Qianlong Chinese Porcelain Vase Sold For £43m/$66m ...Found in British Bungalow

A vase found in a house clearance in London has been sold for £43m /$66m, thought to be a record for any Chinese artwork. The 18th Century Qianlong porcelain piece, found in an inherited bungalow in Pinner( England)  had been estimated to fetch up to £1.2m for the brother and sister who inherited it. Ivan Macquisten, editor of Antiques Trade Gazette, said the vase would have been made for the Qianlong emperor. The 16in high vase is yellow and sky blue in colour with a fish motif on the front and a perforated outer wall.

The private buyer - who is thought to have come from the Chinese mainland - paid £43m, with an additional premium of £8.6m to go to the auctioneer. The auctioneers found the vase in the bungalow which the brother and sister inherited from an uncle.  Mr Macquisten said there was a "queue of dealers and collectors" to see the vase. He said: "It dates to between mid to late 18th Century and it would have been made for the Qianlong emperor.  "He was the emperor in China when China was at its zenith, effectively creating the empire you see today. And this is one of the great works made for one of his palaces." Mr Bainbridge said they were more used to selling cookers and fridges.

 Peter Bainbridge, from Bainbridge's auctioneers, based in Ruislip, said the value of the vase was realised when items were being unpacked to be catalogued for sale. "When it was on the shelves ready to be catalogued our consultant valuer paused at it and said 'I have a feeling this is quite interesting'. He said the atmosphere at the auction was "electric.
"The Chinese contingent had been in very smart sale rooms all week and I think found it rather curious to come out here, and mix amongst buyers who we were selling fridges and cookers to, and the like. Then the silence wrapped itself around the sale room as we progressed through this very exciting bidding."

Describing the reaction of the brother and sister duo Helen Porter, from the auction house, said: "They were hopeful but they didn't dare believe until the hammer went down."When it did, the sister had to go out of the room and have a breath of fresh air. The ceramic vase was made during the reign of the fourth emperor in the Qing dynasty who ruled the empire from 1735 to 1796. It is thought the vase left China in about 1860 and was acquired by an English family during the 1930s but how it made its way to the bungalow in Pinner is a mystery, the auctioneer said. A posting on the auctioneer's blog said: "It is a masterpiece. If only it could talk."

There is a growing hunger for Chinese art and artifacts. The vase that sold for 43 million pounds or $66m was just one example.The sale price was 40 times the pre-sale estimate. In Hong Kong a local buyer pays nearly $17m for a pair of 5ft-high enamel cranes - believed to be a gift from an 18th Century Chinese emperor to his son. Another Hong Kong-based collector pays $32m for an 18th Century Chinese floral vase.

This year, the hugely inflated sums of money being paid for Chinese art and artifacts have been making headlines regularly. But what has been pushing prices so high? Trade insiders say the recovery from the world economic crisis brought an influx of new, wealthy bidders into the auction houses.

Zhang Lifan, a historian, is the son of Zhang Naiqi, China's first Minister of Food and one of the most respected collectors of Chinese artefacts in his time.His father's collection was confiscated by the government during the Cultural Revolution. Mr Zhang believes many of the bidders at the moment for Chinese artefacts in Hong Kong, London and elsewhere are investors, not collectors. "Some are the new rich, trying to buy artefacts to show off how wealthy they are," he says.

Auctions of artefacts in China only really began 15 years ago. In the last five years they have taken off, but it is not a large market. There are not nearly as many artefacts from China as there are from the West, partly because so many were lost or broken in the turmoil of the country's troubled past. There is still a big price gap between iconic Western art and iconic Asian pieces, and although it is closing, there is still room for prices to rise further.

Jonathan Stone, the Hong Kong-based Asia Managing Director of Christie's, says the proportion of buyers there for Asian art this season from mainland China rose from 40% in 2009 to 51% in 2010. But the whole market's value increased significantly, so the value of the sales by customers from the mainland was 250% higher than the year before.

"I think there is a genuine passion and enthusiasm in China for buying back their own culture, which has been dispersed through the world for hundreds of years," he says. "But it's not just Chinese people, people in greater China or people of Chinese heritage. At the very top level, there is very great enthusiasm indeed in the West for great Chinese works of art as well."

Qin Jie, a collector of ancient books, has a few favourites he would like to see back on Chinese soil. "One item I'd like to see returned is one of China's first copies of the Buddhist book, The Diamond Sutra," he says. It sits in the British Museum in London. Most of those artefacts that do find their way back into China go into private collections, not museums. "When Asian people get rich, they start to care about their history," says Qin Jie. "They want to enrich their lives with historical art." He believes 30,000 artefacts will have come back to China in the last 12 months.