Psychology Today | 24.05.2026 21:15
In a hotel lobby across from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, a transaction took place that had nothing to do with the usual commerce of its Manhattan neighborhood. A collector met a stranger, exchanged $3,000 in cash, and walked away with a small Chinese teapot that had spent nearly three centuries at the bottom of the South China Sea. The exchange was illegal. Both parties knew it. Neither hesitated.
