Hard work made tea farmer’s son one of world’s richest men

Wang Yung-ching was born on a small tea farm in Xindian, a mere 10 miles south of the heart of Taipei, on January 9, 1917. He died Wednesday, Oct. 15, at 9:38 p.m. (Taipei time).

He was 91, 92 or 93, depending on how one counts age. According to Western counting, he was 91. But a Chinese is one sui (year) old when he is born. But Wang was also born in January 1917, which was the 12th or last moon of the previous year. As a result, he was two sui old a fortnight after birth.

That didn’t make any difference in his long, unprecedented rags-to-rich success story.

His great-grandfather emigrated to Taiwan from the county of Anxi in the province of Fujian. His father was Wang Chang-gung. That’s why he named his six medical institutions Chang-gung Memorial Hospitals, the latest one opened in Xiamen, or Amoy, near Anxi in January this year.

Chang-gung was a poor tea farmer. The eldest son, Yung-ching had to work when he was only five years old. One house chore he had to do as a first grader was to get enough water from a well for the family’s small cistern before he went to school every weekday.

After school, the boy had to carry hog feed back home. He had to be apprenticed as soon as he had graduated from elementary school. At first, Yung-ching was an apprentice at a rice shop in Chiayi in central Taiwan.

Wise and clever, the teenager quickly learned book-keeping and acquired enough knowledge to run a rice shop.

In 1932, Yung-ching’s father gave him 200 yen, with which he opened a rice shop of his own, with the help of his two younger brothers, one of them Yung-tsai who has only recently retired as chairman of the Formosa Plastics conglomerate.

His rice shop in Chiayi expanded shortly before the Pacific War in 1941 by acquiring a mill to hull the grain. The shop and the rice mill had to be closed when the war broke out and rice was rationed in Taiwan.

Yung-ching then tried his hand at brick-making. The two brick kilns he opened, however, were soon closed down by order of the Japanese authorities.

Then the young man started raising geese. He invented his own goose feed, a mixture of wild grass and rice bran. The goose-fattening business was a success, but he re-opened his rice mill in 1946, nearly a year after the Japanese surrendered to the allies and restored Taiwan to the Republic of China in August 1945.

Strict government control was enforced after the February 28 Incident occurred in 1947. On March 11, Wang Yung-ching was arrested and detained 29 days for transporting rice across county borders. After he was released, Yung-ching had to give up his rice dealership, and he became a dealer in timber. That was a failure.

Chiang Kai-shek moved his Kuomintang government to Taipei from Nanjing at the end of 1949, after he had been defeated by Mao Tse-tung’s communist forces in the Chinese civil war.

Taiwan was in an economic shambles, but Wang Yung-ching never said die. The Chiang government set up an economic security committee in 1953 to plan the development of key industries, including textiles. Finally, the Goddess of Luck smiled at Wang Yung-ching.

He tried to start what everybody thought were very promising industries. He failed to get government aid for any of them, however.

PVC (polyvinyl chloride) was the one industry left unclaimed. Wang Yung-ching had to take it or leave it.

Take it he did. And good things come to those who wait for a long time.

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