Huang Nubo, Chairman of Zhongkun Investment Group, who bought back the Yuanmingyuan stone pillars, is perhaps best known overseas for his 2011 attempt to purchase land in Iceland to build a golf course (later changed to leasing the land). But Huang’s identity goes far beyond that: he is a renowned mountaineering explorer who completed the 7+2 challenge (climbing the highest peaks on all seven continents and trekking to both the North and South Poles); he is also a poet who has visited Taiwan.
Also known by his pen name Luo Ying, Huang Nubo published the poetry collection The Ninth Night in early 2012 and came to Taiwan to attend the “Luo Ying Poetry Symposium and Cross-Strait Poetry Conference,” where he recited poems accompanied by African drums alongside famous poets such as Zhang Mo, Lo Fu, and Xin Yu, displaying such emotional depth that it was hard to associate him with the image of a shrewd businessman.
He is also a mountaineer. Born in Lanzhou and raised in Yinchuan, Ningxia, Huang Nubo, whose business has grown ever larger, says that he feels stressed the moment he returns to big cities and must “escape.” Starting in 2005, lured by Ernest Hemingway’s novel The Snows of Kilimanjaro, Huang Nubo summited Africa’s highest peak, Mount Kilimanjaro, for the first time. Over the next eight years, he climbed the highest peaks on all seven continents and trekked to both the North and South Poles, becoming the 15th person in the world to achieve this feat.
Although he is a billionaire on the Forbes list, Huang Nubo’s childhood was “so dark he dares not look back.” At the age of four, his father was labeled a counter-revolutionary and committed suicide. The family was poor, and his mother made a living hauling soil to support their four children but died of gas poisoning when he was 13. Due to his father’s status, Huang Nubo was often bullied, but he always fought back.
In 1977, Huang Nubo took someone else’s place to enter Peking University. After graduation, he worked at the Central Propaganda Department and became a full-section chief at the age of 29. Unwilling to remain a low-level official, he resigned in 1990, founded Beijing Zhongkun Investment Group in 1995, and after ten years of ups and downs, became a billionaire with assets worth billions.
Now over fifty, he is undertaking the “21st Century Human Faces Action.” Since August 2013, carrying luggage weighing 64 kilograms, he plans to visit World Heritage Sites around the world over the next 10 to 15 years, engaging with locals and sharing experiences.