The trouble with antique glass is that people tend to be terrified. 'There's always this prejudice against touching glass,' said Carlos Prata, who is holding a show of English 18th- and 19th-century glass this month in his Hanlin Gallery in Hollywood Road.
'If you are going to collect, you just have to get over that breakage thing as soon as possible,' he said.
The show - of pieces he has been collecting for about eight years - is small, but a rare one in Hong Kong.
'People don't tend to know very much about European glass. Even if they are interested in European antiques, glass is very much the poor cousin to ceramics and silver, even though the workmanship is just as skilled.' People often ask Mr Prata why he is so interested. After all, glass is disposable; what is so special? Apart from the fact it is usable and relatively inexpensive ('For what you get, it can be cheaper to buy old glass than new'), there is something innately dramatic about a clarity born of the mixture of sand and heat, and about the search by glass-makers (ever since glass-making began, believed to be early in Egyptian history) for an artificial recreation of natural rock crystal, created when a volcanic eruption boils up silica.
Glass crystal was invented in the late 18th century in England. Early examples are quite grey because of the lead content which made it softer for cutting.
As Mr Prata explained, although most manufacturing moved to Ireland soon afterwards, to flee excise taxes, many of the makers were still from east of the Irish Channel, 'which means there's still a big debate about defining English and Irish glass'.