For nearly thirty years, Nadège and I had devoted our lives to reconstructing the memory of the global Art Market. Europe had transmitted its archives to us.

America had transmitted its biographies. We thought we had reached a kind of balance. We were wrong.

One morning, the phone rang. A few days later, I was received at the Chinese embassy. I expected a protocol meeting. During the exchange, my interlocutors told me they knew Artprice, its reputation, and its documentary standards.

They presented a very precise question to me: what place did the Chinese Art Market now occupy in the global hierarchy?

Had China become the world’s second-largest Art Market power? Or was it already number one?

According to what was presented to me during that meeting, they wanted an independent Western actor to examine the question using a documented methodology. I immediately understood that we were no longer there to sell technology: we were being asked to apply our measurement method.

I interpreted the approach as a search for an outside perspective independent enough that the result could be debated on the basis of the figures and the method, rather than on political or national preference.

I then felt an immense responsibility. I saw in that meeting less an economic operation than an act of trust between interlocutors from two different cultural and documentary traditions.

I already knew China deeply. Not only through books. I had traveled through it. Observed it. Loved it.

I had known a China that was still poor. A China of bicycles. A China where roads were at times still little more than dirt tracks. A China still bearing the scars of the Century of Humiliation, the Opium Wars, the Japanese invasions, the Long March, and the Cultural Revolution.

I had also followed Deng Xiaoping’s work with great interest. For many Westerners, he was simply the leader of economic opening. To me, he represented much more. He was the man who had understood that a civilization several millennia old could enter the modern economy without renouncing its deeper identity.

Since adolescence, I had read everything I could find about China. Its history. Its philosophy. Its scientists. Its engineers. Its major projects. Its Silk Roads. Its space program. Its industrial rebirth.

I never looked at China with fear. I looked at it with curiosity.

I believe the Chinese officials understood that immediately. They knew I had not come to explain to them what they were.

I had come first to listen.