"Besides eating and making money, people should also be committed to putting their spirits at ease." These are the words of Wang Chi-hsiung, yet so busy is he with his restaurant that he rarely finds the time for rest and recreation. In addition to staying open seven days a week, he also often caters for a number of neighborhood activity centers and companies in the Los Angeles area. Up bright and early and off to shop in the market every morning, he keeps going until one or two hours after midnight; only then, after his restaurant is scrubbed and polished, does closing time finally arrive.

After a full day's activities are over, he walks back to the two-bedroom apartment next door to the restaurant, but he isn't so tired that he drops off to sleep straight away. Instead, he digs down into his pile of fossils, sifting and scrutinizing the "biological relics from all over the earth" that fill his room-hundreds of samples, hundreds of millions of years old, from the planet's most ancient life forms, like trilobites and marine ammonites, to dinosaur embryos and footprints. Sometimes he does not stop until day breaks in the east.

All he has to do is see a magazine article in National Geographic or Science on dinosaur embryos or the evolution of life, and he'll pull out the fossils he's collected to compare them with the ones in the article. Looking at other people's fossil collections, which are no more complete than his own, he can't help revealing his pride: "To say I'm number one would be going a little too far, but at least I don't feel second to anyone else."

From downtown Taipei to the Andes

These "diamonds" in the eyes of fossil collectors can usually only be had by major museums with generous budgets or the independently wealthy. What is Wang Chi-hsiung's story?

The 48-year-old Wang Chi-hsiung is in fact the child of a poor family. His father passed away early on, and when he was still in grade school, Wang had to begin helping out with family finances. Usually on days off he would wander up and down Taipei's Chungshan North Road picking up old newspapers and broken bits of metal, which he would turn in for an NT dollar or half an NT dollar apiece. And when he didn't test into middle school, he wasn't despondent, because how could his family pay for the NT$300-plus in tuition? No longer in school, he apprenticed himself in a bicycle shop and a wooden clog shop, and he went along with his older cousin to sell chickens in the market.

In 1964 the Vocational Assistance Commission for Retired Servicemen opened the Hsin Hsin Restaurant. Because Wang often delivered goods to the restaurant and knew the manager, he found out that they were hiring apprentices. In this way he started to learn the craft of cookery. After he became a chef, he worked in a few different restaurants. When the Ministry of Foreign Affairs' new office building was completed and their new restaurant was unveiled, Wang, by then quite adept in his craft, began to prepare traditional Chinese banquets for visiting foreign dignitaries, and at night he taught others at a cookery school.

On an offhand chance, Wang became acquainted with Miss Wu Yue-chen, a member of the National Assembly who had adopted 70 or 80 orphans. One of her foster sons, who came from faraway South America, urged Wang to go abroad and make his way in the world. So it was that Wang, young and unburdened by family obligations, journeyed to La Paz, the capital of Bolivia. Working in a restaurant run by overseas Chinese, he bumped into his former boss at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, who invited him to serve as the embassy chef.

During his leisure time, Wang often went mountain climbing with the ambassador and his wife. Once on a trip in the mountains, Wang spotted a rock that was shaped like an animal. Having never seen a real fossil, only pictures of fossils in his grade-school textbook, Wang became inexplicably curious. "There was an electrifying sensation," he says, "like a kind of energy coming down from the sky that allowed me to walk back through a time tunnel." So the first time he saw a fossil in the Andes, he bowed to heaven, in thanks for the chance to see such a vestige from ancient days.

In search of the unknown

In order to understand information on fossils, he started studying Spanish and spent time going to the library. Whenever he was free, he would go up into the mountains on fossil-hunting expeditions, and began to gather stones that most people would consider worthless. The layers of rock in the ancient Andes mountain range became his research site. Fossils of trilobites, brachiopods, fish, crabs and snails, hundreds of millions of years old, all fell within the scope of his collecting. His embassy coworkers often laughingly called him "nuts," as he filled up his room with a pile of useless rocks.

Having lived in South America for four years, Wang hoped to give more people the chance to see his collected pieces. So he took the initiative to contact museums in Taiwan, hoping to bring them back to be displayed at home.

In 1980 Wang brought back more than 700 South American cultural artifacts and fossils for exhibition in Taiwan. They included stone axes and knives and ceramic and bronze implements used by the Incas, as well as fish, mollusk and plant fossils that dated from before recorded human history. Twenty years later, he still speaks with relish of the magnificent sight of the two exhibitions made up primarily of his holdings, "An Exhibition of Latin American Culture" and "Fossils of the Americas," held at the Taiwan Museum and the National Central Library. He still has the clippings from the local periodicals at the time.

Wang explains that before his exhibitions, in general only universities in Taiwan did research on fossils, and Chinese-language information on fossilized ancient life forms was also quite scarce. The specimens he brought back were more extensive than the collections of experts or museums in Taiwan at the time. Therefore, they had a huge impact. Long queues formed in front of the Taiwan Museum on Hsiangyang Road, with many teachers taking their students there on field trips.

After the exhibition he donated half of his cultural artifacts to the collections of such institutions as the Taiwan Museum, the Chinese Culture University's Hwa Kang Museum and the Ministry of Education. He also received an award from the Ministry of Education. Afterward, the Echo publishing house included the trilobites from Wang's collection in their children's encyclopedia to illustrate "the mysteries of the earth's evolution."

The family that walks like crabs

Having entered the world of fossils through the realm of Inca culture, Wang Chi-hsiung felt that he ought to learn something more about Native American culture. In addition, "America is ultimately the heartland of fossils," he says. "The geological strata of the Grand Canyon are a living museum of the earth. If you're into fossils and don't go to America for a look, you'll regret it."

In 1981, he went from Taiwan to California with only US$100, for the purpose of researching fossils. While he worked, he saved, commencing his lifestyle of "running a restaurant to make money to toy with fossils."

After three years of hard work, he opened his own restaurant in North Hollywood. Because of the high level of his culinary skills, he has won a four-star rating from the Los Angeles Daily News nearly every year. When business is good, his restaurant can rake in tens of thousands of dollars in a month. But when his marriage ended several years ago, he became embroiled in an eight-year lawsuit. He ultimately had to pay two million dollars in alimony and legal fees, enough to buy two restaurants and a house with a garden.

In the end his savings don't amount to much, and the money he has spent on fossils would be enough for two houses. Nevertheless, he has never considered selling his fossils. On the contrary, he is very satisfied with the simple life he currently leads.

As Wang's ten-year-old son puts it, in their small apartment people have to "walk like crabs." The living room and kitchen are filled with artifacts tens of thousands of years old and fossils that have been sleeping for hundreds of millions of years. Both the host and his guests must chat standing up.

The quest for rarity

From his living room to his bedroom, Wang's entire home is one big depository, containing, among other things, Qing-dynasty land deeds written in the Manchu script, exquisitely sculpted antique calligraphy trays, medieval hymnals from Europe, American postcards made from leather in the days of the Wild West, and a host of posters and photos of Marilyn Monroe and Elvis Presley.

But what takes up most of the space are rows and rows of wood cabinets crowded with drawers, each one filled with rocks-hundreds and hundreds of fossils. "Any one of these that you'd care to pick up is the ancestor of sea life today," he laughs.

"Some people specialize in researching dinosaur footprints, and some specialize in researching eggs. I'm a generalist. I even research dinosaur dung," he says in all seriousness. Dinosaur teeth and dinosaur feces are also fields of erudition, which can shed light on whether certain dinosaurs were vegetarian or carnivorous, or what diseases they might have contracted.

Most dinosaur fossils are extracted from a few select regions, such as South America, mainland China, and North America. In mainland China the export of vertebrate fossils is prohibited, though dealers still secretly smuggle them out. The export rate in South America is even higher.

In February every year, an exhibition of fossils from around the world is held in Tucson, Arizona, and it has become Wang's designated treasure-hunting ground. In addition, he has formed an "adventurer's club" with a group of other amateur enthusiasts, and every autumn between six and eight people go out into the deserts of Utah or Arizona to do field collection, roaming private quarries or mountainous areas.

After he had become adept in the field of fossils, Wang began "going for quality, not quantity," searching for items that are truly rare. "Dealing in large objects, you can't compete with the museums. Little crabs are just as loveable," he says. He has more than a thousand mollusks that date back hundreds of millions of years before the dawn of humankind.

My kingdom for a fossil

Several years ago at the home of a fellow collector friend, he saw a palm-sized lump of golden amber from the Cretaceous period, unearthed in Colombia. Inside it was a mushroom from an ancient forest, and he could see a pocket of air with a tiny drop of water that moved around inside it, and a group of ants on the march. He knew that this was an extraordinary find "of world class." He spent tens of thousands of US dollars, treated his friend to dinner, and even used what amounted to devious tactics to convince his friend to part with his prize.

After he had been buying fossils for some time, researchers and fossil dealers came to know just how big a "fossil fanatic" he was.

One professor of paleontology at the California Institute of Technology frequented his restaurant and thus learned of his passion for fossils and became his good friend. Eight years ago, before he passed away, he specially directed his son to give Wang two cabinets full of mollusks from his own collection.

Whenever they come upon a rare or precious item, many dealers will contact Wang first. Two years ago, one fossil dealer from mainland China sent a number of dinosaur eggs to a British paleontologist to be cleaned with a special solution. The procedure revealed that one egg held a dinosaur embryo. Wang snatched up this rare, expensive fossil, though he had to make payments in monthly installments.

Wang Chi-hsiung says that private collectors tend to have a few weaknesses. When they lack funds, they'll trade their holdings for money. When they grow bored with something, or have two or more specimens of the same variety and start to hanker for something new, they'll often be willing to sell.

Stones that live

Although he is himself an amateur, Wang very seldom sells an acquisition. Only one time did an old friend persuade him to part with a six- or seven-centimeter Tyrannosaurus Rex tooth, but "as soon as I let it go, I regretted it." Because he sold it at the price he had paid twenty years before, when he learned the current market rate, he discovered it had long gone up ten times in price.

People around Wang often make fun of him, saying, "Only idiots buy rocks." But he responds, "My rocks have life in them. It's gold and diamonds that are just lifeless minerals."

"The history of the earth is an international language. Collection isn't just a kind of nostalgia; more importantly, it's preserving history," he observes. With more than 30 years of experience in collecting fossils, today each time he sees a new specimen, he feels something akin to the exhilaration of genesis.

Perhaps it was his boyhood spent scrounging for scraps that has given him the habit of digging things up and cherishing them. He says that once acquired, this habit is impossible to abandon. To this day, if he has nothing to do, he'll often go down to the flea market to uncover some little gem. Recently he read in the newspaper that one person bought an 18th-century hand-painted map in a flea market for just US$3. Later, an auction house estimated its value at at least ten million dollars.

Wang Chi-hsiung says that he doesn't want to make money from fossils. Nevertheless, he has a powerful sense of ambition. Having started out in life as a scrap collector, he hopes one day to found a museum to house the treasures he has picked up.

p.50

When living things die, the organic matter inside their bodies is replaced by minerals; these dead organic beings then turn into fossils. This is an ammonite, a Jurassic-period mollusk from 170 million years ago.

A dinosaur egg excavated from mainland China.

A dinosaur embryo excavated in mainland China. Its tiny skeleton already developed and visible, it is one of the centerpieces of Wang Chi-hsiung's collection.

What is this dark black mass? In fact, it is the excrement of a dinosaur. From fossilized feces one can learn the feeding habits of an animal, such as whether it was a carnivore or herbivore.

p.51

Taiwan-born Wang Chi-hsiung has opened a Chinese restaurant in Los Angeles. Nearly all the income from his business goes into buying fossils. This afternoon, he brings the fossils he has collected in his home out into the light of day, and gives them a good dusting.

p.52

Unearthed in Argentina, this crab is about the size of a human hand. Its minute claws are completely preserved.

p.53

A Jurassic-period marine dinosaur unearthed in Lebanon.

An extremely well preserved lobster excavated in mainland China.

p.54

In addition to delicious cuisine, the China Chef Wang restaurant draws in customers with its posters and photos of dinosaurs and American movie stars like Marilyn Monroe. The three members of the Wang family live and work happily together.

A dinosaur embryo excavated in mainland China. Its tiny skeleton already developed and visible, it is one of the centerpieces of Wang Chi-hsiung's collection.

When living things die, the organic matter inside their bodies is replaced by minerals; these dead organic beings then turn into fossils. This is an ammonite, a Jurassic period mollusk from 170 million years ago.

What is this dark black mass? In fact, it is the excrement of a dinosaur. From fossilized feces one can learn the feeding habits of an animal, such as whether it was a carnivore or herbivore.

Taiwan-born Wang Chi-hsiung has opened a Chinese restaurant in Los Angeles. Nearly all the income from his business goes into buying fossils. This afternoon, he brings the fossils he has collected in his home out into the light of day, and gives them a good dusting.

Unearthed in Argentina, this crab is about the size of a human hand. Its minute claws are completely preserved.

A Jurassic-period marine dinosaur unearthed in Lebanon.

An extremely well preserved lobster excavated in mainland China.

In addition to delicious cuisine, the China Chef Wang restaurant draws in customers with its posters and photos of dinosaurs and American movie stars like Marilyn Monroe. The three member s of the Wang family live and work happily together.