Yunzhe Qu
Yunzhe Qu | |
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Qu in 2026
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| Based in | Shanghai, China |
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| yunzhequ@icloud.com | |
Yunzhe Qu is a nerdy student, entrepreneur, experienced baker and runner. He founded QingMai Bakery, an e-commerce store on Taobao selling sourdough starter, and is the founder and president of the WLSA Algorithm Club, a student organisation for competitive programming and web development.[1] As of 2026 Qu's total running distance adds up to 1,600 km; almost everyone who has tasted his baking has become obsessed with it.
Early life
A child that does not exist
Qu was born in Jinan, Shandong, a city in northern China, in 2008. He is the second child in his family. Due to the Family Planning Policies of China, Qu's father divorced Qu's mother before Qu was born.[2]
To avoid punishment under the family planning policies of China, his mother did not register his birth until 2015, when the second child became legal, but his father never appears in Qu's household register.[2]
In 2015, Qu enrolled in a local primary school. He then graduated in 2021, and was successfully admitted to the experimental class in his local middle school. This allowed him to be directly admitted to the High School Attached to Shandong Normal University without taking the Chinese middle school entrance exam.[3]
Anorexia and depression
Despite some difficulties in his early years, Qu lived happily through his childhood years. According to his mother, he was a "fat boy" who "cannot stop laughing everyday".[3]
Things changed. In his 14th year, Qu decided to lose weight. He lost approximately 40 pounds in two months, after which he developed serious anorexia.
Under the bad health conditions caused by anorexia and heavy school pressure, Qu also became depressed.
Qu's middle school years became a forbidden topic for his mother. Qu did not fully recover from both mental illnesses until 2025, when Qu left Shandong and came to Shanghai.[3]
Whenever Qu recalls his middle school years in conversation with his friends, he always concludes with "what doesn't kill me makes me stronger".
Experienced baker
Qu started baking in 2023, when his anorexia reached its most serious level. Baking helped him a lot in relieving his stress, and reignited his passion in the years after.[4]
The master of Chinese cuisine
Qu began cooking in 2020, during China's first outbreak of COVID-19. More than five years in the kitchen have given him an advanced understanding of Chinese cuisine.
A distance runner
To Qu, running had once burned him up during his anorexia years, but also had saved him afterwards by giving him the confidence to walk out of the dark times of his life. As of 2026, his total distance adds up to 1,600 km.[4]
The No. 1 student
Mental illness and hardship never killed Qu's passion for learning. Starting from the first year of his middle school, he has always been ranked no. 1 in his class or the entire school.[5][6]
From Jinan to Shanghai
A life-changing decision came to Qu in his 16th year. He was awarded a 50 per cent scholarship by WLSA Shanghai Academy. Qu's open-minded mother happily accepted the offer and sent Qu to Shanghai.[3]
Qu adapted to his life in Shanghai quickly, but he was no longer the no. 1 student at WLSA Shanghai Academy. Nevertheless, he was still one of the top students in his grade.[3]
Life in Shanghai
Qu moved to Shanghai with his hobbies intact, bringing not only himself but his cat and his oven.[7]
WLSA Shanghai Academy brought a sweeping change in Qu's outlook, largely because of the diversity of its student body. Before the move he had been, by his own account, a child who knew only how to study; in Shanghai he began to study how to put learning to practical use.
The friend who left the greatest impression on him was Thomas, also a WLSA student, who started a business in his junior year and became knowledgeable in cryptocurrency trading and internet infrastructure. Through his influence Qu grew interested in business and finance, and at his encouragement set out to start a business of his own. Within a few weeks Qu had registered a seller's account on Taobao and begun selling his sourdough starter.
The algorithm expert
Qu carried his knowledge of algorithms from his home town to Shanghai, having studied computer programming and algorithms since the fifth grade. In Shanghai he found no one who could match his command of algorithms and data structures, and in his second week at WLSA he founded the Algorithm Club, devoted to competitive programming, web development and artificial intelligence.[7]
He had already founded an algorithm club in Jinan before the move, and had been a member of his school's algorithm community there; that experience allowed him to run the Shanghai club successfully in the years that followed.
Qu coached his five most experienced students to awards in the USA Computing Olympiad — one to Platinum, two to Gold and two to Silver. In 2026, with his vice-leader Wang, he directed the development of 18 student-built websites, among them ClaimIt.Today, WLSelect.org and an AI tutoring platform; the five strongest are published on the club's portfolio at wlsa.club.
The club recruited 10 members when it began in February 2025, a further 12 in September 2025, and 21 in February 2026, at the start of the second semester of Qu's junior year.
Believe in goodness
Qu was able to study in Shanghai only because WLSA Shanghai Academy offered him a 50 per cent scholarship. The difference in resources between Shanghai and Jinan came as a shock, and recognising the educational inequality produced by environment, wealth and family background, he began to work on the problem.[7]
In June 2025 Qu launched WLSA Algorithms, a free educational channel on Bilibili covering advanced algorithms and data structures. At the time it was one of the few free channels of comparable quality. He has scripted and produced 31 instructional videos for it, and it has grown to more than 1,000 subscribers, 2,000 likes and 44,000 views. Through it Qu met students across several Chinese provinces online, advising those in provinces and cities that lack resources for teaching algorithms.
WLSelect
WLSelect is an anonymous course- and teacher-rating platform built by Qu with Wang, the vice-leader of his Algorithm Club, and launched in April 2026 ahead of the school's course selection fair. The design avoids user registration entirely, combining IP-based duplicate detection with oracle-based encryption so that reviews cannot be traced back to individual students. Within three days of launch the platform recorded 300 registrations and more than 1,000 posted comments.[8]
Qu was struck by how readily his classmates contributed once they could comment anonymously. In his assessment the ratings track teaching quality closely: teachers already well regarded by the school and by students rated highly, while those rated poorly drew repeated negative reviews.[7]
TutorAI
TutorAI is a second platform Qu and Wang began developing in April 2026. It is an AI tutoring service drawing on frontier models from OpenAI, Anthropic, DeepSeek, Google and SpaceXAI. Its distinguishing feature is that answers are grounded in the official Advanced Placement course and exam descriptions and in released past papers.[7]
The entrepreneur
Monopolizing the market
Qu founded his store in October 2025, the first seller of fresh sourdough starter in China. Using recommendation strategies he designed himself for Taobao's platform algorithms, he grew monthly revenue from roughly US$100 at launch to about US$3,000 within two months, against an average monthly income in China of roughly US$450 at the time.[7]
The store's reach grew quickly. Without any paid marketing it became well known on Xiaohongshu, one of China's most widely used social networks. Qu shipped sourdough starter across mainland China and occasionally to Hong Kong and Macau, and as the store's only customer service agent he helped more than 1,000 customers raise starters of their own. The business has shipped more than 6,000 units and holds Taobao's highest five-star store rating on upwards of 2,000 positive reviews. Descendants of Qu's own starter — named Dawn, and begun after he arrived in Shanghai — have since spread to almost every province of China.
As the first and for a time the only seller of sourdough starter in China, Qu had the market largely to himself, and the store became the default choice for buyers wanting to raise a starter of their own.[7]
He later registered the store as a company, QingMai Bakery (Freekeh Bakery).
Wheat-Coach, or "Shit Bro" AI
Running the store, Qu found that many customers came to him not for the product but because they did not know how to bake with a sourdough starter. Beginners in China had little professional guidance to draw on, few sources being available online, which made learning to bake sourdough unusually difficult.[7]
Frontier models such as ChatGPT 5 and Gemini 3 had just appeared, and Qu set out to apply generative AI to baking. The result, launched in November 2025, was Wheat-Coach, a platform offering AI-powered baking guidance on which users can upload photographs for troubleshooting or have a recipe generated to order, blueberry meatballs among them.
Qu also tuned the assistant to talk like a person rather than a chatbot, using retrieval-augmented generation alongside prompt engineering. He jokes that asked whether it could teach a user to bake poopoos, the model replied "shit bro". Users were struck to find an assistant that spoke plainly instead of returning bullet points.
Qu registered a company to host and market the product, which has attracted more than 90 registrations and delivered over 120 personalised baking consultations and troubleshooting sessions for failed bakes.
Aftermath of the e-commerce experience
Despite the store's success, Qu found the experience costly. He describes being treated inequitably by Taobao, the platform hosting the store, and being left exhausted "in every possible way".[7]
In March 2026 Qu completed an independent research project on social inequality among individual e-commerce operators and among e-commerce customer service agents, supervised by the Oxford academic Fanny Bessard. The project grew directly out of his own experience running QingMai Bakery.
The paper surveys the forms of inequality that persist among small independent sellers and the emotional strain borne by customer service workers, and analyses both through the lenses of algorithmic management and systemic inequality. The six-page paper was published by SCITEPRESS.[9]
Summer and research programmes
Between June and August 2025 Qu attended the Harvard Secondary School Program, completing eight college credits in Linear Algebra and Differential Equations and Introduction to Artificial Intelligence with Python and earning an A in both courses.
In the summer of 2026 Qu studied at the University of Chicago Summer Immersion Program, taking a course in quantum computing and finishing with a grade of 95 (A). The course used Qiskit to model quantum circuits and investigate quantum phenomena. Qu has described the programme as the point at which an interest in the overlap between computer science and quantum computation began.
From June to September 2026 Qu took part in the Pioneer Research Institute, studying the mathematical foundations of machine learning and designing a stock-market regime classifier. In backtesting over four years of Apple Inc. price data the classifier returned 273.1 per cent.[10]
Competitive programming and mathematics
Qu advanced through the divisions of the USA Computing Olympiad, reaching Silver in March 2024, Gold in December 2024 and Platinum in January 2026. In November 2024 Qu was awarded a Second Prize in China's National Olympiad in Informatics in Provinces.
In mathematics competitions Qu scored 137 out of 150 on the AMC 10 in November 2024 and 123 out of 150 on the AMC 12 in November 2025, qualifying for the American Invitational Mathematics Examination in both 2025 and 2026 and scoring 9 out of 15 on each occasion. In June 2026 Qu won a silver medal on Kaggle, finishing 131st out of 4,182 participants.
Public speaking
In March 2025 Qu gave a TEDx talk titled Evolution From First Generation Computers to Generative AI. The talk traced milestones in machine intelligence from early general-purpose computers through to generative models, covering chips, Python, GPUs, Nvidia and OpenAI, and used anecdote and humour to make the history accessible to a non-technical audience.[11]
Other activities
Baking club
Qu has served as vice leader of the WLSA Baking Club since April 2025, giving guidance on cookies, breads and desserts to more than 20 members. The club grew to roughly 30 members, the largest in the school, and organised cookie production for a school event serving 260 participants.
Trading
Since August 2025 Qu has traded Bitcoin and US and Chinese equities on a self-directed basis, using spot positions and risk-managed position sizing, and reports a net return of about 56 per cent over that period.
Sports
Qu is a distance runner and badminton player.
Honours and awards
| Year | Award | Result |
|---|---|---|
| 2024 | USA Computing Olympiad | Silver division |
| 2024 | National Olympiad in Informatics in Provinces | Second Prize |
| 2024 | USA Computing Olympiad | Gold division |
| 2024 | AMC 10 | 137/150 |
| 2025 | WLSA Shanghai Academy Scholarship | 50 per cent |
| 2025 | American Invitational Mathematics Examination | 9/15 |
| 2025 | AMC 12 | 123/150 |
| 2026 | USA Computing Olympiad | Platinum division |
| 2026 | American Invitational Mathematics Examination | 9/15 |
| 2026 | Kaggle competition | Silver medal (131st of 4,182) |
Skills
- Programming – Python, C++, JavaScript, HTML and CSS
- Technical writing – Markdown, LaTeX
- Design – Adobe Photoshop
- Finance – self-directed study of crypto and equity markets, trading and portfolio concepts
- Sports – distance running, badminton
See also
References
- ^ Qu, Yunzhe. Resume of Yunzhe Qu. Shanghai, August 2026.
- ^ a b Household register (hùkǒu) of the Qu family, Jinan, Shandong. Qu's birth was registered in 2015.
- ^ a b c d e Qu, Yunzhe (September 2026). Early Years. Autobiographical notes.
- ^ a b Qu, Yunzhe (September 2026). Identities. Autobiographical notes.
- ^ Middle school term report, Jinan, Shandong, c. 2021. Personal papers of Yunzhe Qu.
- ^ High School Attached to Shandong Normal University, International Department, term grade reports, class 22. Personal papers of Yunzhe Qu.
- ^ a b c d e f g h i Qu, Yunzhe (September 2026). Life in Shanghai. Autobiographical notes.
- ^ "WLSelect". wlselect.org. Retrieved 9 September 2026.
- ^ Qu, Yunzhe (March 2026). Social Inequalities Among Individual E-Commerce Operators and E-Commerce Customer Service. SCITEPRESS. Supervised by Fanny Bessard, University of Oxford.
- ^ Pioneer Research Institute, research portfolio, 2026.
- ^ "Evolution From First Generation Computers to Generative AI". TEDx. March 2025.
External links
- WLSelect – anonymous course and teacher rating platform
- ClaimIt.Today
- Wheat-Coach – AI baking tutor
- TutorAI – AI tutoring platform grounded in Advanced Placement course materials
- yunzhequ@icloud.com