The country's rapidly growing class of brash tycoons is spending money on fine art and antiques that several decades ago were regarded as useless remains of a feudal past.

Last year, several price records were broken at auctions of Chinese arts, especially traditional arts and crafts.

At a Sotheby's auction in Hong Kong last October, an unidentified Shanghai businessman - who turned out to be mainland stock investor Liu Yiqian - paid an astonishing HK$85.7 million for a rare red saddlewood dragon throne from the period of Emperor Qianlong in the middle Qing Dynasty (1644-1911), a record auction price for a piece of Chinese furniture.

The newly rich are indeed unafraid of showing off their refined taste.

Celebrities such as Liu, film director Feng Xiaogang, movie investor Wang Zhongjun, and best-selling novelist Hai Yan, have appeared on magazines or TV talk shows, sharing their antique-collection stories with readers and viewers.

This buying trend was unimaginable only a few years ago.

Official statistics show that the country has around a million super-wealthy and some 13-15 million people (1 percent of the population) best described as middle- to upper-income consumers.

This emerging class, however, was once considered unscrupulous figures who tended to be corrupt, to have made their riches on the backs of toiling workers. People of this class were said to have accumulated their staggering wealth by cutting corners and taking advantage of loopholes.

And only two or three years ago, local media were bandwagon jumping on the widespread hatred toward the newly rich.

Estimates show that Chinese arts markets, auctions in particular, grew by 152 percent from 2001-2008. The local market is expected to become the largest in the world and will hit 500 billion yuan in annual income by 2020.

This could have not been achieved without the wallets of the newly rich and of the middle class.

As the stock market and property sector become more and more risky, the arts market has been grabbing the attention of shrewd investors.

In recent years, the gap between low-end and high-end art markets has widened.