4 ideas
Everyone pursues wealth as surely as water flows downhill, so the best government follows this drive rather than fighting it: it lets people trade, guides them where needed, and competes with them least of all. Moral standing tends to follow material security ('when the granaries are full, people know propriety'), so poverty is not a virtue and wealth is not in itself a vice.
Take what others discard and sell what others hoard. Buy grain at harvest when it is cheap and sell silk and lacquer then; buy silk and floss when cocoons come in and sell grain. Act on price signals as fast as a hawk strikes, and live frugally.
After helping King Goujian of Yue destroy the rival state of Wu, Fan Li judged that his lord could be trusted in hard times but not in success. He left office, took a new name, and settled at Tao, a trading crossroads. There he applied Ji Ran's price-cycle doctrine, made a fortune three times over within nineteen years, gave most of it away twice to poor friends and kin, and became the byword for a self-made rich man, Lord Zhu of Tao.
Sima Qian classes the very rich, such as the self-made Zhuo ironmasters of Shu and the widow Qing of Ba, who kept up her family's cinnabar-mining fortune built over generations, as 'untitled nobility'. Their fortunes won them power and deference comparable to that of lords with fiefs, though they held no rank. Seen this way, commercial wealth is a real route to social standing rather than a vulgar deviation from the aristocratic order.