These are the charms on offer at Mumingtang Ancient Porcelain Samples Museum in central Beijing.

Mellifluous and soft notes flow from a Chinese zither played by a young lady, an enchanting fragrance graces the air from green tea in pretty porcelain teacups, bright but gentle lights make hundreds of pieces of ancient porcelain fragments dazzle on dozens of delicate wood shelves -- a peaceful ambience that can comfort one's tired body and mind within a few minutes.

As one of the few private museums to have emerged in Beijing in recent years, the 300-square-metre museum offers a good opportunity for fans of porcelain not only to glimpse the beauty of nearly all types of the nation's famous chinaware but also touch them with their own hands.

"It is an impossible experience that cannot be enjoyed in other porcelain museums where delicate and precious porcelains are protected by translucent yet thick showcases," said Bai Ming, 44, founder and curator of the museum.

"Few people can resist the temptation to touch, particularly if the items are more than 1,000 years old."

The 1,200 pieces of ancient porcelain fragments on the shelves and nearly 50,000 pieces on rotating display represent Bai's 15-year collection.

Most items were made in the Tang (AD 618-907), Song (960-1279), Yuan (1279-1368), Ming (1368-1644) and Qing (1644-1911) dynasties.

Touching History

With an investment of 3 million yuan (US$360,000) and the help of two of his friends, Bai redecorated a former teahouse into a museum last year. He displayed the best of his previous collections to the museum which now constitute 80 per cent of exhibits in the museum.

"Some people will think I am crazy to spend so much money just to exhibit some porcelain fragments," said Bai.

"But I think they are worth exhibiting because the production history of Chinese porcelain is pieced together and linked by these fragments, even though their prices are much cheaper than complete utensils.

"In other words, history itself is priceless and should be known to all Chinese people because this is our own culture handed down through generations."

Bai is glad to see that his idea of "touching history" is gradually being accepted by visitors.

Liang, a porcelain fan who lives nearby the museum, is grateful to find such a unique museum catering to her tastes.

"I feel so wonderful when touching the porcelain pieces and examining them. It makes me feel that I'm getting closer to ancient history and arts," she said.

With the improvement in lifestyles and education, Bai said more and more people want to join the group of porcelain collectors.

"But the first big obstacle remains money, because the price of complete authentic ceramics is still enormous to most people," he said.

This explains why the collection of ancient porcelain fragments has been quietly popular among common collectors in recent years.

They can buy fragments from construction sites, from farmers living around ancient kiln sites and from second-hand antique markets to enrich their collections at cheaper costs, usually about 3-20 yuan (US$0.36-2.42) for each piece, he said.

But Bai added that not all fragments are cheap, such as the 100 pieces of authentic Ruyao porcelain fragments of the Song Dynasty exhibited in a special room. The most precious one among them, which comes from a dragon-like sculpture in celadon glaze, cost Bai 8,000 yuan (US$966).

Ruyao kiln, with the kilns Dingyao, Guanyao, Geyao and Junyao, were the five royal kilns in the Song Dynasty which were famous for their fine craftsmanship and unique pottery skills.

Among them Ruyao porcelain is the most precious because records said the kiln was operational for only two decades, starting from the first year of the reign of Song Emperor Zhezong (1086) and ending in the fifth year of the reign of Emperor Huizong (1106).

Only 60 or so Ruyao porcelain pieces have been handed down through the past 900 years. They are housed in the Palace Museum in Beijing, the Palace Museum in Taipei, the Shanghai Museum and museums in Osaka, St Louis, Philadelphia and a few other places, according to Bai.

Ruyao kiln was located in Baofeng County in Central China's Henan Province, which was under the jurisdiction of Ruzhou in the Song Dynasty. Bai has visited the county 11 times just to buy authentic fragments.

Outsider to professional

Another reason for building the museum is to let more people gain a basic knowledge of porcelain before making a decision on whether to buy imitations at high prices, Bai said.

He still regrets selling some 50 pieces of authentic porcelain from the Ming and Qing dynasties, handed down from his grandfather, to one of his relatives from Hong Kong for 10,000 yuan (US$1208) in the early 1980s.

"I really wanted to give myself a big slap on my face when I heard of their actual value, hundreds of times the price I sold them for," Bai recalled.

The painful experience was arguably the main impetus for Bai to start his study in this field after he graduated from the Department of Chinese Language and Literature, Central University of Nationalities in 1984.

He worked in the Beijing Publishing House as an editor and most of his salary and spare time went towards porcelain.

"I just wanted to be more professional so I could gain compensation for what I'd lost previously," he said.

But this transition was not as smooth as he expected. He read all kinds of books on ancient ceramics but all his porcelain, most of which he bought from antique markets at high prices, were identified as fakes by experts.

Things improved in 1987 when his father-in-law, a connoisseur of Chinese jade, gave him a box of porcelain fragments and asked him to learn to tell the difference between them.

"Since then, I began to pick up and buy porcelain fragments from construction sites in Beijing and from ancient kiln relics where I passed during my business trips."

After moving bags of fragments back home, Bai cautiously washed them, occasionally selecting pieces and putting them on a big table. Then he tried his best to invite an expert to classify them chronologically for him. After examining and remembering the special characters of different eras and types, he mixed the fragments again and learned to classify himself.

"The more I touched them, the more familiarity I felt with them. A few years later, after touching about 100,000 pieces of porcelain fragments, I could recognize any porcelain's accurate type and the time it was produced at first glance," he said.

"Look at this piece of the late Song Dynasty," Bai said, pointing at the bottom of a blue-white plate with a fine picture of a fisherman and a woodcutter. "I bought it for only 10 yuan (US$1.21) from the construction site of Beijing's Ping'an Street in 1998.

"No one wanted to buy it when hearing the price offered by the construction workers but I bought it without hesitation because I knew it was worth far more due to its near 1,000-year history."

To share more of his professional knowledge in porcelain with visitors, Bai spends all his evenings in the museum as a narrator.

He regrets that he cannot show all his collections due to space limitations. But he said he would show them in groups and themes monthly to let people have different experiences in touching porcelain.

"I think we are a lucky generation because our ancestors left us beautiful porcelain beneath the earth. And I hope our descendants 200 years later can still be lucky in unearthing something beautiful and not just plastic bags," he said.

(China Daily November 6, 2002)