When financier Peter Fung bought his first antique in the 1980s, little did he imagine that he would spend the next three decades amassing Asian and European furniture and objets d’art into a museum-worthy collection. So goes the backstory of the Liang Yi Museum, which opened in February on Hong Kong’s Hollywood Road. The first two exhibitions attest to the scope of Fung’s collections: “Ming and Qing Masterpieces: Icons of Antique Chinese Furniture” and “Shanghainese Deco: Vanities in the Roaring Twenties,” the latter including the vanity case pictured above. Rare woods and precious stones respectively abound, yet the museum seemingly exists to share its wealth, not flaunt it. A nonprofit enterprise, it rents its ground-level space to small antiques dealers, while in the galleries above, visitors can touch and sit on the furniture displayed, just as their original owners might have done. –Gabrielle Lipton

This article originally appeared in the April/May 2014 print issue of DestinAsian magazine (“A Rare Gift”).