Lovely music, lucrative investment

Exquisite, expensive violins increasingly popular among China's musicians, collectors

The value of "Strad" violins has never gone down.

So says Colin Maki, an American violin dealer who visited China last summer to meet a potential client in Shenzhen, Guangdong province, and spoke to an audience at Yale Beijing Center about how to appreciate the classical instruments not only as works of art, but as reliable financial investments.