Why this website and e-book

When I first started buying antique Chinese porcelain I had no access to any information except those available on the Internet and a few books, andthose all did not go much into detail.
Luckily I do read Chinese, so I spent two years almost daily looking at porcelain items in a Chinese membership site, where they mainly evaluated/commented items  presented by other site members. During these two years I viewed some twenty thousand porcelain items, both antique and fake.

The problem was (1) to identify the members who really knew their stuff, thus allowing me to slowly get an impression of genuine antique items, and (2) to figure out why some items were thought to be authentic and others not. No one taught this, they would just state "it is a fake", or "good one" etc.
At that same time I was starting to buy some items on my own, trying to keep the fakes as few as possible. Thus I acquired theory and some experience in a slow process. There were virtually no books out there discussing what to look for in an item, in order to make sure it was a genuine antique and not a fake.

After several years I finally had acquired a considerable amount of related knowledge from different sources, mostly Chinese. I decided to make it easier for other collectors and the current ebook and web site are the result of this.

You do not need to follow the slow process of learning I had to go through.

Always be aware, however, that there are no “tricks” or shortcuts making it simple to know the difference between genuine antiques and fakes. You have to learn the difference yourself. This website and ebook provide the information that helps you speed up the learning process. The rest is a matter of obtaining more experience with actual items.