People from all over the world write to Mr Zhao for help and some travel to China to see him. He has won international awards for his invention.

And he counts Premier Mr Li Peng, Vice-Premier Mr Tian Jiyun and the wife of former communist party leader Mr Zhao Ziyang among his customers.

Mr Zhao said the premier did not have a baldness problem, but he used 101 as preventative medicine.

''Premier Li's hair is oily,'' he said. ''But he will have hair when he's 100 years old.'' When he ran into the wife of Mr Zhao Ziyang on the street a year ago, she reported her husband - under house arrest since he was deposed in June 1989 - to be in good health.

But, more pertinent to Mr Zhao, the inventor, was that ''her hair was great''.

Mr Zhao, 50, himself uses 101, applying it to his scalp once a week and letting it sit for a day before washing out the formula. The result is a head of hair as thick as a finely woven Persian carpet.

''When I was 40, I didn't have as much hair as I do now,'' he said.

Mr Zhao's rags to riches tale challenges some of the stereotypes about China.

The country, which claims to have invented gunpowder and paper - and, as one newspaper brazenly suggested a few years ago, even golf - has not been a centre of innovation for a long time.

There are many reasons for this that cannot be blamed on orthodox socialism, but the suspicion, even contempt, in which the communists have held their intellectuals and other great minds has not helped. BUT things are beginning to change now economic reforms allow more scope for individual initiative.

For Mr Zhao, a Communist Party member who was recently selected as a delegate to the National People's Congress, China has been a land of opportunity.

Mr Zhao began researching baldness in the 1960s when he was a ''barefoot doctor'' in rural Zhejiang province.

''In my village, there were many young and beautiful girls whose hair was falling out,'' said Mr Zhao, sitting in his modest Beijing office, the hub of his hair tonic empire.

''Who would marry a woman like this?'' he lamented, pointing at a photo of one of his earliest patients.

Mr Zhao was moved by what he saw. After 100 tries at curing baldness, he hit the mark with his 101st formula, hence the product's name.

Its ingredients include ginseng, notoginseng, seed of Chinese dodder, tuber of multiflower knotweed, alcohol and water.

The tonic is sold across China and is approved for sale in more than 40 countries. Exports account for a third of all revenues.

But 101 has not been passed by the United States Food and Drug Administration, or by Japan's health ministry.

According to one of Mr Zhao's aides, the Japanese are worried 101 will wipe domestic baldness cures off the shelves.

Some Japanese tour groups travel to China just for 101. ''They come to see the Great Wall, eat Peking duck and buy 101,'' said the aide.

Mr Zhao claims to have helped more than 2.3 million people. The success rate is around 90 per cent for most types of baldness, and 80 per cent for seborrheic alopecia - the typical sort of balding common among men over 40.

One afternoon, a 10-year-old girl from Kiev walked in with her father. She removed a red wig and revealed a head with only a clutch of hair growing on her crown, and a few meagre tufts on the rest of her pate.

Mr Zhao applied 101 to the scalp, then covered her head with a plastic grocery bag and tied it tight.

''She had no hair at all three or four months ago,'' said the aide. ''Then she started using 101. She'll be cured in about five months.'' Mr Zhao plans to expand his empire. Among other things, he is negotiating a deal with the Russians to barter passenger planes for 101.