Xiaogan residents Dai Liqing and his wife Ren Yanli, who work shifts from early morning to late at night may look no different from any other bus drivers in China, but passengers would be surprised to know they own a hotel and three properties.
The couple married in 1992, the newspaper said. They quickly accumulated a multimillion yuan fortune within a few years by running a construction business and later by managing a hotel. They were making 400,000 yuan a year profit at a time when many of today’s wealthy people were struggling.
But they lost their money due to Dai’s gambling in the late 1990s. At one point Ren had to sell a property to pay her husband’s gambling debts of hundreds of thousands of yuan.
Determined to end the destructive cycle they found themselves in, the couple decided to rent their hotel and move to Wuhan to start a new life, the report said.
The couple eventually found fulfilment in 2010 by doing jobs that kept them busy – driving buses.