In a small office at the heart of the museum, an elderly man was playing cello when I arrived. Peter Fung set down his bow and—choosing his words with care—offered an hour of conversation about collecting.
His main advice: focus. Pick an area and go deep. Learn the material, study the makers, understand what distinguishes the exceptional from the merely good. Breadth comes later, if at all.
The irony wasn’t lost on me. Over four decades, Fung had assembled one of the world’s finest collections of Ming furniture, then expanded into European vanities, Japanese art, and European silver. The man preaching specialization had mastered several fields.
But watching him speak, the contradiction resolved itself. Each collection began the same way—with obsessive focus. The furniture came first, twenty years of it. Then the vanities, another deep dive. What looked like scattered interests was actually serial expertise, one passion at a time.
I’ll return for a proper tour. But even from this brief encounter, one thing was clear: the museum exists because someone cared—deeply, specifically, for decades—about peak human craftsmanship.
Authenticity. Rarity. Beauty.
Most museums enforce distance. Glass cases. Do Not Touch signs. Climate-controlled barriers between you and history. The logic is preservation: keep the public away, and the objects survive.
The Liang Yi Museum in Hong Kong takes a different view.
Here, on Hollywood Road—the historic heart of Hong Kong’s antiques trade—visitors are invited to sit on 18th-century hardwood chairs. To open the doors of precious cabinets. To run their hands along surfaces shaped by craftsmen four centuries ago.
It sounds reckless. It’s actually radical.
The Collection
Peter Fung started collecting in the 1980s, when he was working as an investment banker and spending his lunch breaks wandering Hollywood Road. The neighborhood was (and remains) Hong Kong’s informal center for Chinese antiques, and Fung found himself drawn to furniture—specifically, pieces made from two legendary hardwoods: huanghuali and zitan.
These aren’t just expensive materials. They’re extinct ones—or nearly so. Huanghuali, native only to Hainan Island, was largely exhausted by the mid-Qing dynasty. Zitan was so precious it was restricted to imperial workshops by the 18th century. Today, a single huanghuali chair might sell for over $15 million at auction. A Ming dynasty horseshoe-back armchair set the world record at auction: HK$124.6 million.
The furniture that survives is irreplaceable in the most literal sense. The trees are gone. The craftsmen are gone. What exists is all that will ever exist.
6,800 Pieces
Three decades after Fung began collecting, the museum opened to the public in 2014. It occupies four floors of a building on Hollywood Road, housing over 6,800 artifacts. The core collection—roughly 400 pieces of classical Chinese furniture—is considered one of the finest in the world. Selected pieces have been loaned to the National Museum of History in Taiwan and the Palace Museum in Beijing.
But the furniture is only part of the story.
The museum also holds over 800 European vanities—bejeweled compacts, powder boxes, and clutches from the late 1880s through the 1960s. Pieces by Cartier, Boucheron, Van Cleef & Arpels. These aren’t random additions. They represent a parallel tradition: the pocket-sized luxury object, designed to be held, opened, touched.
The museum is named for Fung’s two daughters (liang yi means “two dependents” or “two children”). But there’s another meaning embedded in the name—liang yi also evokes the Taoist concept of duality, the interplay of complementary forces. East and West. Function and beauty. Distance and intimacy.
The Philosophy of Touch
Lynn Fung, Peter’s daughter and the museum’s managing director, has articulated the philosophy behind the hands-on approach: “When designing exhibitions, we try to recreate how objects would have been placed so visitors could visualize the original use.”
This isn’t casual permissiveness. It’s a curatorial stance.
A chair you cannot sit in becomes a sculpture.
A cabinet you cannot open loses its essential purpose.
Traditional museum logic prioritizes longevity over legibility. The object survives, but its meaning erodes. A chair becomes pure form. A cabinet becomes a sealed box. The human element—the reason these things were made—disappears behind protective barriers.
Liang Yi inverts this. The risk of wear is accepted as the price of comprehension. You understand a Ming dynasty chair differently when you’ve sat in it. You understand a Qing cabinet differently when you’ve opened its doors, felt the joinery, experienced the weight.
The Joinery
What visitors discover when they touch Ming furniture is the engineering.
Classical Chinese furniture rarely uses nails or glue. The pieces are held together by mortise and tenon joinery—interlocking wooden components that fit together with such precision that they can last centuries. The joints are often hidden, invisible from the outside. You only understand them through interaction: pulling a drawer, testing a hinge, feeling how the pieces move.
This engineering philosophy—invisible complexity, apparent simplicity—explains why Ming furniture commands such prices. You’re not paying for decoration. You’re paying for a solution so elegant that it still works after five hundred years.
And you can’t appreciate it through glass.
Appointment Only
The museum operates by appointment only, Monday through Friday. This isn’t exclusivity for its own sake—it’s a practical requirement of the touch policy. Large crowds and irreplaceable objects don’t mix. By limiting attendance, the museum can maintain the intimate experience that makes the collection meaningful.
The contrast with major institutional museums is intentional. Where a national museum might prioritize accessibility and volume, Liang Yi prioritizes depth. Fewer visitors, longer visits. Less coverage, more comprehension.
What Survives
At the heart of the Liang Yi philosophy is a question that haunts all collecting: what are we preserving, and why?
The conventional answer focuses on the object. Preserve the wood, the lacquer, the carved detail. Keep it intact for future generations. But this approach can become paradoxical—the object survives, but divorced from its context. A chair no one sits in. A cabinet no one opens. Artifacts that persist as form while their meaning leaks away.
Liang Yi offers an alternative. By allowing interaction, the museum preserves not just the object but the relationship between object and person. The experience of using Ming furniture isn’t recreated through interpretation panels. It’s enacted directly.
Neither model is wrong. They’re optimizing for different things. The question is what you believe museums are for.
Visiting
The Liang Yi Museum is located at 181-199 Hollywood Road, Sheung Wan, Hong Kong—steps from the antique shops and galleries that still define the neighborhood.
Visits are by appointment only, Monday through Friday, 10am to 6pm. The museum is closed on weekends and public holidays. Tours are priced at HK$200.
It’s worth the effort. Not because the objects are rare (though they are). Not because the collection is comprehensive (though it is). But because the experience offers something increasingly difficult to find: direct, physical contact with the past.
In an age when we experience most things through screens, when museums treat visitors as potential contaminants, when authentic objects are locked behind barriers while replicas fill gift shops—the Liang Yi Museum takes a different position.
Touch, it suggests, is not the enemy of preservation. It’s the point.
The Liang Yi Museum can be found at liangyimuseum.com. Prices for Ming dynasty huanghuali furniture have been confirmed through recent Sotheby’s and Christie’s auction records.