Chapter 23. I-Rocks' Da Han: The Legend of a Life Staked on Going All In

A chapter from ONE MORE WAY: The History Behind Chinese Esports, by BBKinG (Liu Yang). Translated from the Chinese original: 二十三 I-Rocks大韩 豁出来的人生传奇

First published in the author's Zhihu column on December 13, 2013: https://zhuanlan.zhihu.com/p/19636641

This translation was reviewed against the Chinese original on August 1, 2026. If you spot a mistranslation, a wrong name, or a factual error, please open an issue or send a pull request.

Han Bohan, known to everyone in the industry as Da Han, or Big Han, was born in Hebei in January 1983 and grew up in Beijing. A fanatical enthusiast of games and peripherals, he is the exclusive Chinese distributor for Cherry, the well-known German mechanical keyboard brand, and a co-founder of I-Rocks.

The first time I met Da Han, he struck me as a clean-shaven Li Kui, the black-faced brawler of the classic novel Water Margin: dark, thickset and solid, with eyes like burning coals. All that was missing was an axe in each hand. He is blunt and direct, and he loves making friends over a drink. When the interview finished that day he dragged me out and we drank all evening. Just as my vision was starting to blur, he suddenly switched off the music, put away the smile, turned round and stared at me for a while with eyes lit by a cold fire, and then told me a story. I suddenly realised that the real interview was only just beginning.

In 2011, Da Han approached WE Esports Club himself and set up a custom-branded distribution arrangement with them. Three years later he had not only grown annual sales of the I-Rocks peripheral line tenfold, he had also given many Chinese esports clubs, casters and media outlets the most direct and effective route yet for turning attention into money.

Today, the success of Da Han's model means hardware peripheral makers are no longer merely sponsors within the esports industry but partners, while esports people have gone from passively waiting for sponsorship to actively helping companies sell products, becoming sports and culture merchants themselves. The effect of this on the development of Chinese esports runs very deep.

Do You Dare Go All In? Do You?

The story Da Han told that day had nothing to do with esports, so I will leave it out. But as we were parting at the end of the evening, Da Han held on to me and asked me the same question over and over. He said: I am where I am today because I was willing to go all in. Do you dare go all in? Do you?

I understood that he was proving a point to himself. Because for a third-generation son of a revolutionary family, the descendant of a military line, other people could see no need for him to go all in at all, when in fact he had put in more than most.

During the War of Resistance against Japan, Da Han's grandfather also went by the nickname Da Han. He had been a landowner in Baoding. After the Japanese invaded and began burning, killing and looting everywhere, he flew into a rage and led his household men and fellow villagers into the mountains around Zhangjiakou to fight the Japanese as guerrillas. A local gazetteer in Zhangjiakou records a line from the Japanese of the time: Da Han and Xiao Han will not live out the year. Xiao Han was another local guerrilla fighter, and Da Han was Han Bohan's grandfather. Xiao Han was later caught and killed by the Japanese, while Da Han held out, kept fighting and lasted until liberation. Da Han's maternal grandfather was a regular soldier in the Fourth Field Army and served through the War of Resistance, the civil war and the Korean War without missing one of them. With both a paternal and a maternal grandfather in the army, Da Han's father grew up steeped in it and naturally became a soldier as well. He is now a senior officer.

The family background sounds illustrious, but as a dependant following the army, Da Han spent his childhood moving house without a break. Villages, mountain valleys, remote garrison postings that enemy reconnaissance could not reach: he lived in all of them. Wherever the unit went, he went too. Only after he placed in the top two in his county at the end of junior high school and got into the High School Affiliated to Tsinghua University did life in Beijing finally settle down.

In his second year of senior high he became hooked on computer games. His reason was not the same as everyone else's. What Da Han loved was that playing games together made everybody happy. Perhaps it was the constant moving and the lack of a fixed home in childhood that made him treasure the feeling of sharing something enjoyable with friends, and that instinct laid the ground for his willingness to share with others when he later went into business.

At university his gaming ran completely out of control. He played as though his life depended on it, with the computer on his bed. He would sit up in the morning and start playing, and apart from going to the toilet he barely left the bed at all. StarCraft, Counter-Strike, Warcraft III: he was good at all of them and regularly ruled the dormitory building.

Then one day Da Han played Counter-Strike against a classmate and lost, by a very wide margin. He was so surprised by it that he finally got up off the bed and went to ask the classmate how he did it.

That one unexpected trip out of bed opened up a whole new world for Da Han.

Da Han found that his classmate was using a very unusual mouse, the IE3.0, the Microsoft IntelliMouse Explorer 3.0. An optical mouse with no ball in it could track that precisely? For Da Han at that moment it was a revelation. Could a good peripheral really make that much of a difference?

Over the next few years Da Han began collecting peripherals obsessively, pulling every string he had to get hold of newly released products from well-known brands at home and abroad so that he could study them. At a time when most people had never heard of Razer or Cherry, he already owned their latest gear.

Da Han spent his four years at university haunting peripherals forums, hunting down technical material and writing reviews. The more he understood about games and peripherals, the more he felt this was a field in which he could build a career, and that led him to a very different idea of his own future from the one his father's generation had.

When he graduated, Da Han had a long talk with his father. The family wanted him to join the army, and the road had already been paved for him. Given his family's connections, the army was practically a motorway for Da Han. He would not agree to it. At the end of the argument he calmly put a question to his father. A soldier either expands the country's borders or defends his home and his nation. This is peacetime, so the first is out of the question, and as for the second, would the job ever fall to me? His father had no answer. Da Han then set out his own idea: business. He had worked out that the most powerful organisation of this era was not the army but the commercial enterprise, and he wanted to test himself on that battlefield. His father had no choice but to let it go.

His family stopped pushing him, but Da Han put no small amount of pressure on himself, because to his relatives and friends the idea of a third-generation son of a revolutionary family selling mice and keyboards made no sense at all. They thought he was messing about. So he gritted his teeth and swore he would produce results of his own, and went straight to Zhongguancun to work a shop counter. Because he knew peripherals inside out, he found a counter job quickly, and began dealing every day with all sorts of customers, learning to read people, understanding what users wanted, sharpening himself, and learning how to do marketing and distribution from the ground up.

Before long, fate handed him a chance to go all in.

In 2005, Da Han went to Hong Kong on a trip with his mother. Everyone else went shopping in the malls. He had found online that Cherry had a branch office in Hong Kong. Mechanical keyboards were still an object of pure curiosity on the Chinese mainland at the time, described only in a few forums frequented by the most hardcore enthusiasts, so the moment Da Han put his bags down he went to pay his respects.

He had made no appointment and knew nobody there, and it took him a long explanation at the Cherry reception desk before the staff understood why he had come. Fortunately, Hong Kong people may be commercially minded but their sense of service is strong, and rather than turn him away they found a marketing person called Raymond to receive him. It was that Raymond who became the beginning of Da Han's road to success.

All of that came later, of course. Raymond had no idea at the time what Da Han was there for, but he still showed him round the Cherry office and patiently talked him through a great many products. Towards the end of the conversation Da Han said he wanted to buy a few keyboards, and Raymond told him that the Hong Kong office only did wholesale, not retail. That was understandable enough, given that they only sold in bulk to first-tier distributors. Da Han still would not give up, and asked what the minimum was for it to count as wholesale. At least ten, came the answer. Da Han was stunned. Cherry keyboards had always been expensive, and at more than 800 yuan each even a student today would have to think twice, let alone eight years ago. But Da Han gritted his teeth and bought them, using up every yuan he had saved from his part-time work. If it came down to going all in, then he would go all in.

So while everyone else came back from Hong Kong loaded with clothes, handbags and cosmetics, he came back hauling ten crushingly heavy mechanical keyboards.

Da Han says that carrying them home was painful, but that compared with working out how to sell those ten keyboards it was a walk in the park. The price of the keyboards plus the freight was already extremely high, and at a time when almost everyone in China was using membrane keyboards, hardly anyone even knew what a mechanical keyboard was, never mind was ready to be sold one. And so began the hard road of educating the market. Da Han forced himself to find material online and translate it, add pictures and post it on forums. The well-known Counter-Strike forums of the day, ESAI, GZ and the rest, all carry his traces.

When Da Han was small, his grandfather often told him that fighting a guerrilla war meant avoiding the enemy's strengths and opening a new front. So although it was hard going at the time, Da Han was quite clear in his own mind that mechanical keyboards were a viable road, because the membrane keyboard market had already been carved up by the big manufacturers while the mechanical keyboard was a completely new concept, a blue ocean. Strategically, Da Han had chosen the right path. Add to that the effect his groundwork on the forums was having, and he actually managed to sell all ten of those astronomically priced mechanical keyboards.

Just at that point Raymond called from Hong Kong to follow up with him as a customer. He had only meant to ask out of curiosity how it was going, and was astonished when Da Han told him they were sold out. He then asked whether Da Han would be willing to become Cherry's designated seller on the mainland. Cherry would take ten US dollars off the price of each keyboard, but Da Han would have to take on a much larger volume.

Go all in, or not? The question was in front of Da Han once again.

Da Han thought the risk was considerable, but the business could work, so he gritted his teeth, borrowed the money and went all in. He accepted. When two armies meet in a narrow pass, the braver one wins, and luck was on his side too: when the time came to pay, the US dollar rate happened to fall, which earned him a small profit.

Because the keyboard business could not support him in the early days, Da Han also took a job at a state-owned enterprise, learning how a large company gets things done while selling mice and keyboards on the side. As the keyboard and mouse business grew, selling on forums was no longer enough to serve as his main sales channel, so in early 2008 he opened a small twenty-square-metre shop in Zhongguancun. The rent was very expensive, and Da Han says that when he signed the lease he had no confidence at all that he would earn it back. From then on he ran two jobs at once and spent every weekend at the shop. He says it was exhausting, but the project experience he picked up inside the state-owned enterprise was extremely valuable and laid the groundwork for dealing with a large company like Cherry later on.

Fate Favours Only Those With Courage and Preparation

In 2008, a Chinese employee at Cherry's head office in Germany became Da Han's benefactor. A relative of his had seen the Cherry promotion Da Han was running in Zhongguancun in Beijing, thought the publicity and marketing were rather good, and mentioned it to him in passing. The people at Cherry's German headquarters were astounded, because they had never spent a single cent promoting the brand on the Chinese mainland. How could somebody have made their product this popular?

Full of curiosity and rather mixed feelings, this Chinese employee got in touch with Da Han, and then brought a German product manager over to Beijing to meet him. Everything that followed fell into place naturally.

Why do I say it fell into place naturally? For that I need to go through Cherry's history first, or it will be hard to appreciate how extraordinary the events of that moment and afterwards really were.

Cherry was founded in Germany in 1953. Broadly speaking, Cherry makes switches, but you should never underestimate how seriously the Germans take a switch. They turned the craft of making one into an art form, so much so that from that time on Cherry's products were used mainly in the military field, along with mainframe computers, scientific instruments and control systems.

Against the backdrop of the Cold War, the military was Cherry's biggest buyer. That gave Cherry ample funds to expand its production lines from the start, and when commercial computing entered a period of rapid growth in the 1980s, Cherry reached its peak. It had 24 production lines in all, capable of producing 240 million MX switches a year, and those lines are still usable today. In other words, Cherry recovered their cost long ago, which gives the company an absolute advantage in both technology and cost in this field. Overtaking it is very difficult.

From the 1990s, however, the arrival of new technologies such as the membrane keyboard made the mechanical keyboard's drawbacks, its high price and its bulk, more and more glaring. Cherry's mechanical keyboards went into decline and its production lines were progressively idled and cut back. Cherry itself never imagined it would have another day in the sun.

It was against exactly that background that Cherry's German headquarters found the work Da Han was doing in China, leading a new revolution in the concept of the mechanical keyboard, so astonishing. Da Han had avoided the main battlefield of the membrane keyboard and opened up an entirely new field. Cherry had enormous respect for that courage and ability, and the plum job of national distributor for China fell to Da Han as a matter of course.

For his outstanding contribution to the mechanical keyboard market, Da Han also came to be called the father of the mechanical keyboard in China.

Looking back over this stretch of Da Han's life, the key to his success was his willingness to go all in at a handful of decisive moments. He carried the risk and the pressure and he got the reward, which takes sharp judgement together with great courage and conviction. Over the years that followed, Cherry's sales gradually found their stride, but Da Han did not stop, because he knew that mechanical keyboards would slowly turn into a red ocean too. It was time to open a new front again.

Crossing Paths With WE

Da Han had been a fan of WE Esports Club since the Warcraft III era. As a devoted esports enthusiast, doing something for Chinese esports had always been his dream, and the peripherals industry he knew best happened to sit right next door to esports. So once again, everything fell into place.

After ChinaJoy in 2010, a friend introduced Da Han to KING, WE's founder. The two hit it off immediately and decided to do something together. That much was settled, but Chinese esports had been famous for years for sitting on a mountain of gold with nowhere to dig: there was a market, but nobody knew how to make money from it. How did Da Han solve that problem?

First, Da Han believed that the key to a successful partnership between a commercial brand and traditional sport came down to two things: base numbers and adoration. As the longest-running and best-known esports club in the industry, WE had both the adoration and the base numbers, so he was determined to work with WE. It was only the business model that had to change.

The earlier business model was a sponsorship model. Esports people would plead with manufacturers for sponsorship, and much of the time all they got was product, with cash sponsorship very rare. Even with some of the big manufacturers, advertising and sponsorship were unstable, there one moment and gone the next. Then again, the esports market used to be small, so this was also a limitation of the times.

But how was Da Han going to change that situation? The first problem he ran into was that Cherry's German headquarters did not agree at all with his approach of promoting the brand through games. Even sponsorship was extremely hard to get approved, and no amount of lobbying made any difference. Da Han was at a loss. If this battlefield was closed to him, then all he could do was open another one.

So Da Han went all in again and created a brand new brand, I-Rocks. Many people may not believe this, but Da Han created I-Rocks entirely because of esports. This was membrane keyboard territory, the battlefield he had avoided at the outset, and now he was back on it. From the very beginning he positioned the I-Rocks line in esports, working with the top clubs, players and casters in the esports scene and putting his understanding of base numbers and adoration into practice.

From 2010 onwards, Da Han's first three years with WE made no money. In the first year he gave WE the highest revenue share in the Chinese esports industry. The exact figure is a commercial secret and cannot be disclosed, but it is fair to say that I-Rocks put at least two million yuan a year into brand building, and in the first year that marketing budget far exceeded I-Rocks' sales. Willing to spend, quick to decide, and selling in a bundle with the team: those three things became the principles I-Rocks stuck to consistently through those three years. That produced the I-Rocks title sponsorship of the team, the I-Rocks campus tour and the full I-Rocks WE peripheral line, which included not only dedicated keyboards and mice but headsets, mouse mats, cable clips and other WE-themed products, all updated and improved as fast as market feedback came in. It brought I-Rocks to its harvest season in 2013, recovering everything it had put in and returning a great deal more.

A Revolutionary Breakthrough in the History of Chinese Esports

At a time when esports was widely written off, Da Han had the courage to try a model in which a sponsorship fee and a share of sales existed side by side, making esports people part of the business itself, and it worked. It was a brave experiment and a revolution in the history of Chinese esports.

Once the I-Rocks model succeeded, it was an immediate spur to every other peripherals and PC hardware manufacturer. Companies that had previously been willing to sponsor only in product began to follow suit, all of them ready to put real money into bundled sales arrangements with teams, clubs and casters. That set large numbers of esports people to work helping companies sell products and build a reputation, through their videos and every other channel they had. The approach proved to be the right one, and one esports millionaire after another emerged from a Taobao shop.

Today, the capacity of Chinese esports to generate its own income is the best it has ever been in its history. Even without sponsorship, esports clubs and esports people can live well on their competitive results and their product operations. For the first time, esports has formed a stable and healthy ecological cycle of its own, and on that count I-Rocks and Han Bohan, the father of the mechanical keyboard in China, deserve much of the credit.

I-Rocks was on track, but Da Han did not stop moving. He believes that a businessman deals in trends, and that the trend of the future is the mobile internet. He set up a mobile game company whose competitive mobile game is about to be released, and he has also built a mobile peripheral controller: plug it into either end of the phone and you can play, and it comes with WiFi and an integrated game app download function on top, convenient and practical. From software to hardware he has thought it all through and made it real. A new battlefield has been opened up once again, and this time Da Han is getting ready to go all in all over again.

Da Han of I-Rocks: the legend of a life staked on going all in.