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When the designer saw images of children injured in a Chinese earthquake, she felt compelled to help. Then she heard that Jet Li had set up a charity and got in touch

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A mobile toilet trailer has pulled up on the side of the road and two Chinese soldiers stand formally beside it. A small blonde woman dressed in black skin-tight trousers, a nipped-in jacket and platform heels, flits behind them across the hard shoulder.

Behind the toilet 20 Jeeps are backed up and journalists, charity workers and marketing folk disembark to stretch their legs and take in the view of a wide river and verdant hillsides. It's misty and mysterious and, were it not for the traffic thundering past on the road, you could imagine yourself back in the days of legend, so beautifully evoked in films such as Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.

The stop has broken a three-hour journey from Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan province, to the mountain village of Sanjiang. If Chengdu is a world away from the televised images of the Olympics in Beijing, then out here, as the road goes from four lanes to one muddy track, it feels like another universe.

For Donatella Versace this really is the case. There are no towels in the toilet, nor gold taps. Versace, head of the Italian luxury fashion label, travels everywhere with her inner circle of bodyguard, hairstylist, make-up artist and a handsome French pony-tailed assistant called Bruce. Today, these four tall men wear black, long-sleeved T-shirts bearing a white circular logo, enclosing the word “One”. Donatella also wears one, in pink, under her jacket, and the symbol provides the clue as to what this media circus is doing here.

Six months ago an earthquake hit Sichuan province - it lasted around three minutes and measured 7.8 on the Richter scale. The shock waves were so powerful that office buildings in Beijing, 1,200 miles away, were evacuated. The area around the epicentre was devastated.

Official figures state that 70,000 died and 18,000 are missing. Many schools collapsed and images of injured children filled front pages and TV screens. The loss of a child's life is tragic enough, but in a country where you can have only one, it is particularly traumatic.

“I saw this earthquake, and I saw the children - some without parents - and I felt obliged to do something,” Versace says. But she had no idea how to help. Then she heard that one of China's biggest celebrities, the actor Jet Li (star of Hero and Romeo Must Die), had set up the One Foundation to help survivors. She got in touch, and that is how the fashion designer and the movie star hatched a plan to help 400 children in a remote village in southwestern China.

The Versace business pledged to donate cash to sustain a children's centre in Sanjiang for a year. It is funding the psychological and trauma care, including paying for 40 doctors. Jet Li, who is on the road with the Versace crew, explains: “We have different types of earthquake relief. We have environmental protection and we are also building old people's and children's centres. In fact, the children need more psychological than material care.”

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The farther we drive the worse the damage - in the city of Dujiangyan there are fields of rubble, a wrecked factory and buildings with cracked façades. In the country we see evidence of huge landslides and pass a flooded “crater lake” with a half-submerged building. As the edges of the road disappear and conditions get more muddy, it's a relief to enter the one-street village that is our final destination.

The people of Sanjiang have lined up, standing in front of stores that are little more than concrete holes in the wall. There is a smell of cooking from an outside kitchen. We see temporary huts with blue corrugated roofs - accommodation for the displaced. These are not only dormitories, but classrooms too. The cars stop and Versace gets out. But the designer is not the main draw - the applause starts when Jet Li emerges.

The next couple of hours pass in orchestrated chaos. There is a line of children in white tracksuit tops with red neckerchiefs. Versace chucks them on the cheeks and for a moment looks like the Italian mother of two that she is. A band of drums and horns strikes up and the celebrity guests are welcomed by staff in a classroom, where they sit at tiny wooden desks. Versace and Li play ping-pong with a little girl for the cameras. Finally they take their seats for a playground performance that starts with boys and girls dancing in bright silks and ends with a fashion show, of clothes that the children have made, to the strains of The Model by Kraftwerk.

At the end Versace gives a standing ovation before overseeing the distribution of toys that she had purchased the day before in Chengdu - teddy bears, basketballs, Hello Kitty merchandise.The children live here during the week and those who are not orphans return to their parents at the weekend. Many families are rebuilding their houses themselves. This place was badly hit by the earthquake - the new school is next to the site of the original one that collapsed - and the village was cut off for days. One 83-year-old grandmother tells how her younger sister died because she was not reached. A mother with her baby says that her child was born three days after the earthquake but will never know its father.

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Back at Chengdu airport, Li explains the story behind the One Foundation. “The water came to here,” he says, touching his ankle, “and then it rose” - he touches his nose. He is recounting how the tsunami hit while he was on holiday in the Maldives in 2004. He held his four-year-old daughter above his head and clasped his babysitter with his free hand. She, in turn, was clutching his one-year-old daughter. The babysitter was washed away with the baby - but, mercifully, they were saved. “When the water receded I saw people helping women and children. I thought, I want to do something.”

Between January 2005 and November 2007, when his charity was launched, he studied non-governmental organisations. He realised that people want to know where their money goes. So he engaged Deloitte to audit his spend, and this is documented on the website.

“I am the first one to create a charity where you can see every investment,” he says. “That is why we are getting so much support.” The idea behind the foundation is simple. Li wanted to leverage the power of the masses. He called it the One Foundation because, “if every human being donates one yuan a month, we have a lot of money”.

Although the foundation was running before the earthquake, the disaster provided the focus. A website launched on the day of the quake raised 50 million yuan (around £4.8 million) in two weeks. Li has a talent for co-opting people in to his “family”. “I never ask for money, I always ask for the heart.”

Versace is the latest recruit, joining Disney, Universal and Ferrari, and individuals including Tony Blair, Bill Clinton and the chairman of the CMB (China Merchant Bank), which later this year will issue a credit card that requires holders to donate 1, 11 or 111 yuan each month, depending on their status.

Then there's the deal with the South Beauty chain of Sichuan Chinese restaurants, where diners donate one yuan a meal, and a ten-year contract with a Chinese film production company where moviegoers contribute each time they see a film. The first title is in the scheme is, fittingly, The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor, starring Jet Li.

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Jet Li

“I went to Harvard - they wanted to study how One Foundation got so big in one year,” he says. “Harvard calls the foundation a ‘love virus'.” The achievement is more remarkable when you consider that Li is appealing to the only children of China's “me generation”. One of these, a young woman called Sweet Lee, who works as a tour guide in Beijing, tells me that they are “not good with sharing”. She says: “Jet Li is like your neighbour, very warm-hearted. He's very local, from Beijing.”

If the power of the Versace brand can help to raise more cash then Jet Li will be happy - he repeatedly refers to Versace as his “sister”. The following evening he sits front row at her fashion show in Beijing looking a little stiff in a black Versace suit. Li comes from a modest background and gained his passport out by winning martial arts competitions. You can tell that his heart lies with the people - the glamour of this event is clearly not his thing.

But as the models strut to a soundtrack by the Ting Tings, he looks on appreciatively, and at the end presents the designer with a yellow rose. She invites him on to the catwalk for her curtain call.

Later there is a dinner for 200, held in the spectacular painted wooden Duanmen gatehouse, a 15th-century Ming dynasty treasure within the Forbidden City. The actress Michelle Yeoh, Li's co-star in The Mummy..., says that she and Li go way back - he was once very shy: “He could make an entire movie with you without saying a word.

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“He's doing the right thing at the right time in the right way,” Yeoh says. “It's not just about going to the wealthy, the big companies. He's given our people the chance to support. It had to be someone the people trusted, and the Government trusted.”

I am reminded of what Sweet Lee said: “Every time in Chinese movie, he plays hero. But every time he plays in Hollywood, he plays bad guy.” Bringing his good works to the attention of the West, may reverse that stereotype.
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