Zhang stepped back into China in 1995 as the economy was moving away from orthodox Marxism. As early as 1978, China’s leader, Deng Xiaoping, had begun to open markets, declaring: “To get rich is glorious。” Beijing, famous for its exquisite 600-year-old Forbidden City flanked by stolid Soviet-style architecture, was beginning to sprout modern buildings. Workers were flocking to the capital as China’s economy surged at the rate of 10 percent a year. A friend of Zhang’s recommended that she contact Beijing Vantone Real Estate Co., where Pan served as a partner。

　　Hawaii of China

　　Like Zhang, Pan was self-made. His grandfather, a supporter of Mao’s rival, Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek, had fought on the losing side in the civil war that ended in 1949, Zhang says. The family had been persecuted for it and forced to eke out a living as peasants in impoverished northwestern Gansu province。

　　“If I grew up with nothing, they grew up with even less,” Zhang says。

　　After getting a college diploma and working in the petroleum ministry, Pan in 1989 headed south to the tropical island of Hainan, then a freewheeling frontier about to be reshaped as the Hawaii of China. There, Pan learned the real estate business before returning with his partners to seek opportunities in Beijing, Zhang says。

　　Tiananmen Square

　　Within four days of meeting Zhang, Pan proposed. Soon after their marriage, he left Vantone and the newlyweds teamed up to form a company called Hongshi (red stone)， later renamed Soho China. Zhang would use her experience in investment banking to attract foreign investors and architects; Pan had local knowledge and connections to negotiate with the government to acquire the land。

　　“It was the initial attraction in us being partners in business as well as partners in life,” Zhang says。

　　Zhang and Pan were setting up their company in 1995 as the local government in Beijing was developing a 4-square-kilometer central business district beyond the eastern end of the Avenue of Eternal Peace. The development was about 5 kilometers (3 miles) from Tiananmen Square, where the army had killed pro- democracy demonstrators six years earlier. The couple correctly gambled that the government would soon allow citizens to get home loans, and that a class of entrepreneurs would emerge to buy their live-work units。

　　Asian Crisis

　　For their first project, Pan and Zhang planned to turn a malodorous old Chinese liquor factory into Soho New Town: 10 brightly colored buildings from 12 to 40 stories high and accommodating 8,000 residents and hundreds of small businesses。

　　“Neither of us was financially established,” Zhang says. “But the good thing about having no experience is that you have no fear。”

　　As construction was about to begin in 1997, the Asian financial crisis struck. Beginning in then-debt-ridden Thailand when the government was forced to abandon its currency peg to the U.S. dollar, the contagion spread across the region, sending currencies other than the nonconvertible yuan plunging。

　　Investors outside of China who had promised to back the project suddenly couldn’t or wouldn’t come up with the funds. Pan turned to local investors to save Soho New Town, and the development sold out even before completion in 2001. Rather than trying to sell or lease entire buildings, Zhang and Pan peddled units to individual purchasers, a practice they still use today to reduce the risk of whole buildings sitting vacant。

　　Management Disputes

　　As China’s global aspirations grew, so did Zhang’s. By the early 2000s, China’s economy was rapidly overtaking those of the U.K. and Germany. Beijing had been chosen to host the 2008 Olympics, accelerating the government’s plans to develop the equivalent of three Manhattans in the central business district。

　　On the site of an old machine-tool factory, Zhang and Pan began in 2002 to put up Jianwai Soho, a 683,000-square-meter complex of 24 white, cubic buildings of varying heights designed by a Japanese architect, Riken Yamamoto. The project was so large that it took five years to complete and exposed a weakness in Soho China’s business model, says Jack Rodman, president of Shanghai-based Global Distressed Solutions LLC。

　　After selling the apartments, offices and shops in their developments, Pan and Zhang turned over control to independent management companies. At Jianwai Soho, disputes over management fees and quality of service broke out between owners and property managers -- tensions that continue to flare today. Some of the buildings are now in need of repair。

　　2007 IPO

　　Zhang says the management breakdowns hurt the reputation of Soho China, which is taking back control of all but one of its developments。

　　“Earlier, we said, ‘This is not our problem; why should we manage them?’” she says. “Then we realized they have our names on the buildings。”