When he was one month old, Niu Gensheng was worth Rmb50. He knows, because that was the price he fetch-ed in 1958 when his impoverished parents sold him to a more prosperous family in a neighbouring village in Inner Mongolia.

By the time he was 46, in 2004, Mr Niu’s circumstances and net worth had been transformed. That year he listed China Mengniu Dairy, the milk company he founded five years earlier, in Hong Kong. Virtually all his proceeds, hundreds of millions of dollars, he immediately put into the Lao Niu Foundation, which is based in Inner Mongolia and works to improve education and the environment in China and beyond.

Today, the adopted son of a rural family consorts with global philanthropists such as Bill Gates, Hank Paulson, former US Treasury secretary, and Ray Dalio, the founder of hedge fund Bridgewater. But in 2004, Mr Niu’s act of giving away virtually all the proceeds of a listing was unheard of in China.