The man with 400 pairs of shoes in his living room

If you think it is only women who can have a fetish for shoes, take a quick look into the Aladdin's cave that belongs to Xu Bo, and it will set you rethinking.

The cave is his Beijing home's 12 square-meter living room in which reside 400 pairs of sports shoes, about 150 of them bought solely as collectors' items. Most are limited editions and the brands he covets most are Air Jordan, Nike, Adidas and Reebok.

Like many of his peers born in the 1980s, Xu started buying sports shoes because of a love for NBA, something that developed when he was in middle school.

He began to assiduously follow basketball on TV and in other media in 1991 and started collecting basketball player cards at the same time.

"Apart from the stories about players on and off the court, the most attractive thing to me was the shoes they wore," he says.

One reason for his taking a fancy to the shoes and beginning to collect them was that at the time many were unobtainable in China, he says, and a lot of those were unaffordable to him in his student days.

"Then, the shoe makers began to put them back on the market again, and that gave people like me the chance to own them."

His enthusiasm for shoes became professional when he landed a job as a journalist with the Chinese edition of the magazine Sports Illustrated, and he began writing a column devoted to footwear.

"That gave me access to a lot of information about shoes and I gained a much deeper understanding of them," he says.

"To some people some of these shoes may look fairly ordinary, but for me they carry a very special meaning. I would buy a pair of shoes for a sports star card I had when I was a child, or a poster or a film."

People like Xu are willing to go to great lengths to get the shoes they want. Hundreds of people lined up at Adidas outlets in Beijing, Guangzhou and Wuhan on March 17 when the brand's NMD sports shoes went on sale.

Nearly 2,000 buyers had even queued the day before, local media reported.

Most would eventually go home empty-handed because most of the outlets had just a few dozen pairs of the shoes.

Those left out would have had to turn to private sellers or scalpers if they wanted to land the shoes they desired.

The official retail price of the NMD shoes was from 1,099 yuan ($168) to 1,499 yuan, but private dealers were asking for as much as 3,000 yuan.

The same dealers can demand a premium of 2,000 yuan to 3,000 yuan on the Air Jordan 1 classic series, a private dealer nicknamed Lao Lyu says.

Some shoes, such as the Yeezy, made by Adidas, have sold for almost 10,000 yuan in China, the official retail price being a fifth of that.

Lyu suggests anyone buying shoes use their common sense when they find what they want, because some are exorbitantly priced.

Xu sees buying shoes as one of life's pleasures rather than as a money spinner. He gets his information about shoes mainly from official channels, the media or shoe dealers, he says.

He has no plans to sell the shoes he owns.

"As for how much I spend, I reckon anyone can spend a bit of disposable income on their hobby without it interfering with their life."

The most he has spent on a pair of shoes is 5,000 yuan, he says.

"On average, the shoes I have bought have been marked up by 500 yuan to 1,000 yuan from the original price."

Chen Chaodi from Shanghai started to sell sports shoes at the end of 2012 when he was studying in Japan.

He sensed the rising market when he found many people in Japan and his friends at home talking about wanting to buy Air Jordan, made popular partly by the American rapper Kanye West.

So he began to buy popular sports shoes in Japan and then sold them to China and was able to sell 40 to 50 limited edition pairs of shoes a week, and he usually marks up the price 30 percent.

He continued the business on the side to earn a bit of cash after he returned to China in 2014. Now he can sell between 20 and 30 pairs a day, he says.

With years of sales experience he has built up purchase channels of his own, and most of his customers are men.

"Those born in the 1990s want to buy the shoes their idols are wearing, and those born in the 80s are buying them to relive memories," Chen says.

E-commerce has made buying shoes much easier, Xu says.

"I used to have to go to small shoe shops or abroad to get the shoes I wanted, but these days they are just one click away from my WeChat friends' circle."

Xu has neatly sorted out all the shoes in his living room, so he will have more space for future purchases.

"Every time I put on a new pair of shoes, I'll visit old friends," he says, only half jokingly.

yangfeiyue@chinadaily.com.cn