Patriarchs add value in two ways that do not appear on balance-sheets, says Mr Fan.

ECONOMIST: Chinese family businesses

It is written in an elegant, clerical hand, on four sheets of parchment, each two feet wide and a bit more than two feet high, about the size of an eighteenth-century newspaper but finer, and made not from the pulp of plants but from the hide of an animal.

NEWYORKER: The Commandments