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Some of the celebrities even suggested that Lu remain in Hong Kong, and promised to help her develop her business.

"At that time, I was only an unknown pedicurist in a bathhouse, but the trip to Hong Kong made me determined to establish my own business," Lu recalls. "I was very sad when I heard about the death of Mr Shaw. I could not have succeeded had I not known Mr Shaw."

In 2002, Lu opened her first pedicure salon in Yangzhou with the investment from Zhu Yuanzhong, chairman of the Association of Jiangsu and Zhejiang Provinces Fellow Townsmen in the United States.

The following year, Lu registered the first pedicure trademark nationwide under her own name - Lu Qin Foot & Art.

During the past decade, Lu's pedicure business has expanded quickly with more than 100 franchised outlets across the country and six direct owned salons in Yangzhou and Beijing.

Lu also set up a pedicure vocational school in 2002 to raise the service and skill standards for young practitioners in the trade.

Since its establishment, the school has trained more than 10,000 men and women, and the students include those from overseas, such as Japan, Singapore and Canada, who want to provide Chinese pedicure services in their home countries.

In 2003, Lu was elected as one of the seven deputies of Yangzhou to the National People's Congress. She served two terms until 2013, contributing proposals related to the service and pedicure industry, as well as ways to relieve transport problems during the Spring Festival rush.

In 2009, Yangzhou Municipal Bureau of Culture nominated Lu as one of the representative inheritors for the intangible heritage of "Yangzhou's Three Knives".

"Customers sometimes talk about their admiration of the art of jade and wood carvings," says Lu. "I tell them that we pedicurists are also artists. We make the feet of people better."

In her effort to promote the Chinese pedicure culture in Yangzhou, she lent a set of pedicure tools used by elder professionals to the city archive as part of the project to preserve the city's intangible heritage.

Lu's collection includes three set of pedicurist knives, pedicurist lamps and wooden clogs. One of the lamp shades is about 120 years old.

"We agree to preserve these precious items for Ms Lu, and will continue collecting related items," says Jiang Li of the Yangzhou Municipal Archive. "We are working with about a dozen of intangible heritage inheritors like Lu, and hope to put up an exhibition of 'Yangzhou's Three Knives' later this year."

Looking back, Lu says there were doubts and hesitations in the Chinese pedicure trade.

"When I was 20 years old, I thought I would leave the business in five years; when I reached 25, I swore that I'll only give it another five years. On the day I turned 30, I knew that I could never put down the pedicurist's knife."

Xing Yi contributed to this story.

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