Meet Li Li Juan, a former millionaire whose benevolent spirit led her to bankruptcy. The 47-year-old, from northern China’s Hebei Province, has adopted 72 abandoned children over the course of 19 years and spent her fortune caring for them.
Li became rich during the 1980s, earning huge profits from her garments business and her investments in iron ore mining. It was around this time that she started taking in sick and disabled children who were abandoned by their parents, and orphaned children whose parents had died in coal mine disasters. Li fell on hard time in 2008, when her mine was shut down due to urban developments, but she continued to take in orphans, selling off all her properties and valuables, one at a time.
To make matters worse, Li was diagnosed with early stage lymphatic cancer in the winter of 2011. But after only seven days of treatment, she decided that she had had enough.
She prioritized the children over her own health, choosing to spend whatever money she had left on them. Today, she is in heavy debt and barely makes ends meet with donations from kind-hearted people, but she has never considered giving up her adopted children.
