The richest person in China is Yang Huiyan, worth over $16.2 billion, and only 26 years old. Yang is worth so much due to the boom in stock and real estate that is happening in China. She is the majority stockholder of Country Garden Holdings, a property development company which her father started. He had transferred 70% of the companies shares over to her right before its IPO.

On top of only being 26, a billionaire, and the richest person in China, she’s also pretty cute:

Not bad, eh? Too bad she’s married!

Yang now sits on the board with an executive director title, and works in the companies logistics activities.

The growth in wealth in China has been very dramatic over just the past year. If you look at the combined net worth of the top 40 richest people, they were worth $38 billion in 2006. Just one year later, that number grew to $120 billion.

Of the top 40, 12 of them are real estate developers. This just goes to show you how fast real estate is on the rise. Unfortunately that is a potential problem for the country:

Their rise reflects a sharp rise in Chinese real estate prices over the past year despite government efforts to restrain a boom that it worries could ignite a debt crisis or leave the country’s poor majority without affordable housing. CNN

By comparison, the youngest American that makes the top 40 list are Sergey Brin and Larry Page, founders of Google and 34 years old. They are both worth $18.5 billion.