Man leaves $3.23m villa to charity

A deceased man has donated his 20 million yuan ($3.23 million) downtown villa to a charity that builds schools in poverty-stricken areas, local media reported Wednesday.

In his will, the donor, Xu Shaocun, left the 380-square-meter property on Huaihai Road Middle to the charity Project Hope, according to a report in the Oriental Morning Post.

Xu decided to give the villa to charity a month before he died in March 2011, the report said. He was in his mid-80s.

In his will, Xu asked the charity to use the money to educate poor children. A portion of the proceeds from the sale of the property will be used to build two schools, one in Hubei province and one in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region.

It will cost about 900,000 yuan to build the two schools, which will be named after Xu and his sister, said a vice director from the charity surnamed Wei. Project Hope will use the rest of the money to set up a scholarship fund for poor children.

The donation was the largest charitable gift that Project Hope has received in 20 years.

Xu got the idea to donate the villa to help school children after he saw television reports about the schools that collapsed during the 2008 earthquake in Sichuan Province.

Despite the size of Xu's donation, his finances were not in good shape when he died.

Neither Xu nor his sister, Xu Songmei, ever got married or had children, the report said. Their family was wealthy before the Cultural Revolution (1966-76). During that time, the villa was divided, and five or six other families were sent to live there. Xu's family was left to live in a single, 18-square-meter room. They shared a bathroom and a kitchen with the other families.

The ownership of the entire villa was returned to Xu in the 1990s, though the families who had moved into the building's third floor during the revolution were allowed to stay until the government could find them apartments in affordable housing projects, Wei said.