Zhang Xin: China's real estate mogul

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Lesley Stahl: You didn't know anybody?

Zhang Xin: Didn't know anybody. I sat on my suitcase, started crying.

Lesley Stahl: You end up - no one's gonna believe this - you end up working at Goldman Sachs!

What a tale! From crying and alone to school to learn English, which led to a scholarship to the University of Sussex and then a masters in economics - from Cambridge! It was 1992. And Xin's timing was perfect. China was opening its markets to foreign investors. Goldman Sachs sent the sweatshop girl to the mainland to look for opportunities. But she was unhappy in the world of investment banking.

Lesley Stahl: I'll give you some of the quotes that you've said. "People spoke crassly, treated others badly, looked down on the poor and adored the rich." Those are your quotes.

Zhang Xin: That's pretty much true. I think investment banking environment was very competitive and cutthroat. I was always looking for opportunities to leave.

Lesley Stahl: You wanted to come back to China.

Zhang Xin: I think I was just missing the idealism which was how we grew up in the Communist Socialist China when everyone was encouraged and brought up to be idealist. And I guess I was missing what I was brought up with.

That's when she met the man she would marry, Pan Shiyi. He was part of a wave of young idealists, committed to liberalizing China through business, in his case through a new industry: real estate.

Zhang Xin: And I remember he took me to see a construction site. It was evening, it was late at night. He took me-- he said, "You have to come and see what I do." And I went, "Wow. I had never seen a hole that big on earth." And he told me, "This is a place will be the Manhattan of Beijing." And I laugh. I thought-- because he hasn't been to Manhattan. He has no idea what Manhattan means, right? The whole bunch of factories in the area, big hole on the ground. This is not going to be a Manhattan of Beijing. This is where we are now.

[Zhang Xin: All this area used to be factories.]

We stood at that spot, in a sea of offices they built: it's not Manhattan. It's bigger! Building after building, some projects the size of entire neighborhoods and all built in the 19 years...going back to the night Xin and Pan first met.

Lesley Stahl: Did you really decide to get married in four days?

Zhang Xin: Yeah, we did. And I left my bank and we joined together, formed the company, with no money, no backing. We're-- no relationship. None of us is the sons or the daughters of anybody in China--

Lesley Stahl: He wasn't a princeling.

Zhang Xin: No. No, in fact just the opposite. He came from one of the poorest provinces in China, the most impoverished place.

But she and Pan were finding out that mixing how East and West did business was not easy. They fought constantly. And so one day she packed her bags and went back to England. But then she changed her mind.

Zhang Xin: I thought I just cannot give up like this. I called him up. I said, "You know what? I decided to stay in China. Stay in this marriage, I'll quit the job. I will step aside, I stay at home."

In her time off, she got pregnant with the first of their two sons, while Pan was making a success of the company.

Zhang Xin: He did so well that there was too much work. He couldn't handle. So then he said, "You better come back to work. Really, I need you to work."

Lesley Stahl: Oh my goodness.

Zhang Xin: Everything changed from fighting, wanted to get divorced, to starting a family with a baby and the business is going well and I'm back to work.

Now they split their duties. He focuses on everything inside China. She uses her Wall Street know-how to raise money abroad, and hires the world's top architects. Together they have built SOHO China into a company with $10 billion dollars in assets.