a garment factory, spending long shifts on a production line rather than in a classroom. She saved what she could from factory wages and a stint as a nightclub hostess to buy herself passage to Britain.

In England she supported herself with menial jobs while studying economics at Sussex and later earned a master's degree at Cambridge, before working briefly in banking in Hong Kong and New York. In 1995 she returned to a China only beginning to open its property market to private developers, and with her husband Pan Shiyi founded what became SOHO China, betting on office and retail buildings in Beijing and Shanghai designed with international architects rather than the utilitarian blocks then common.

The company's striking, architecturally ambitious buildings, including projects with Zaha Hadid, made SOHO China one of the country's best known developers and made Zhang one of the wealthiest self-made women in the world. She has spoken candidly about the discomfort of straddling two very different worlds, the factory floor of her childhood and the boardrooms of her adult life, and about the loneliness of being a woman in a heavily male property industry.

She has since funded scholarships for Chinese students at Western universities, saying she wanted to give others the chance an unlikely scholarship once gave her.