The price (£51.6m ($83.2m) including buyer’s premium) puts it just outside the top ten artworks ever sold at auction, an exclusive list that up to now had only been occupied by paintings and a single sculpture.

The 16in (46cm) reticulated double-walled vase or yang cai with famille rose decoration would have been a commission for the Qianlong Emperor (1736-1795) for one of his palaces, probably the Summer Palace or the Forbidden City. According to the world’s leading dealers and collectors, is the best object of its type to be seen on the market in decades but it also chimes perfectly with current Chinese taste that values pieces from this period above all others.

Peter Bainbridge, the auctioneer, who normally sells inexpensive antiques and equipment such as lawnmowers, will have become a multi-millionaire himself as a result of the sale. His buyer’s premium for this sale was 20 per cent, or £8.6m, while he could have charged the vendors anything up to 17.5 per cent, or just over £7.5m, to sell it.

Opening at £500,000 (the estimate prior to sale was £800,000-1.2m) the bidding on the evening of November 11 took 18 minutes, with the hammer falling at around 6.30pm to gasps and applause from a room packed with the world’s leading dealers and collectors and their representatives.

Based on previous auction precedent the most anyone had thought it would make before the sale was £20m, although, even in the context of a rapidly rising market, many thought that figure fanciful.

Seasoned dealers and collectors in London for Asian Art Week had patiently queued along Dover Street on November 8 when Peter Bainbridge brought the vase to the capital to be viewed. Those who missed that chance were able to inspect it up to the moment of sale in the incongruous surroundings of Bainbridges’ cluttered store room, where it sat on a metal table next to the kitchen.

In scenes that were unprecedented outside the world’s leading auction rooms, eight or ten serious buyers were bidding into the millions, either in person or on the phone.

The successful buyer, a leading mainland Chinese collector, was represented in the room by his agent, who told ATG’s Kate Hunt, through an interpreter, that nothing this beautiful had been seen outside China in a very long time. His client had only heard about the vase two days before the sale.

The price establishes a swathe of new auction landmarks. The previous world record for Chinese porcelain was set at Sotheby’s Hong Kong only weeks ago when a double gourd vase, also made for the Qianlong Emperor, sold to the Chinese business magnate and collector Alice Cheng for HK$225m (£18.2m), but the Ruislip vase also surpasses the previous record for any Chinese work of art, the RMB390m (£37m) for an 11th century calligraphic scroll by Huang Tingjian sold at Beijing Poly International this June.

Only paintings or sculpture by a handful of major Western artists have sold for more at auction: at £43m the vase slots into eleventh place on the all-time list, just behind Rubens’ Massacre of the Innocents sold for £45m at Sotheby’s in 2002.

With all the global media attention generated from the sale, an interview with ATG Editor Ivan Macquisten featured on BBC Television.

You can see the interview by clicking here for the BBC News website.

Source: Antiques Trade Gazette