Antique dealer Wang Fu pulls up his brand new Buick in the grounds of a pungent junkyard beside a demolition site. He greets a woman who is rummaging in rubbish. 'Boss Cui, where is your treasure?' he asks.
The woman walks into a shabby single-storey house and emerges with a scroll. Having scanned through less than half of it, Wang shakes his head. 'Fake. It's not by Fan Zeng. The figure's scale is not correct,' he says.
It's just another routine treasure hunting trip for Wang. Wang used to be a poor farmer with just three years of formal primary school education. Today he owns three antique shops in the capital. Buying antiques cheaply from dustmen and selling them on to art collectors at higher prices has allowed Wang to turn his back on his previous life.
'We're making a living from the gaps of Beijingers' fingers,' he says.
A country boy from Shandong, Wang was an unwelcome child in his family of 11 so he hitched a ride to Beijing to make a crust. After scraping by as a beggar for about a month, he started collecting rubbish and sorting out used books and magazines.
It wasn't long before he found that old books, calligraphies and paintings could be sold for tidy sums. In 1996, he stumbled across a decree dating back to the Qing dynasty lying around in a junkyard. He tucked the decree into a book and bought it for three yuan. He later sold it for 1,000 yuan.