Fondness for tea－both drinking and serving guests, casual clothing and making millions of yuan a year are a few traits common to four men and a woman in Guizhou.

They started their businesses in the 1990s and the decade after with incomes from driving taxis or planting saplings or scouring media offices for advertisements.

Fu Dan, Xiao Shimei, Deng Shengyi, Zhao Jianbo and Luo Yongquan, all of whom belong to the same generation but possibly personally unknown to one another, today run successful companies that respectively sell electrical heaters, tea, chili sauce and manhole cover, and one that promotes culture.

By many accounts, theirs is a story of small enterprises going big in this part of Southwest China that has long been a byword for underdevelopment.

In late September, China Daily interviewed four of the five entrepreneurs in their offices in Guiyang, and visited the factories of three. An associate of one of the businessmen who was away from the provincial capital at the time also spoke to this paper.

A few million people in the province are still poor. In China, those who earn less than 2,300 yuan ($365) a year are considered to be living below the poverty line.

But of late Guizhou is witnessing an economic revival. With a GDP of around 1 trillion yuan, it grew by 10 percent year-on-year last year as compared with the national average of 6.7 percent. Playing a role in that have been its 359,965 registered private businesses, the vast majority of which are small.

Guiyang alone has 128,951 small enterprises, according to local government officials.

When the five entrepreneurs had started out, Guizhou was a very different place.