An hour from Beijing is a mysterious province of 75 million people that the outside world has never heard of.

Episode one of The Big Picture goes into Hebei, where every city builds something the world buys, and meets the canny Aussie who got there 26 years early and made a fortune on nothing but a handshake.

Don't Break the China!

For five years, The Big Picture has covered Australia-China business from the places everyone knows: Shanghai, Shenzhen, Hong Kong. This year we went somewhere else. An hour from Beijing lies a province of 75 million people the outside world has never heard of. It's shaped like a doughnut, and the hole in the middle is Beijing. For centuries the capital took the glory while Hebei did the work.

Now Hebei is opening up, and we got the first invitation. There's no guidebook, so we made one.

Every city here has a speciality, and every speciality is world-scale: enough handbags a year to circle the equator eight times; more steel than America and Australia combined, now going green; a new city run by AI and Shakespeare-quoting robots.

But the real story is people, and the long game. We meet entrepreneurs like Bob, who arrived in 1999 with one friend and no Mandarin, and made a fortune. The question isn't can you do business in Hebei. It's why aren't you there already?

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