Antique market are where traders and collectors put their psychological strength and their antique knowledge to test the annual big antique fair in Zhengzhou, capital of Henan province. [Photo by Xiang Mingchao/China Daily]

In Zhengzhou, he was far from alone, with sellers from his hometown of Lishui occuping almost half a floor. All of them dealt in antique jadeite from the Qing Dynasty. One thing they all had in relatively large quantities was the bird or hand-shaped jadeite head of silver hair sticks, widely worn by women in ancient times. Sorted into small plastic bags and numbered in the hundreds, they raise the question: how could anyone possibly accumulate such a great deal of the same thing?

"If you listen to most of the sellers, they'll tell you that they roamed the countryside and bought the little birds and hands one by one, asking from door to door. But this is untrue," says Zhu. "I bought them in one lot, from a Hong Kong collector who first purchased them from one of the country's many government-owned antique stores in the late 1980s."

Li Zhongming, a Taiwan collector who has come to the Zhengzhou fair to sell his antique jade, can't hide his sense of disbelief when relating his own stories. "When I first stepped into an antique store on the mainland in 1985, I was fresh out of university and had just been dispatched by my company to work at its Shanghai office," says the 52-year-old. "I went there, took a casual look around－I knew nothing about antiques at the time－and told them, rather timidly, that I wanted to buy an antique jade bracelet for my girlfriend."