The man with 400 pairs of shoes in his living room

Xu Bo poses with some of his beloved sports shoes.[Photo provided to China Daily]

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

Like many of his peers born in the 1980s, Xu started buying sports shoes because of a love for NBA, something that developed when he was in middle school.

He began to assiduously follow basketball on TV and in other media in 1991 and started collecting basketball player cards at the same time.

"Apart from the stories about players on and off the court, the most attractive thing to me was the shoes they wore," he says.

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

"Then, the shoe makers began to put them back on the market again, and that gave people like me the chance to own them."

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.

"That gave me access to a lot of information about shoes and I gained a much deeper understanding of them," he says.

"To some people some of these shoes may look fairly ordinary, but for me they carry a very special meaning. I would buy a pair of shoes for a sports star card I had when I was a child, or a poster or a film."

People like Xu are willing to go to great lengths to get the shoes they want. Hundreds of people lined up at Adidas outlets in Beijing, Guangzhou and Wuhan on March 17 when the brand's NMD sports shoes went on sale.

Nearly 2,000 buyers had even queued the day before, local media reported.

Most would eventually go home empty-handed because most of the outlets had just a few dozen pairs of the shoes.

Those left out would have had to turn to private sellers or scalpers if they wanted to land the shoes they desired.

The official retail price of the NMD shoes was from 1,099 yuan ($168) to 1,499 yuan, but private dealers were asking for as much as 3,000 yuan.