TIANJIN is an old concession city, originally planned by the British general, Charles "Chinese" Gordon, later famed as Gordon of Khartoum. Troops of eight nations controlled the streets until the Chinese took it back in 1949.
The foreigner occupiers liked to collect valuable Chinese artifacts and an antique market sprang up in the French concession. Today it has revived and is one of the best places in northern China for picking up the real thing.
We found it after driving for an hour in first gear through streets choked with bicycles and pedestrians and asking directions several times.
Tianjin is now China's third largest city with a population of six million, and sprawls over dozens of square miles.
Located near the old restored Astor Hotel, the market spills over several narrow lanes which have dozens of stalls and shops specialising in old clocks, bronzeware, porcelain, statues of Buddha, coins, stamps and discarded bric a brac, like wooden radio sets, from the days when the port city was called Tientsin.
It is rumoured that the dealers stocks come today from warehouses full of old stuff which escaped the ravages of the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s and 70s. This makes for interesting browsing.
For a few pounds here on Saturday I bought a set of cards with Chinese prints advertising concession era cigarette brands such as Pirate, Peacock and Pin Head the latter made from "mild and mellow North Carolina leaf" (it isn't just in modern times that American tobacco growers have sought markets in the orient).
It involved a little bargaining. Antique dealers are the same the world over, engaging types for whom the price is just the starting point.
The unwritten rules of haggling are the same. In China it's a matter of naming a lower price but not so low as to cause the seller to lose face.
The most popular items these days are relics of the early period of communist power. Every dealer seems to have stocks of revolutionary exotica, from plaster busts of Mao, including one the size of an elephant head which filled half of a tiny shop, to Little Red Books, plates, pictures, clocks, watches, and even cigarette lighters bearing the countenance of the chairman.
The original realist artefacts of that period are now fetching high prices from China's nouveau riche in Beijing. Last year the capital's leading auction houses, China Guardian, Hanhai, Sungari, Rong Bao and Pacific, broke records selling Cultural Revolution classics. These companies, which only opened in the last four years, are the first officially approved auction houses to operate in China since 1956.
China Guardian is the best known and likes to think of itself as the country's Sotheby's. Its top auctioneer, Gao Deming, represents the new, upper level of Chinese antique dealers. Typically dressed for work in bow tie and stiff wing tip collar, he models himself on Julian Thompson, the smooth and composed senior auctioneer at Sotheby's.
Not long ago Mr Gao, who says he likes to be "in total control" at his auctions, knocked down an oil painting Mao Zedong Goes to Anvuan for the equivalent of £500,000, and a pair of palace lanterns used in Tiananmen Square to celebrate the founding of the People's Republic in 1949 fur over a million.
There is a particular irony for the 63 year old Gao in making money from selling Mao. He was imprisoned and forced to work in a coal mine as a "rightist" during the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution.
But as he said this week: "Life can be spent in many ways. It can be a piece of rotten log buried in the slush or a stick of candle burning brightly to the end."
There is a theory that the original relics of the revolution are popular because they constitute the only art to which the new upper class Chinese were exposed in their early days.
Red Guards turned yuppies are among the buyers bidding six figure sums for such works as Farmers Busy With Spring Ploughing in Time of Peace and Shaoshan - Revolutionary Sacred Place, Chairman Mao's Former Residence.
Bearing in mind auctioneer Gao's stress on the importance of being in total control, we walked away from a dealer in Tianjin who wanted 300 yuan for an attractive old wooden box. This was far too high a price; he was bending the unwritten rules. "Make an offer," he called after us in desperation as we disappeared into the crowd. "One hundred yuan," I said. "Done," he replied.
That small victory alone made the effort to find Tianjin's antique market worth while.