Only the most obedient children usually had real expensive porcelain dolls with splendid dresses and spotless curls falling on the fragile shoulders. Children grew up, became rich and successful, and their favorite dolls were substituted for expensive porcelain services which demonstrated their wealth and good taste. At all times porcelain was valued as gold, and sometimes it cost much more than jewelry and exquisite outfits. Some great porcelain items from different times can still be found in museum halls and private collections. So if you are lucky, you can take part in an international auction and become the owner of the coveted «porcelain lot». However, what absolutely no one would ever do with porcelain is build houses out of it or decorate the exterior walls with it. Nevertheless, there was such a person – Zhang Liangzhi. He spent many years collecting porcelain items and then decorating his old mansion with them. His mansion is built in colonial style and is located in the very center of the city of Tianjin. That house has another name that is «Chinese House».

The inspiration to construct such an unusual building which was named «Porcelain House» came to the author from one of the walls of the Huayun Museum which was fully covered with ancient ceramic. 

Nowadays the original building houses a modern museum of ceramics and antiquities. It occupies an area of about 4,000 square meters. Its roof is crowned with a huge inscription «China» in English, which is a part of a 768-meter dragon that wraps around the entire house. The fantastic mansion is decorated with almost 500 million pieces of ceramics. Among them, you can see more than 5000 ancient porcelain vases and 4000 plates. There you will also see 400 bas-reliefs made out of jade and snow-white marble, 300 stone mythical lions, as well as more than 20 tons of various crystals, thanks to which on a sunny day the walls of the «Porcelain House» look like the facets of a giant shining gem. All the objects are of different shape and are attributed to different historical periods: from the Song dynasty to the Ming and Qin dynasties which was the time of the greatest heyday of the Chinese Empire.