That does not mean everyone should copy their extreme frugality.
People have legitimate reasons to save for retirement, medical expenses, emergencies and family responsibilities.
The significance of Du and Lu's story lies not in the idea that spending money on yourself is wrong.
It lies in how deliberately they aligned their spending with their values.
They knew what mattered to them.
And their financial decisions reflected it.
Du's Final Year
There is another detail that makes the timing of the donation especially poignant.
Du died in 2018 — the same year in which the couple made the major contribution.
He was 81.
According to later reporting, Du died of cancer.
When he told the charity worker that he and his wife did not have much time left, those words were therefore more than a philosophical observation about aging.
Du was approaching the end of his own life.
Yet during that period, he was thinking about children at the beginning of theirs.
There is an extraordinary symmetry in that.
A man facing mortality chose to use what he had accumulated over decades to improve the chances of children whose lives had barely begun.
After Du's death, Lu continued living quietly.
She survived him for another seven years.
Lu's Final Years
Lu Suying lived until 2025.
She died at the age of 92.
By then, the couple's enormous contribution had already been directed toward helping hundreds of children.
But their charitable relationship extended beyond the initial hospital appeal.
According to later reports, the couple had also donated to other causes over the years, including education and earthquake relief.
Because they had no children, Du and Lu made arrangements concerning their later-life affairs with the Shanghai Overseas Chinese Foundation.
Their relationship with the organization helped ensure that their wishes could be carried out after their deaths.
Following Lu's death, the modest details of the couple's private life became more widely known.
There was a powerful contrast between the scale of their giving and the condition of the home and possessions they had kept for themselves.
They had lived without displaying wealth.
There was no lavish residence announcing that its occupants had accumulated substantial savings.
The evidence of their wealth was somewhere else.
It was in the lives their money had helped change.
Why Their Story Became Known
For years, Du and Lu were not international symbols of philanthropy.
Their names were not widely recognized outside their community.
They did not appear to have pursued celebrity or public admiration for their giving.
Their story attracted broader attention after a charity exhibition in Shanghai in 2026 highlighted their lives and charitable work.
The exhibition took place after both of them had died.
That timing is important.
The story became widely shared when neither Du nor Lu could personally benefit from the attention.
There were no interviews promoting themselves.
No social-media campaign designed to build a personal brand.
No opportunity to turn the generosity into fame.
What remained was simply the record of what they had done.
International coverage followed, including reporting by the South China Morning Post and other news organizations.
Readers were particularly struck by two numbers:
17 yuan for a meal.
5 million yuan donated.
Those figures seemed almost impossible to place within the same life.
But that contrast was precisely what made the couple's story so compelling.
Frugality With a Purpose
Frugality can have many motivations.
Sometimes it comes from necessity.
Sometimes from fear of financial insecurity.
Sometimes it is a habit formed during periods of hardship.