At the media press conference for his exhibition at HKPM, Hall said that “You don’t succeed in collecting if you don’t put yourself in front of temptation.” With thousands of textile gems to his name, it is difficult to imagine that the accountant-turned-collector hardly ever says no. But the reality is quite the opposite. “I think collecting is really about making choices,” he later clarified. “There are very few collectors who can afford to buy everything—I certainly can’t.” He mentions some of his passes: a panel of Buddhas from the 13th century and a porcelain hat stand with Chinese reign marks that he had recently seen, and an early 19th century empress robe he laid eyes on in the ‘80s and can’t seem to shake from his memory.  All were no-gos in terms of practicality and to an extent, quality. 

In deciding whether an item is worth adding to his collection or not, Hall conducts a fool-proof assessment of every piece he encounters with something he calls the “wah” test. “The Cantonese of Hong Kong don’t need to be told what ‘wah’ means,” he said. “You can also call it the ‘wow’ test. If something says ‘wah’ to me, I will buy it!” For Hall, these include impeccably rare finds like the first dragon robe at his HKPM exhibition that dates back to the Warring States period, and oftentimes ornate Ming dynasty textiles that are distinguishable in their vibrancy. “The problem with earlier periods is that not so much has survived, and the colour isn’t so good,” he explains. “Whereas there’s some beautiful, very colourful Ming textiles which give me a lot of pleasure. I think it was partly the wealth in that the late Ming was a period of great prosperity.”

Hall is unabashedly a lover of beautiful things, of colour, and of intricacy. You can see it in the way he presents himself—a tailored cobalt blue suit and tie for this interview, a crimson red suit and perfectly colour-matched tassel loafers for his HKPM exhibition tour—and in his magnificent collection. Despite textiles’ susceptibility to wear, much of it has survived well over the years, and admittedly, condition is also paramount in Hall’s collecting criteria. “No matter how careful you are with your textiles, they will show signs of wear. The only way to keep textiles pristine is not to use them. It raises an interesting question in that if you get a textile which is stained with marks on it, if you can see they’ve spilt some soup on it, and somewhere a dog has caused a tear, should you keep it in its state so you can have the history of the piece? Or do you clean it up and repair it to try to make it look like it was originally?”

In offering his stand on the matter, Hall draws a parallel between these historic artefacts and himself. “Personally, I prefer to have things looking better. Certainly in my own case, if I’m presenting myself in public, I would not want to present myself dirty and disheveled, even if I had achieved that in a good cause by, say, playing some football, or say, diving into the water to save someone. So if the textiles have a soul, if they’re going to be presented, they’d probably like to show their best appearance.”

That being said, even an aesthete such as Hall himself can see that there is also value in the less visually appealing. “If I look at [collecting] in a more scholarly fashion, something should be rare, beautiful, in good condition, and old. But I also buy things that are not beautiful because I try to have a comprehensive collection.” Alongside impressive mythical embroidery and lustrous silks, Hall has a variety of simple, rather neutral funeral clothes, underwear, textile advertisements, and even wrapping paper of which most have become rather battered.  

In the world of collecting, everything is worth something when you recognise the potential of a humble hobby to go beyond oneself. But that’s not to say Hall started out with the intention of assembling one of the world’s most important collections. “I think collectors are born. I would always have collected something,” Hall said. He believes it all comes down to an innate disposition and the magic of good timing. “I started to buy a few Chinese textiles, and then I realized there was a great opportunity to put together a wonderful collection because pieces were appearing on the market that had never appeared before.”

“When I started collecting, the only Chinese textiles you really saw were 19th century and a few 18th century pieces. If you had something from the 17th century that was very unusual and precious. As China opened up in the 1980s, a lot of Ming textiles started to appear on the market, and people saw things they’d never seen before. I acquired a lot of Ming textiles, but I never thought I’d go much farther. Then in the first decade of this century, pieces started to appear from the Tang, Han period. So my collection now goes back all the way to the Warring States.” 

Hall’s personal interests have led him straight into a cultural mission, offering people the opportunity to study old clothes and textiles, and to see them within the context of the very country that bore them. While his collection is extravagant in more ways than one, he argues that it is exactly the reason for its indispensability.

“What I have is part of China’s heritage. Civilization is important, yes, but essentially, civilization is having things we don’t need. If you only have things that you need, you’re living a subsistence life of the peasant. I mean, we’ve gone far beyond that.” He smiled. “A knowledge of antique Chinese textiles is not necessary, but people have minds that like to be engaged. If we don’t use our minds on something, we stultify, we stagnate. Just like paintings are not necessary, but they give pleasure to people, and that is what I think my textiles will do.”