See China

According to collector Ma Weidu, “In the early morning in Beijing, there are two places that are always bustling with people. One is Tian’anmen Square, where people wait for the flag-raising. The other is the antiques market at Panjiayuan.” (Reporters Notes, February 2010 issue)

Beijing’s Panjiayuan antiques market, located inside the southeast Third Ring Road, is known throughout the country as one of the best places to go to purchase artifacts from China’s turbulent 20th Century and its several millennia of dynastic history.

I personally like to visit Panjiayuan every few months to check out the long aisle of used book dealers who offer an astonishing variety of printed material: last year’s remaindered best-sellers, pirated editions of big-name novelists, diaries from the 1970s bound in attractive covers and containing stories of mundane life written in spidery fountain-pen handwriting, old copies of newspapers, foreign medical texts, and once in a while a hidden gem, like a decent-quality Republican-era copy of a book long out of print.

But there’s far more at Panjiayuan than just books. Here’s how a writer for the Lotour website described a visit to the market:

When you follow the flow of people under the large canopy, you can take your time to inspect the stalls containing all kinds of second-hand goods, anything you could possibly want: old furniture, the essentials of a writing studio, old-style books, works of calligraphy, used periodicals, ceramics, coins both foreign and domestic, bamboo carvings, religious artifacts, and relics of the Cultural Revolution. Wares of all types are laid out on stalls on the ground, but dross is mixed with the gold: the many imitations include copies of Ming and Qing-era paintings or the works of famous modern-day artists, reproductions of ancient ceramics passed off as genuine articles, dyed jade, fake bronzes….so you must exercise caution before opening up your wallet, and make sure you’ve gotten a good look before you make a selection. If you’re looking for old ceramics here, there’s no chance of finding anything high-quality, but sometimes you’ll be able to find something passable, like late Qing or early Republican china, or pottery from the Neolithic period or the Han Dynasty. The majority might be reproductions, but this is an excellent place for training your eyes. You can treat it as a learning opportunity, or a way to improve your discriminatory abilities. Pick things up and look them over without caring too much for whether they’re genuine or fake.

At one stall, this Lotour editor found an old-style lock. At a glance it was obvious that it had been artificially antiqued, but when asked, the seller claimed that the lock was a late-Ming, early-Qing lock. The seller also claimed to be an old Beijinger who had worked a stall at Panjiayuan for more than a decade selling pieces from old Beijing.

How do you improve your chances of discovering genuine antiques? Ma Weidu’s quote tells only half of the story: Panjiayuan’s early morning activity can be seen only on the weekends, when the true collectors come out to trade.

From Monday to Friday, the market is open from 8am to 6pm and caters largely to tourists who are looking for mementos of their visit to Beijing. Fakes and reproductions predominate. But on Saturday and Sunday, the gates open at 4:30am. It is in the early hours of those two days that dealers of genuine antiques join the usual array of vendors selling knock-offs and imitations.

Of course, finding a true treasure still requires a trained eye, but your chances are better on the weekends.

Images via Tencent Digital