Collecting is one of the best hobbies! It gives you an exciting task that in some cases can accompany you your whole life. Hardly anything else reflects the hobbyist's preferences and interests so much. It invites you to dream when it comes to the rarest pieces or sometimes even connects people who would otherwise never have met. A hobby that not only harbors collector's items with countless stories, but can also create priceless personal memories around them.

Collecting has played a central role in human existence since time immemorial. Originally, it was mainly for the pure preservation of life - but our ancestors from around 40,000 years ago probably already had an eye for the beautiful, valuable treasures that they collected in caves for no other purpose. From the Middle Ages and beyond, collecting served to demonstrate wealth and power, with royal and noble collections often containing rare and valuable pieces from all over the world. One of the most obvious examples is probably the passion for collecting of Augustus the Strong - porcelain enthusiast and founder of today's MEISSEN porcelain manufactory. During his lifetime, his porcelain collection comprised more than 35,000 individual pieces from China, Japan and, of course, Meissen. Over time, however, collecting developed into a more accessible and diverse activity that reached all levels of society.

Enthusiastic collectors get a lot of pleasure from starting and maintaining a collection and building it up bit by bit over time. What is collected is as varied as life itself and has its origins in numerous things - a fascination with all sorts of things relating to historical world events, an enthusiasm for a particular stamp, a preference for a very specific animal species or simply the joy of collecting.

One popular collector's series from MEISSEN, for example, is the "Monkey Orchestra". Fans love this series for various reasons. The first versions were created by the important modeler Johann Joachim Kaendler himself. At the time of its creation, the series also picked up on the current trend of the time for singerie - monkeys in human clothing that imitated and parodied their role models in a humorous way. To this day, the elegance of the figures has lost none of its appeal.