Today, with fortunes being created in China and Hong Kong, and an eagerness on the part of wealthy Chinese to collect their cultural patrimony, the market in Chinese paintings has become both inflated and extremely volatile. Paintings that would once have sold for $100,000 now sell for $10 million, a curator of Asian art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Maxwell Hearn, said last week during a tour of his latest exhibition, “Anatomy of a Masterpiece: How to Read Chinese Paintings,”

Auctions in Beijing and Shanghai are packed with hundreds of people, all of them bidding, Mr. Hearn said. There is a lot of speculation, and even pieces of questionable authenticity can bring hundreds of thousands of dollars. Add to this that the government, reacting to the flow of art out of the country, has stopped giving export licenses to works currently in Chinese hands, and it’s now virtually impossible for a museum in the West to build a collection of Chinese painting.

Fortunately, the Met already has a great one. Much of it was acquired in the 1970s and ’80s, from private collectors in New York who had either brought their collections from China when they emigrated or bought inexpensively in Hong Kong. “Anatomy of a Masterpiece,” a selection of 36 paintings and calligraphies, accompanied by photographs of enlarged details, shows the full range of the Met’s collection, spanning a period from the eighth century to the 17th.

“I don’t think anybody else can tell this story, of 1,000 years of Chinese painting,” Mr. Hearn said.

The Met’s decision to build a major Chinese art collection was largely the initiative of one trustee, C. Douglas Dillon, who had been a diplomat and a secretary of the Treasury under presidents Kennedy and Johnson.

In 1970, when the Met did a major survey of all the departments, Asian art was found to be the weakest in terms of collections, staff, and space. There were only two galleries devoted to Asian art. The Met faced a choice, about whether to emphasize its strengths or rededicate itself to the mission of an encyclopedic museum. Dillon, who became president of the board that year, argued successfully for the latter course. He saw Asia as a crucial world player and believed the museum’s collection should reflect that.

Both Dillon and the head of the Asian art department, a curator named Wen Fong, understood that the Met could not build a great collection by purchasing pieces one by one; it had to acquire whole collections. Thanks to the emigration of members of the Chinese intelligentsia after the communist takeover, there were at the time several major collectors of Chinese art in New York, including C.C. Wang, a collector and dealer, and a painter himself. In 1973, the Met, with Dillon’s help, purchased 25 paintings from Wang’s collection. Over the next 25 years, it acquired 35 more paintings that had passed through Wang’s hands.

Dillon believed that it was important for Asian art to have significant space in the museum. Between 1971 and 2000, the museum added some 50,000 square feet of permanent exhibition space for Asian art, including galleries for Chinese painting, ancient Chinese art, Japanese art, South and Southeast Asian art, Korean art, Tibetan and Nepalese art, and Asian decorative arts.

In the current show, the enlarged photographs allow the visitor to inspect elements of the composition that are hard to distinguish in the paintings themselves, which, because of their delicate nature, can’t be lit too brightly.

Mr. Hearn said he was inspired by one of the permanent collection galleries at the National Palace Museum in Taiwan, where next to the paintings light boxes were set up, with big color transparencies of details. “I thought, ‘Oh, how crass,'” Mr. Hearn said. “Then I found myself looking at the photographs more than the paintings.” In the Met’s installation, after some experimentation, he opted for mostly black-and-white photographs, which do not compete as much with the paintings themselves.

Mr. Hearn intends the show as, among other things, an examination of connoisseurship. Historically, Chinese collectors put marks of ownership — either seals or inscriptions — on artworks in their possession. These were seen not as defacing the paintings, but as enhancing them. The eighth-century painting “Night-Shining White,” which shows the emperor’s powerful horse tethered — symbolizing an emperor who, because he was too devoted to his favorite concubine, neglected his empire — bears seals and inscriptions that record 1,000 years of the painting’s transmission. A label next to the painting identifies them. A ninth-century critic inscribed his name. A 10th-century emperor inscribed the artist’s name and the painting’s title and signed the inscription with his cipher. In the 12th century, a commentator inscribed a line corroborating this attribution, noting that paintings that bore the cipher of that emperor were almost always genuine.

Wang, who died in 2003, put his seal on the paintings he owned, too. “That generation of collectors is the last to become part of the work of art,” Mr. Hearn said. Mr. Hearn still looks at the auction catalogs and goes to Hong Kong and Beijing occasionally to bid. He recalled going to an auction with his eye on a painting that was estimated at $24,000. Though he was prepared to pay much more, the painting ultimately sold for $420,000 — not to the Met. “You look at the estimate and think, ‘Well, if we go 10 times above the estimate, we should be okay,'” he said. “But who knew it would go for 20 times?” So he is grateful for Dillon’s and Mr. Fong’s prescience and timing.

“There was just that narrow window when we lucked out: The goods were here, and we had the patronage to take advantage of it,” Mr. Hearn said. “That time has passed.”