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 NBA limited editions and the brands he covets most are Air Jordan, Nike, Adidas and Reebok.

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

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.