Chinese pottery sets world record after selling for £28m at Sotheby’s auction in Hong Kong

Chinese pottery sets world record after selling for £28m at Sotheby’s auction in Hong Kong

A 1,000-year-old dish from China sells for record price of £28million at auction. The bowl was expected to bring in £10 million but sold for almost three times as much.

By Nick Pisa

4th October 2017

This 1,000-year-old bowl sold for a world record amount at auction

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A BOWL for washing brushes sold yesterday for a world record £28million.

The 1,000-year-old ceramic dish, just 13cm in diameter, was the subject of 20 minutes of frenzied bidding at auction.

It was expected to fetch about £10million but the price kept climbing at Sotheby’s in Hong Kong.

The price paid by the anonymous winning bidder was a world record for a Chinese ceramic piece, beating the £27.1million paid in 2014 for a 15th century porcelain cup decorated with chickens.

The dish was made between 1086 and 1106 for the Song dynasty imperial court by Ru guanyao, one of the most revered of the Five Great Kilns.

It would have been used to clean brushes and has an intense blue-green glaze in a distinctive ice crackle pattern.

Sotheby’s Nicolas Chow holds the bowl up for scale

A screen displaying the winning bidding price at the auction

There are thought to be just 87 pieces of Ru ware in existence and only six have been sold publicly since 1940.

Sotheby’s Nicolas Chow said prices were being driven up by Chinese buyers. But he added: “It’s a totally new benchmark for Chinese ceramics and we’ve made history with this piece tonight.”

Last month, we found a lookalike bowl from British pottery Denby for £4.80.

https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/4606240/china-pottery-sets-world-record-at-sothebys-auction

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