Tom Pattinson meets a Chinese tycoon who preaches a surprising message of European enlightenment to his peers

It’s a cold, damp spring afternoon and I’m drinking tea out of a Wedgwood cup in front of a log fire that crackles in the broad open hearth of a drawing room. Standing in front of me, dressed in a pressed pinstriped Dunhill suit, is the man who collected me in a black Range Rover, whisked me through wrought-iron gates, past expansive stables and into his stately home. However, this isn’t some country seat in Hampshire, but the northern outskirts of Beijing — home to Liu Jia, one of China’s growing number of multi-millionaires.

Liu is worth at least £75m and is one of the estimated 500,000 dollar millionaires to have emerged since the opening of China’s economy 30 years ago. At 42, he now owns the country’s largest private dental chain and is in love with all things British.

“The British the world over are known as gentlemen,” Liu says. “They’re one of the most polite of all nations.” Liu was born in the northern city of Dalian, on China’s east coast. Here as a child he met his aunt’s British fiancé, who was working as a missionary. “He gave me books on Shakespeare, showed me photos of England and explained British culture to me. I was hooked.”

After studying at the prestigious Peking University, he worked part time in sales and made “millions for the company”, then became a government official before an American venture-capital company headhunted him.

He proved his worth after increasing revenue nearly fivefold for the firm, making him enough commission by 1993 to start Jiamei Dental, his own private practice. In 2006 he won the licence to establish a nationwide chain, and by the end of this year, aided by injections of overseas cash, he will have 200 clinics.

Private healthcare is one of China’s booming markets thanks to a rapid increase in urban incomes, a rising middle class, an ageing population and the reforming public-health system. The speed of China’s economic growth has taken much of the country’s population from poverty to wealth in an astonishingly short time, but not without problems, Liu explains: “In 1988 I was working in politics, in legal institutions as a government official, yet I was earning only 380RMB [£27] per month. In those days, the cost of living was cheap and there was nothing to spend it on. Now people earn a lot more money but it’s hardly to live on well. The speed of growth is too fast.”

In 1993, the same year he founded his company, Liu discovered his passion: riding. “The British empire took over the world on horseback,” he says. Liu has a British riding coach, and proudly shows off pictures of him jumping 15cm short of the Olympic show jumping record. Having paid a British architect he calls “Dr James” £100,000 to design his very traditional home, Liu’s idealized impression of an English way of life is just as it in Jane Austen’s novel, and comes into reality day by day.