Yao has struck a deal with Southwest China's largest lamp dealer to open a roughly 500-square-meter museum.

"It will be the first museum of its kind in Sichuan," Sichuan Provincial Department of Culture museum division chief Li Pei says.

Yao is excited to display the more than 3,000 lamps from myriad dynasties and countries he has collected since 1980.

"I find them very interesting because the materials, sizes, workmanship and s are different."

Yao's lamps span from the New Stone Age to present day.

Some of his best specimens include a Southern Song Dynasty (1127-1279) stone Buddha-shaped lamp that weighs more than 200 kilograms and a 15-cm-high mosquito-killing lamp from the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911).

The Buddha has 38 troughs on its head, chest, back, feet and toes to hold oil lamps. Ancient people would visit such a Buddha at temples, light a lamp and place a lamp on the part of the Buddha's body corresponding to that which afflicted them.