Fried buns made to Swiss precision

At a busy street in Wuhan, Hubei province, a long line of customers waits patiently to buy shengjianbao, or fried stuffed bun, from a handsome Swiss national who runs the 10-square-meter eatery.

"My shengjianbao's base is crispy and a bit sweet and the top, very thin and soft; inside there is a lot of meat and juice," Ranponl Jacques-Olivier says. "Each bun has exactly 22 grams of flour and 36 grams of meat."

Jacques-Olivier, or He Aojie to his Chinese friends, has been living in China for seven years. Although it was traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) that first drew him to the Middle Kingdom, the 40-year-old has established a very successful business selling fried buns.

Two years into his studies of medicine, Jacques-Olivier chanced upon a Chinese doctor in Switzerland, whose knowledge of TCM fascinated him. As there weren't many places to learn TCM in Europe, he went to a college in San Diego, California to study TCM from 1997 to 2001.

When he returned to his hometown Montreux, a small city near Lake Geneva, and tried to open a TCM clinic, he encountered his first problem. "It is really hard to translate Chinese medicine terms into English or French," Jacques-Olivier says.

To improve his TCM skills, he arrived at the Hubei Traditional Chinese Medicine College in Wuhan in 2003. There, he completed his undergraduate studies in two and a half years.

He joined a Shanghai clinic as an assistant and that was when he got an offer from the Philadelphia College of Osteopathic Medicine (PCOM), which said that if he could earn a Master's from the Hubei college, it would offer him a job in the United States.

Everything changed when he met a Chinese woman Liu Jia, now 36. Liu had studied and traveled in Switzerland and when a friend mentioned a TCM clinic with a young Swiss on its staff, she decided to meet him.

It was love at first sight.

Unwilling to leave China for a foreign country, the couple looked for other means to sustain themselves.

It turned out that both he and his wife liked the snack shengjianbao very much. Also, Liu had a cousin who has been cooking these buns for years.

Given Shanghai's sky-high rents, they turned to Wuhan, where not only were the rentals lower, but "everyone loves to eat" at the numerous small, roadside eateries.

It took Jacques-Olivier and his wife's cousin, Chen Gang, two months to find a suitable location at Qianjinwulu, close to Jianghan Road, Wuhan's main street.

They spent 120,000 yuan ($17,600) to sublet the 10-sq-m place from two shopkeepers - one running a barbecue stall, another, a handbag one - besides a monthly rent of 6,000 yuan ($880). They began selling their shengjianbao last September at 1 yuan, which is slightly higher than the average price for such buns in the neighborhood.

While Chen deals with the customers, Jacques-Olivier concentrates on the purchase of flour, meat and other raw materials.

He says they sell buns worth 5,000 yuan every day, with the help of 24 employees, each paid a monthly salary of between 1,600 and 1,800 yuan.

Jacques-Olivier is a fan of the ancient classic The Art of War, and has also studied Buddhism and Taoism.

On weekends, he reunites with his wife and 2-year-old son in Shanghai. Another child is on the way.

When he opened his second shengjianbao shop recently, Jacques-Olivier named it "Little Louis Shengjianbao", after his son, Louis.

But the successful restaurateur retains his passion for TCM.

"I will be back in my hometown in 10 years to be a TCM doctor."