IF it were not for three shooting stars streaking across the sky of South China Sea seven years ago, Zhang Bo might be just another 9-5 office worker in Shanghai.

The stars lit up not only the sky but also Zhang’s imagination. “The sight rocked me to my core, and I couldn’t sleep that night because I kept wondering what happens to space material that falls to earth,” he says.

Zhang, 34, has become a foremost collector and researcher of meteorites in China. His pursuit takes him all over the world, hunting for remnants of outer space.

Last month, he donated four specimens he discovered to the new Shanghai Planetarium, which is under construction and due to open in 2020.

The donation includes one lunar rock, one sample from a meteorite that fell this August in Qinghai Province, and a 10-kilogram rock shaped like a Chinese gold ingot that was found in the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region.

“I feel it my duty to try to stir up public interest, especially among children, in meteorites,” Zhang says.

The road to the skies has been twisty.

Zhang graduated from law school and did an internship in a prosecutor’s office before tossing law aside. He subsequently managed a gym club and then went into the family’s jewelry business. Now his only passion is meteorites.

It was hard at the start, he says, because so little meteorite research existed in China at the time.

So Zhang did his own research, using the Internet and libraries.

He called the Shanghai Observatory, hoping to be put in touch with one of its meteorite specialists, but he was told that none existed. However, the staff worker who answered his call suggested he might try the Purple Mountain Observatory in the city of Nanjing, capital of Jiangsu Province.

On an impromptu visit to that observatory, Zhang was shunted aside by the gate security guard.

“A national scientific institute seldom receives ordinary folks,” Zhang says.

But that didn’t stop him. He later wangled his way into the observatory’s annual meeting, which was held in a Nanjing hotel, and managed to meet Xu Weibiao, who later became his mentor on meteorites.

Within four years, Zhang set pretty much everything else in his life aside and immersed himself in the study of meteorites. He studied books on rocks and minerals, and pored through the latest scientific reports from NASA. He taught himself the names of rocks in English so he could read foreign journals.

“I did nothing but study during those years,” he says. “It felt like I was going to university all over again. It was a tough process, but I loved every minute of it.”

Every year around the Chinese Lunar New Year, he flies to a small desert town in Arizona, where a black market is held for gemstones, antiques and meteorite fragments.

The prices for meteorite pieces can run over US$10,000 per gram, depending on the rarity of the fragment. As a buyer, he has learned to beware, after once being conned out of 60,000 yuan (US$8,700) for a fake rock.

“It taught me that solid experience and research are essential,” he says.

In 2013, Zhang began hunting for space stones on his own.

“The meteorites I’ve bought were all found by people,” he reasons. “If they can do it, why can’t I?”

He began his search in the Sonoran Desert on the border of the United States and Mexico, after hearing of meteorite discoveries there.

It was a risky region, notorious for gangs and drug dealers. He says he was approached by some unsavory characters who mistook him for an Asian drug mule. Living in a tent in the desert, he also had to be vigilant for predatory wildlife.

“I found nothing in the end, but it was an unforgettable experience,” Zhang says.

His later expeditions took him to snowfields in Siberia and remote deserts in China’s northwestern region of Xinjiang. He has met wolves and bears and been trapped in fierce storms.

His first meteorite find was in the Sahara Desert in 2014. He was about to fry some eggs on the hot bonnet of his off-road vehicle when he spotted a nearby pile of black stones, which stood out amid the yellow sand. He knew it immediately. He had found meteor fragments.

He was so taken aback that he was frozen to the spot for a moment, just staring at the stones.

“I felt remarkably calm,” he says. “I just couldn’t believe that I found them so haphazardly.”

Lab testing of the stones later revealed they were from an asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. 

“Luck is the most important thing in meteorite exploration, much more important than expertise,” Zhang says. “You can dedicate your life to it and find nothing. It’s a little like buying a lottery ticket.”

Zhang uses NASA reports, history books and eyewitness accounts to direct his search for meteorites. In August, one of his sources told him about a shooting star that fell in Qinghai Province.

He immediately went to the area and found the fragment that he donated to the new Shanghai Planetarium.

Old archives and ancient poems are also good indicators of astronomical events that may have produced meteorites.

Zhang says he once read about a story about a shooting star that fell in the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region’s Nandan County in 1516. He traveled to the mountainous area, searching for fragments. He finally found two, which a local farmer had used as bricks in building a pigsty.

During a trip to Xinjiang in 2012, Zhang heard an ancient myth about “Allah’s tear,” which was said to have dropped from the heavens and been used in local rituals. Zhang realized the “tear” might well have been a meteorite.

He spent four years, on and off, looking for the rock, based on a fragment of a hand-drawn map. His search took him along the Chinese border from Mongolia to Russia. His persistence was rewarded this year when he found the stone he was searching for under some granite.

“It’s at least 10,000 years old,” he says proudly.

Zhang’s normal working gear includes a jeep, a metal detector, a GPS system, a compass, a satellite phone, a tent and sleeping bag, a shovel, a gas tank and some food.

“I don’t care if I can find anything,” he says. “The searching itself is so interesting.”

He has picked up other relics on his trips: old coins, arrows dating back to the Yuan Dynasty (1271-1368), human skeletons, uniforms of Qing Dynasty (1644-1911) soldiers. He even once discovered an ancient tomb, but walked away without any further excavation.

On an old Huangpu River dock in Shanghai, Zhang now operates a small workshop that also serves as a meteorite showroom.

“Meteorites shaped my life,” he says. “Rocks don’t talk, but they do set my mind at ease when I am among them.”