Met Another Con Man

At Sunday flea market, I met this local Chinese man who claimed to be an expert cum dealer in Chinese Porcelain trained in People’s Republic of China. He started showing me the items recorded in his hand phone which he claimed to be good and genuine and at the same time making statements to frighten me by saying that in China there are many high class copies and his is genuine that I should buy from him and sell. I told him that there is nothing special when I can order high class copies and treat them as genuine and I also asked him to prove those shown in his handphone are genuine so that treasure does not turn rubbish and wealth will pass more than one generation. He said carbon dating and my reply was that in scientific testing there were confusion which lead to a cheating case in Seattle I wrote web site on a piece of paper for him and he said that no use going into the computer and after keeping the piece of paper, I then told him that the site written on the paper talks about Seattle antique cheating case, I didn’t tell him that carbon dating does not work on porcelain otherwise I will make myself a fool.

 I then told him about TL test and the machine written by Dr. Anna Bennett and the most reliable machine to be sourced. He then ask me whether I am still driving taxi which I replied that my age is catching up and with my knowledge, just throw shit around for collectors and experts to clean up. He then said that my mindset to destruction in Chinese antique porcelain collection trade has not stopped. My answer to him is that all experts or collectors must have details on the antique items that they owned and they should not blame on others. There are collectors who believe that they buy it at a high price would be genuine and this makes poor people who cannot afford will keep bad pieces. The Star newspaper page 34 dated 8^th September 2014 titled “Child stumbles upon ancient sword” tells us that a 11 year old boy who is not rich and could not afford to buy the ancient sword for a high price and knows the value that he stumbles was a 3,000 years old sword and not a rotten scrap metal.

 There is another man who knows my late father met my eldest son and he has been telling me to ask my son to start antique business. I told him that experts’ opinions are “Antiques are manufactureable, makeable, fakeable and duplicateable” making me lost interest and I do not want customers coming to my place to bang the table calling old crooks as they did to my father, there are a number of such happening and now the problems are theirs (collectors) makes me happier.

After many years that I had given antique furniture business which can be found in my blog and this visitor request me to get for him old furniture and not of Vietnam type. I have no time to look into whether Vietnam or local and also having to pick up the pieces to assemble.  This confusion has put dealers and collectors into a lot of trouble. I experienced showing a pen to an old man who is a pen dealer, this pen is by the name “Warranted” which I bought from an old timer pen dealer in Batu Road Kuala Lumpur. The old man told me that he has seen this pen forty years ago. It was in my lifetime that I know that everything has good value and I did not keep all the eggs in one basket. There are no good antiques without good knowledge.

 One visitor from San Jose,California, America searching for “original nyonya ware”, nyonya ware was started in the late Ching dynasty and continued to produce until the 70’s where Bandung made copies and production did not cease when Jingde Zhen started to produce nyonya ware. An old shop in Kuala Lumpur imports nyonya ware and has confirmed to be nyonya ware and not any other ware because this shop has reported nyonya ware for sale in the Star Metro in colour. (I am having the copy of this article).  I need to know what is original and what is not so that I will not be taken for a ride by collectors or experts.

A visitor from Newport, England searching for “mother of pearl teaset from Kuala Lumpur how much would it worth?’. The old setting of Mother of pearl in recessed deeper than the newer ones and the newer ones will come off easily. The teaset you mentioned from Kuala Lumpur is not known to me but there are no fixed market prices or fixed value to old things. My late father bought old furniture from Penang, lorry and lorry loads of them and at that time we had a good workshop and a good carpenter to repair and getting the pieces to modify and I spent my time in carpentry work and learn to know why are old mahogany furniture are shaky?.