Prospero | The Chinese art market

Expensively unpredictable

The market for imperial Chinese art is full of record-breaking prices and quite a few surprises

By F.R. | LONDON

THE last two months have seen some astonishing bidding in auctions of Chinese treasures. Record after record has fallen away as newly wealthy collectors from mainland China have piled into salerooms in London, New York and Hong Kong, anxious to bring home their imperial cultural patrimony.

The market for Chinese art works has strengthened considerably over the past five years, and the high prices have drawn out a number of masterpieces from old collections in Europe and America. However, there is a danger of sellers becoming over-confident, even greedy. A close examination of some of the lots that have achieved record prices since early October shows that success cannot be taken for granted. Even the best pieces sometimes fail to excite a saleroom.

A double-gourd vase with an imperial seal mark from the Qianlong period was one of the star lots of Sotheby's sale in Hong Kong on October 7th. The vase was one of 13 pieces in the sale that had once been in the collection of J.T. Tai. Born in 1910, Tai started out as an apprentice to his uncle who had an antiques shop in Wuxi, an old city south of the Yangtse delta. After Mao closed China to foreign trade, Tai and his family moved to Hong Kong in 1949 and eventually became the greatest of the post-war generation of Chinese art dealers, selling to such great collectors as Avery Brundage and Arthur Sackler.

So a consignment from Tai's collection was worth marketing on its own merit, and Sotheby's duly gathered the pieces together into a catalogue of their own. The vase was not the most significant of these, but it attracted the most attention. This was in part because it had come from Fonthill House where Alfred Morrison, Britain's richest 19th-century commoner, had built up one of the greatest English collections of Chinese treasures. His heirs sold the vase at Christie's in 1971, but a Fonthill provenance still counts for something.

Two bidders emerged from the early throng, and Alice Cheng, a Hong Kong collector and sister of Robert Cheng, a well-known octogenarian collector and dealer, proved the winner. Mrs Cheng paid HK$253m ($32.6m) for the vase, including commission and taxes, more than five times the top estimate.

Unhappy underbidders often come back and fight to a more successful finish another day. A Chinese collector who lost out in an earlier auction is believed to be the man behind the £53.1m sale of another Qianlong vase in a provincial auction outside London just four weeks later, on November 12th.

The yellow and turquoise vase, elaborately decorated with fish and flowers, has a double-walled construction so that an inner vase can be seen through the pierced outer wall. Intricate, finely carved and richly coloured, the vase was almost certainly fired in the imperial kilns for the emperor Qianlong, and is exactly the sort of work that appeals to the Chinese new rich.


The vase had been consigned by an anonymous brother and sister who were clearing out a suburban family home. They had no idea of its worth. Dealers who saw the piece in London during Asian Art Week were impressed. But neither they, nor the auctioneer, Peter Bainbridge, could have foreseen the 18 minutes of furious bidding it would arouse on the day. An agent acting on behalf of a mainland Chinese collector on the telephone bought the vase for nearly 36 times its top estimate, making it the most expensive piece of Chinese art ever sold at auction.

With the success of Sotheby's Fonthill vase fresh in their minds, Christie's was keen that the three lots it was offering from Fonthill's collection of imperial treasures should also do well when they came up for sale in Hong Kong on December 1st. The most important of these was a pair of censers of cloisonné enamel in the form of long-legged cranes atop a lapis-blue rock, their long necks curving delicately upward (pictured).

The cranes were put up for sale by Lord Margadale, a descendant of Morrison, Fonthill's original owner. Despite a long relationship with Christie's, which had overseen three previous auctions of Fonthill treasures, his lordship showed the cranes to all the major auction houses and asked them to bid on the consignment. Very few pieces of cloisonné have ever fetched £1m at auction and Lord Margadale wanted much more than that. Christie's still secured the bid to sell the censers.

The estimate in the catalogue was marked “on request”, which is not unusual on very expensive lots; privately Christie's told collectors they expected the birds to fetch HK$120-140m. Bidding opened at HK$75m with only two bidders. Joseph Lau, known to be a buyer of trophy works, won the day with a bid of HK$115m (HK$129.5m with commission and taxes), but a number of dealers who were at the sale said afterwards that Christie's had been lucky to get the pieces sold.

The third London auction house, Bonhams, was also lucky with its top lot last month, a small white-jade dragon seal. Discovered in a private collection in Europe, the seal had excited enormous pre-sale interest. The jade was a perfect white and in perfect condition, and the piece was known to have been personally commissioned and used by Qianlong himself. Five curators from the Palace Museum had asked to see it when it was shown in Beijing before the sale.

A number of specialist dealers and even rival auctioneers came into the room at Bonhams to witness the sale. Yet the bidding never rose beyond sluggish. In the end an agent from Beijing, who until then had been bidding only on the far cheaper lots, secured the seal for £2.7m. He said afterwards that at that price it was “a bargain”. Bonhams had been expecting it to fetch over £5m.

The sale of the seal, and of Christie's cranes, show that even in a pounding market—and the Chinese market certainly is that—no sale can be taken for granted. A little nervousness on the part of buyers, a little uncertainty about a lot on the part of dealers, too much confidence on the part of an auction house; all these can affect the mood of the room on the day. Auctions are skittish and unpredictable. That's what makes them so exciting.

Discover more

An American musical about mental health takes off in China

The protagonist of “Next to Normal” has bipolar disorder. The show is encouraging audiences to open up about their own well-being

Sue Williamson’s art of resistance

Aesthetics and politics are powerfully entwined in the 50-year career of the South African artist


What happened to the “Salvator Mundi”?

The recently rediscovered painting made headlines in 2017 when it fetched $450m at auction. Then it vanished again