Looking for antiques

We are looking for some Chinese antiques, especially furniture. The problem is that Fuzhou is not a very good place to buy old Chinese furniture. The recommended spot was the flower and bird market, where we want a couple of weeks ago. It was a very interesting place, and we will definitely go again. But there wasn't that much decently looking old furniture to be found. The choice of antique porcelain was significantly larger. Luckily, that interested me a lot as well.
The shop that offered the most promising furniture collection, told us that they had another shop, somewhere else in Fuzhou. So, after strolling around for a while, getting an idea of the merchandise to be found here, and checking out some of the prices (not at all cheap!!!), we left again with the plan to visit that other shop in the near future as well.

Last week, we went out to find the shop. We found the address and were surprised to see a very big building, that carried the name 'Oriental antique mart' above the main entrance. That looked promising.
Indeed, the place housed many oriental antique shops, selling porcellain, paintings, stamps, etc. Funny enough, there were many shops selling fishing gear. But we only found one shop selling some furniture, which was a bit of a disappointment. On the third floor of the building we suddenly saw a very interesting place with the name 'Oriental collection club'. The doors were closed, but after peeking through the windows, a friendly lady opened the doores for us and we entered. The place didn't look like a shop, but the lady told us that they were actually selling antiques. So, we looked around a bit. After a while, a man followed us and asked what it was that we were looking for. As they mainly had porcellain items, I said that I was very interested in them, and asked for some prices. After having heard the prices, we realised we had ended up in a rather special shop. There were items from almost all dynasties, with prices ranging from Euro 100,- to Euro 90.000,-.
We got into a conversation with the man, who turned out to be the owner, not only from the shop, but also from the entire 'Oriental antique mart'. He told us that many of the items were bought in Europe, as the prices there were low in comparision to China (who would have thought that). He showed us some jade pieces that had values of several hundreds of thousands of Euros!
We were stunned!! Not only because of the prices, but mainly because of the place where we were looking at those priceless pieces of art: a rather simple exhibition room with standard vitrines and hardly any visible security system.

We were invited for a cup of tea and chatted a bit more with the owner. He had set up an organisation that is active in spreading Chinese culture by means of many international cooperation projects. And the place we were having tea, amongst those fine works of art, was the office and reception hall of his company. You can find some more info on the website.
Unimaginable in Europe, but in this region of China, these places still exist.

We didn't buy any furniture that afternoon, and for the porcellain we had seen, our budget wasn't even remotely sufficient. But the trip was worthwhile anyway.
Quite an unexpected and remarkable discovery!