Architecture and literature are not worlds that people often expect to cross, but De Huang Liang finds himself perfectly balanced between both. The founder of Signet Construction, Liang has also found success as a novelist.

In both, Liang employs an important philosophy of creating things that are different from what he has already seen. He was, for instance, the first builder in the country to ever introduce the lobby of a five-star hotel into residential buildings. Meanwhile, his inventive novels such as The Invisible War and its sequels, have been so highly anticipated that fans had to queue more than an hour to get an autograph. The connection between his two worlds is simple: “Fiction and architecture are both creations,” he says. “I enjoy creating.”