Dreams of riches

But daydreams about the riches to be had pushed the market in the wrong direction.

Typically, a dealer pays rural artisans less than 100 yuan ($15) for an artwork or artifact. Then, after secondary work on the piece painting or polishing, perhaps the dealer sells the item on the antique exchange market for tens of thousands of yuan, according to the report.

Someone gets buckets of gold, while the counterfeiters often end up in prison.

"The point where it becomes illegal is only after the artifacts reach the market and are traded as antiques," said Liu. "It is very rare that the dealers in the middle of the trading process would have failed to identify whether an item is genuine or not.

"If they fail to reveal an item as a fake, that violates the law. It is only at that point we can say it is illegal."

The crime is more severe when the amounts involved reach a certain level, and then the dealers can be sentenced to more than three years in prison, he said.

Of course, they are the ones who benefit the most from the sale, not the rural artisans or skilled craftsman. In the chain of counterfeit production, the dealer or broker benefits the most in the fake art deals, and at the other end of the chain is the unwitting buyer.

"People who dream of getting rich overnight with art investments are targeted by fake-antique dealers," Liu said. "True collectors don't get so excited that they invest in an item without gathering the information needed to make an informed purchase."

Liu also said that the get-rich-quick attitude in collecting has spread everywhere in the past decade. At the peak of the collection fervor in 2008, there were about four prime-time TV programs about appraising and evaluating objects gathered in various places.

The fervor needs to cool down, he said, especially because it has led the market astray. Appraisers are accused of lying for money and auction companies have lost their credibility because of all the confusion.

"Up to now, we don't have a law specifically aimed at regulating the antique trading," Liu said, "but we really need to take some action."

Suspected counterfeit events

In May 2009, for the Wenchuan earthquake commemoration, a dozen collectors donated their private collection of 66 relics, worth more than 100 million yuan ($15.8 million), to the Wenchuan county government. Later, when the public could see the items online, their authenticity came into doubt.

In January 2011, bidding on two jade chairs said to be the antiques from the two Han dynasties (206 BC -AD 220) began at 180 million yuan, and the chairs were finally sold for 220 million yuan. The authenticity of the chairs was questioned, but Zhou Nanquan, a professional appraiser from the Palace Museum in Beijing, maintained that they were genuine. It has been said, however, that if the chairs were counterfeited in Pizhou, Jiangsu province, a place famous for fake Han jade items, they would be worth no more than 500,000 yuan.

In January, a piece of calligraphy called Qianziwen (One Thousand Words), sold for 140 million yuan at an auction in Shenzhen, Guangdong province. The work was said to be a gift of a Song Dynasty (AD 420-479) emperor to one of his top officials. But Shan Guolin, the curator of the Shanghai Museum, told Oriental Morning News, a Shanghai newspaper, that the piece could not be the original because the Shanghai Museum added that piece to its collection years ago.

Contact the reporter at zhangyuchen@chinadaily.com.cn