'You want fish fossils, no problem. But bird fossils? That would be difficult.' The vendor at the Shenyang antique market looked nervously over his shoulder. 'The authorities are very strict about bird and dinosaur fossils. I do not want to lose my licence.'
The market offers an astonishing variety of China's past - bronzes, jade, polished stone, minerals, statues of Mao Zedong, Confucius, the Buddha, badges of the Kuomintang and Communist armies, fake stamps of the Republic of China and Qing dynasty - but not the fossils from western Liaoning that fetch thousands of dollars from collectors in the United States, Japan and Europe.
You can try a market opposite the city's Imperial Palace, which the Manchu rulers built before they conquered China and founded the Qing dynasty in 1644. One shop sells fish and insect fossils, with the highest price of 180,000 yuan (HK$204,000) for a large chambered nautilus, about 400 million years old.
'My uncle made a fortune selling fossils abroad until they changed the law in 2004 to make all of them the property of the state,' said manager Wang Hong. 'Now it is tough, unless you smuggle. A dinosaur egg in the United States can fetch over US$400,000.'
You do not, however, have to travel to Liaoning for fossils - they are available right here in Hong Kong. Antique shops in Hollywood Road, Sheung Wan, sell dinosaur eggs and bird and fish fossils. At the Hung Wan Hong antique shop, for example, a nest of eight dinosaur eggs from Liaoning was selling for HK$12,000.
If you are looking for a specific item, some dealers offer to have it smuggled into the city - for the right price, or course. There is no guarantee the items are genuine, and a buyer who wants it checked has to bear the cost of the laboratory tests.