Long-distance call

Tyne and Wear, in the northeast of England, may be a long way from Sichuan province, but for Lan Ling, who now considers herself 'Blitish', it is most definitely home.

'Chinese are very well accepted here. Possibly because we do not tend to bomb the London Underground or fly planes into Twin Towers buildings. We get on with making money.'

Ling Valentine, as she is better known in Britain, is an unusual character: home and what she calls her 'world HQ' are in Gateshead; she owns a red double-decker bus and a former PLA nuclear-decontamination truck - complete with 'missile'; she is a national television personality and has been so successful at leasing cars that she was a winner at the North East Woman Entrepreneur of the Year awards in 2006.

Valentine was born and raised in Chengdu. Her mother secured her a place at Guangzhou's Jinan University, where she studied chemistry. Then she took the unusual step of moving to Finland: 'My mum had friends in Finland and the education was free. I studied wood chemistry [in Finnish] but failed - what a surprise.'

She met and married Englishman Jon Valentine in Helsinki and, after battling Britain's Home Office for permission to enter the country, studied environmental management at Bournemouth University, in Dorset. 'It was hard, as my English wasn't brilliant. I learned about information processing and efficient use of tools, and I use these skills in LINGsCARS.com,' she writes on her eye-popping, gimmick-laden website. Her husband, a successful car-hire agent, showed Ling the ropes. And she learned fast.

'I must say I'm better at it than him. The key is efficiency. I give good personal service, I have very few overheads and use a computerised system I built myself.'

Valentine's success - and the missile-launcher parked on the outskirts of Gateshead - caught the attention of the BBC. She was invited to take part in the TV programme Dragons' Den, in which participants try to persuade a panel of rich entrepreneurs to invest in their business ideas. Valentine says she enjoyed the show but turned down offers of investment because the percentage of the company 'the dragons' wanted was too high and she didn't need their cash; LINGsCARS brought in GBP28 million (HK$429.5 million) last year.