Born in Guangzhou in October 1936, Zhong Nanshan is one of the greatest doctors in China, as well as an academic at the Chinese Academy of Engineering. After graduating from Medical College in Beijing in 1960, he worked as a teacher.

For years as a leading Chinese specialist in respiratory (呼吸道) diseases, Zhong was well-known, but the outbreak of SARS has turned him into a household name across the country. Zhong was one of a limited number of doctors informed of the disease from the moment the first few cases were reported through the inner medical network in Guangdong. He and his colleagues had been busy fighting it for more than a month before he appeared at the press conference in Guangzhou. Under his guidance, an effective treatment method was discovered not long after, and Guangdong achieved the lowest death rate and highest recovery rate for SARS in China.

In 2010, in order to reform medical education and cultivate (培养) more medical talents, Zhong interviewed and selected students for a 32-student “Nanshan class”. Zhong worked as a headteacher. The class aimed to provide more hands-on training, student-teacher interaction and international viewpoints than the average course. Chinese medical students are often taught in big groups and seldom get the chance to perform clinical practice. “I hope that all of you can have more contact with patients from the very beginning. We should make ourselves practical and creative, not just fluent English-speakers who work as high-ranking employees in foreign laboratories,” Zhong said at the course opening ceremony.

Zhong’s working attitude left a deep impression on his colleagues. “What impresses me most is his double-tube stethoscope (听诊器). Compared with other ones, it’s much heavier, but it works more precisely, so Mr. Zhong carries it with him wherever he goes,” said Li Huiling, a post-doctorate fellow at the respiratory diseases research center in Guangzhou.

All eyes were on Jack Ma(马云). The chairman of Alibaba Group Holding Ltd stepped down on Teachers’ Day from leading the e-commerce giant he founded 20 years ago.

“I still have lots of dreams to go after,” Ma wrote in an open letter last year to announce his parting. “The world is big, and I am still young, so I want to try new things.”

The 55-year-old businessman showed that he was ready for new things by arriving at his farewell party (欢送会) dressed up like a rock star.

In fact, his rags-to-riches (白手起家的) story is a good example of doing something different. Visiting the United States in 1995, Ma saw the internet and had the idea of setting up his own trading website. In 1999, he founded Alibaba with a group of friends in a shared apartment, struggling for years to get it off the ground. With all the challenges, the company slowly brought e-commerce to China.

Although his success has inspired (激励) a number of Chinese tech businessmen, Ma pointed out that the key is having a dream. “It’s the dreams that keep us never afraid of setbacks (挫折),” Ma said in a video posted on Sept 9.

Now the experienced businessman is looking to focus on education. What can he offer?

“I’m not going to teach English; I’m not going to teach business. But I’m going to teach young people how to face challenges,” he told Bloomberg News.

Skilled sailors were never made on calm waters. As Ma said, “Today is cruel. Tomorrow is crueler. But the day after tomorrow is beautiful.”

American magician David Blaine left the glass box in which he had lived for 44 days without food on October 19. Hundreds of people came to watch the end of his starvation experiment, which had become one of London’s main tourist attractions.

Looking thinner and darker, 30 year-old Blaine was taken out of his box over the River Thames and immediately sent to hospital. He was then slowly reintroduced to food, a process doctors said could be life threatening. He had been drinking only water since September 5.

Over the last decade Blaine has become famous with a combination of breathtaking magic and clever tricks aimed at getting a lot of attention.

In 1999, he was buried in a coffin (棺材) for one week and, in 2000, he spent 62 hours in a giant block of ice. Last year he stood on the top of a 25-meter pillar(柱子) in the center of New York for 35 hours before jumping into a pile of boxes.

“I think a lot of people are unable to accept that they’re able to do what they can do,” he said. “They don’t realize we can survive. The human being is an amazing creation.”

But he seemed to have suffered from spending so long in the glass box. He said that at times he was unable to see, had serious back pains and lost his sense of taste.