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]

"They showed me not one, but a couple dozen of them, strung up together by a rope," he says. "I said I wanted only one, but they said all or none. I took all, paying about 100 yuan (16 USD) each. Today, they are worth at least 10,000 yuan (1,600 US) each, with the best ones selling for 100,000 yuan (16,000 USD)" says Li, who later returned to the store to buy more jade. "One time they showed me a big bag of carved amber, some more than a thousand years old, and asked if I could take it all. I refused, because I had never seen amber before. Today, I wake up in the middle of the night wondering if I could have been more silly."

Treating treasures like something little more than giveaways－how could it happen? For those who wonder, Xu Qing, who has been working at the state-owned Henan Provincial Antique Store for more than three decades, has the answer. "Today, it all looks absurd, outrageous even. But one needs to know that back then in the mid 1980s, my monthly salary was about 30 yuan (five USD)," says the 56-year-old. "To sell a bracelet at a price that is triple my monthly salary－that wasn't cheap really, at least in our eyes. And they all came－not only the Taiwanese and the Hong Kongers, but the foreigners, mainly from the United States and Europe."

For Zhu, things have come full cycle in the past thirty years. "Today, we are frantically buying back what we once so eagerly sold. The only difference is that the price has increased 100 times," he says.