Keep collections alive: enthusiast builds his own sports museum

Since then, Xie has been working on collecting items of Olympic Games and other events. Twenty-five years after Xie's first Jordan shoes, he now keeps 2,134 collections.

Xie moved to the United States at 11 and returned to China after graduated from college and opened a cafe and a hotel in Hainan. All these years he searched at home and abroad, went to numerous auctions, contacted lots of private collectors and sports organizations to enrich his possessions.

Xie used to stack his collections on racks in two rooms of his house in Beijing. As the numbers of collections kept growing, he realized that he had problem preserving them, as weather and other negative factors were doing damages to his treasure. Then it occurred to him, "why not take them out and display them to others, like the customers of my cafe?"

In 2004, Xie started displaying these collections on the second floor of his coffee shop. With increasing popularity, the exhibition area became larger and larger, and a museum came into being at last in 2016.

According to Curator Xie, there are five different exhibition areas in the museum displaying a variety of objects, for example, signed jerseys and sneakers of super stars like Kobe Bryant, Lionel Messi and Michael Jordan; stuff recording the sports stories of ordinary people: diary of an unknown athlete, black-and-white pictures, trophies of mass sports, etc.

In the Chinese sports section, one can have a glimpse of the sports history of the country through collections like trophies, torches, mascots: a silver medal donated by former Chinese women basketball center Zheng Haixia who steered the Chinese team to finish runner-up in 1992 Barcelona Olympics; a basketball suit with signatures of the Chinese national basketball team; four golden keys specially made for bidding for the 2000 Olympic Games in 1993.

Open to the public free of charge, this museum greets about 20,000 visitors per year. It has became a must-visit site for many sports fans and travelers.

"These exhibits may fade away someday, but the stories behind them keep shining through times. It's better to present them to the public rather than let them rot in the corner," Xie said, with his favorite collection in his hand -- a volleyball signed by players of the Chinese National Volleyball team, with legend Lang Ping's name among them.

This is a gift given by a retired official after Xie's repeated pleas. He believes it is a witness of the glorious moments of Chinese women's volleyball, when the national team won their third consecutive title at the 1984 Los Angeles Olympic Games.

"Like this volleyball, sports-related objects are tellers of stories. I hope we can pass the stories on," Xie said.