HE jumped up and gave a simple warm smile, his eyes twinkling behind big round glasses, and shook hands. Then he sat down again at his velvet covered table and in big characters, signed his name with a marker pen in the glossy souvenir book I had just bought at the nearby counter.
By doing this every day, from early morning to late in the evening, 68 year old Yang Pen Yan has become very rich in a very short time. Everyone wants to meet him, to shake his hand, to take his picture, and to buy a book and get his signature.
Yang Pen Yan is the peasant who found the famous terracotta warriors near the tomb of China's first emperor outside Xian in central China in the spring of 1974. Along with other inhabitants of Xiyang village, he was digging for water when he came upon the larger than life clay figures which are now often described as the eighth wonder of the world.
Until this year Mr Yang lived in obscurity. The secretive Chinese authorities kept him away from the public gaze. But there were so many queries about him from visitors who came from all over the world to look in awe on the terracotta soldiers and horses of Emperor Qin Shihuang that someone eventually realised that this innocent countryman was a potential money spinner of historic proportions.
Dressed in Mao style peasant gear, Mr Yang can now be found at his table near the red fire hydrant at the exit to the third and last of the three hangars holding the ranks of ancient warriors, through which the latter day armies of free spending tourists must pass as they leave.
He is not very forthcoming about himself, and seems still rather overwhelmed, though extremely pleased, by his sudden fame, and by the fortune he is said to be making from book sale commissions. He has three daughters and three grandchildren, he said, and he still lives in Xiyang village where the government gave him new land.
As for his reactions at finding the historic Qin dynasty figures, or what he thought they were at the time, he would only say, "I am very glad that the Chinese government allows me to great people from all over the world.
A museum worker who has got to know Yang said he often found bits of pottery at the site in his younger days and discarded them as of little value, and when the terracotta figures were unearthed, he and the villagers kept it a secret at first. This was during the Cultural Revolution, when ordinary people were anxious not to draw attention to themselves.
But information got to the government archaeologists and as the ferocity of the Cultural Revolution ebbed, the world was told of the amazing find.
Today, the famous dictum of Deng Xiaoping that to get rich is glorious has taken root here, just as it has at other tourist sites since China adopted its open door policy and free spending world travellers began arriving.
The tour buses taking pilgrims to the terracotta warriors across a plain of vegetable patches, apple orchards, and brick peasants' houses festooned with drying corn cobs first stop at terracolla workshops a few miles away, which are in effect tourist traps. Here clay copies of the two century old soldiers are stacked in hundreds, along with carpets, books and pottery. The pressure to buy is considerable.
It is, of course, a case of supply and demand. Some western tourists are so frantic to spend money at historic places that they look for the shops first. And everything can be bargained for, even in the upmarket hotel and museum stores where the price of a packet of postcards can be halved with the magic words, "What discount will you give?"
Competition is so fierce that one shop assistant in Xian's fabulous History Museum called out to me "You are dishonest" when I bought a book at another counter after I had resisted her sales patter for the same volume by saying I would think about it and come back.
In many parts "it's always hunting season and your wallet is the quarry", says the Lonely Planet Guide to China, the best contemporary travelling companion. A constant irritation for foreigners is the dual price scale. Non Chinese have to pay a premium rate at separate ticket windows to enter such places as Beijing's Forbidden City, the Great Wall and the pits where the terracotta soldiers stand in ghostly ranks.
Here photography is forbidden on the grounds that constant light flashes would degrade the clay figures. It would also, of course, damage the sale of postcards and souvenir books. These are floggedalong with maps, pictures, clothing, jewellery, replicas, cameras, film, and models of the soldiers and their bronze chariots, in an arcade of shops through which visitors pass to enter the three pits.
Many manage to resist. But just before emerging from the hangar housing the last pit, they find themselves succumbing to the charm of the elderly peasant at the exit, with whom a handshake is a close encounter with history.