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 要发财，倒古董。请波姐回避，是谈钱的，有请校长，呵呵 英文版。38年买进，今年抛出，算下回报率吧 |
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作者：ceo/cfo 在 海归商务 发贴, 来自【海归网】 http://www.haiguinet.com
Treasures reclaimed 来自经济学人
Nov 26th 2009
China is bringing home its works of art
Wolley and WallisA SMALL country auction house is not where people would normally go to sell a rare piece of Chinese art such as the handsome 18th-century beast known as the Pelham Water Buffalo. The animal had been carved from a single lump of spinach-green jade on the orders of the grandest of the Qing-dynasty emperors, Qianlong (who reigned from 1736 to 1795), and sits on a gilded stand bearing the four-character mark of Qianlong's reign. Lady Diana Miller had inherited the work from her father, Sackville Pelham, 5th Earl of Yarborough, an English aristocrat who bought it in 1938 from a well-known London dealer. The earl paid £300 for the piece, then a princely sum. To ensure its safety during the second world war, the buffalo was wrapped in newspaper, put into a wooden box marked “porcelain” and deposited in a bank vault. There it lay for the next 65 years.
When Lady Diana at last opened up the box she sent the buffalo, still in its original newspaper wrapping, to Woolley & Wallis, a family auctioneer in Salisbury. The firm had previously sold some family silver for her and she trusted it. Most of all she liked the young specialist, John Axford, and his plan for marketing her Chinese heirloom. He told her he would exhibit it at Hazlitt Gooden & Fox, a London gallery close to Christie's, during the spring season of Asian auctions in London, and also market it online to potential buyers in the Far East.
A look at the visitors’ book for the Hazlitt showing proves that Mr Axford had the right instincts. Among the 100-odd people who came to see the buffalo were some of the biggest names in Asian art: Nicolas Chow, Sotheby's principal Chinese specialist, who is ba<x>sed in Hong Kong; Richard Littleton and Giuseppe Eskenazi, both leading dealers in Asian art, with nearly a century's experience between them; and Bruno Eberli, a Swiss-born foreign-exchange dealer who lives in New York and is one of the keenest buyers of Chinese and Japanese treasures.
There was standing room only at the sale in May this year. So many buyers had registered to bid by telephone that the auction house ran out of phone lines and Mr Axford had to field one bidder on his personal mobile. The catalogue, which featured the buffalo on the cover, offered no estimate of the price it was expected to fetch; only a coy “refer department”, which usually means the auctioneer has no idea what a piece might fetch but hopes that it will be a lot. Bidding would open at £150,000. Mr Axford thought it might reach £500,000.
In the event, Daniel Eskenazi, who had travelled down on behalf of his father, the London dealer, saw off a Hong Kong telephone bidder with his offer of £3.4m. The Eskenazis' client was Mr Eberli, who still holds the record for the price paid at auction for an Asian work of art: just over £15.6m for a rare 14th-century blue-and-white porcelain jar bought at Christie's in London four years earlier.
The big surprise that May day was not so much that a provincial British auction house had beaten the previous record for a sale outside London by a huge margin, but that the bidders from Hong Kong, Taiwan and mainland China-who are now the principal buyers of Chinese treasures-had been outdone by a Westerner. It may not happen again.
Reversing the flow
Collecting Chinese fine art and ceramics was all the rage in the West in the second half of the 19th and the early 20th century. Heavy buying by treasure-hunters, as well as looting of imperial works by the Germans, Dutch, French and British, brought huge quantities of Chinese fine art into Western collections. But in the past decade the number of European and American buyers has dwindled.
Mr Eberli is one of a handful still active at the very top of the market, along with Edward Johnson III, whose father founded Fidelity Investments, and the two elderly Zuellig brothers (one of whom died recently), whose Meiyintang collection in Switzerland is probably the finest Chinese collection in private hands. “When the right piece comes along, they are still ready to fight the fight,” says Mr Chow. But most Westerners with an interest in Chinese art and ceramics today tend to be sellers rather than buyers.
From 1949, when the Communist Party defeated the Nationalists, and especially during the Cultural Revolution, from 1966, owning, inheriting or exchanging pre-communist works of art was banned in China. Thanks to shifts in policy that started under Deng Xiaoping and continued after him, the Chinese are now catching up in a big way, following on from the Japanese buyers who dominated the market in the 1970s and the Taiwanese and Hong Kong collectors who started buying seriously in the 1990s.
The mainland Chinese are beginning to dominate the salerooms. Prevented for so long from celebrating the achievements of their forebears, they have a thirst for their own history, and especially for anything that connects modern China with the glories of its imperial past. The newly wealthy-such as Xu Qiming, China's biggest exporter of eels from the port city of Ningbo; Lu Hanzhen, an industrialist from Zhejiang province who became rich by selling motorcycles and nylon fabric for car tyres; or indeed any businessman or civil servant who benefited from the recent flurry of privatisations-can afford to pay, and pay they will.
Nor are these buyers to be found only in the old political and commercial strongholds of Beijing and Shanghai. There are probably seven Chinese cities with populations of more than 5m, and demand for fine art is as strong in Guangdong, adjacent to Hong Kong, as it is in Sichuan in the west or in more far-flung areas. “It's what I call 'natural repatriation',” says Patti Wong, who as chairman of Sotheby's Asia has been watching the Chinese buying wave grow for a decade, "and it is happening everywhere."
Having made their money quickly, Chinese buyers are in a hurry to build their collections fast and are willing to pay a premium to achieve that. “Arriving at the buffet party a little too late,” says Mr Chow, "they are more aggressive than Europeans or Americans." Even though economic growth in China this year may be only 8%, after 9% last year, it is still far higher than in most of the rest of the world. China may be one of the few places where the number of dollar billionaires has actually increased in the past year, from 101 to 130, according to the recently published Hurun Rich List.
Deep pockets
Dealers and auctioneers familiar with the Chinese market estimate that there are around 150 collectors in Hong Kong and Taiwan who spend at least $1m a year each on Chinese works of art, and that their number is relatively stable. The mainland has another 150 or so buyers in that category, and the numbers there are growing rapidly. More Chinese treasures are now sold at auction in Hong Kong than in New York, London and Paris. Whereas back in 2004 Sotheby's did $10m-worth of business with 70 clients from the mainland in its spring and autumn sales in Hong Kong, the figure for the same sales this year is seven times higher and its list of mainland Chinese buyers has grown to 195. Many more bid through established dealers in Hong Kong. “Mainland China has clearly become our main land,” says Kevin Ching, chief executive of Sotheby's Asia.
In 1886 Paul Durand-Ruel, a Paris dealer, packed his bags with 300 Impressionist paintings-including piles of Renoirs, Pissarros and Sisleys-to take to America. He was closely followed by a Briton, Joseph (later Lord) Duveen, who could see, like Durand-Ruel, that “Europe had the art and America had the money.”
Christies
The new home market
Just as European Old Master and Impressionist paintings then began to move inexorably westwards across the Atlantic, now Chinese fine art and ceramics from America, Britain, France and the Netherlands are moving eastwards back to China. Not since the heyday of Duveen's and Durand-Ruel's exports to America has there been such vigorous redirecting of cultural artefacts from one part of the world to another as European and American collections are broken up and sold off to the newly wealthy Chinese. The traffic is almost all one way.
Mainland Chinese buyers made a dramatic first entrance in April 1999 when two previously unknown collectors, both entrepreneurs in their mid-30s from Chaozhou in Guangdong province, began to buy fine art and ceramics at auction, reviving the market after the Asian financial crisis two years earlier. They were guided by William Chak, a Hong Kong dealer who has since become a well-known television personality and is one of the leading figures in the Asian art market in Hong Kong. Others followed.
The Chinese buy for themselves, but they also like to present gifts to valued customers or even to the government, which sees repatriating national treasures as an important issue. The authorities have been quietly tightening up on the re-export of repatriated artworks. Chinese buyers used to be able to re-export their treasures for up to two years after they had bought them. That period of grace has now been reduced to six months.
The rat and the rabbit
The sensitivity of the subject was shown up in February this year when the collection built up by the late Yves St Laurent, a French fashion designer, and his partner Pierre Berge was put up for sale. The auction included bronze heads of a rat and a rabbit, two pieces that had been looted from the imperial palace of Yuanmingyuan by French and British soldiers in the opium wars in 1860. The heads, part of a series of 12 figures which dominated a zodiac fountain in the palace garden, had not even been designed by a Chinese artist but by a Jesuit priest from Venice who lived in the imperial capital. All the same, their provenance and history made their sale controversial.
The government let it be known that it did not approve of a public sale of the precious bronze heads in the West and did not want its citizens to take part. Even so, both the winning bidder and several underbidders turned out to be Chinese. One, a London-ba<x>sed businessman, had been planning to present the bronzes to the Chinese government as a gift. The buyer, Cai Mingchao, who secured the two pieces for EURO 31m ($46m), turned out to be an adviser to a Chinese foundation which seeks to retrieve plundered treasures. He announced very publicly soon afterwards that he would not pay up. The heads were quietly returned to Mr Berge. The government has since announced that it wants to catalogue all the pieces looted from Yuanmingyuan, which some believe is the first step in a campaign to reclaim them.
Mainland Chinese taste is influenced more by history and tradition than by aesthetics. For cultural reasons buyers tend to shun anything associated with the dead, so they keep away from tomb pottery and from the Tang horses that used to be rare and expensive but have flooded Western markets over the past 20 years. The Chinese are less interested in the early Song period that has been so alluring to Western collectors, instead favouring highly decorative blue-and-white Ming porcelain. Two lots of Ming ware in a recent sale at Doyle, a small New York auctioneer, were wildly bid up, one of them to over 180 times its high estimate.
Mainland Chinese also appreciate seals, lacquerware, antique rhinoceros horn, archaic bronzes, carved wooden furniture and jade, especially the white sort from Turkestan, carved by the craftsmen of Khotan for the Qing emperors. The imperial association is of crucial importance, especially any l<x>ink with Qianlong and some of the other emperors of the Qing dynasty.
In Sotheby's sales of Chinese ceramics and fine art in Hong Kong last month 19 of the top 20 lots were bought by Asian collectors, mostly private buyers. American collectors were nowhere to be seen. Only one lot, an intricately carved red lacquer bowl, was secured by a European collector, an Austrian, after furious bidding that took it up to HK$2.7m ($344,000), seven times the top estimate. A hoard of imperial ware, put together by a London dealer, Hugh Moss, and romantically named the Water, Pine and Stone Retreat Collection, proved a particular draw, with yellow jade and a blue-and-white moonflask all making record prices.
But the biggest battle was over a Qianlong-period throne made of precious zitan wood and carved with dragons, which was estimated to fetch HK$20m-30m. After heart-stoppingly tense bidding it was bought by a Shanghai businessman, Liu Yiqian, who owns the Council Auction House in Beijing. He paid just under HK$86m, a world record for a piece of Chinese furniture.
Dealers, dealers everywhere
China's appetite for its own works of art, together with a national flair for commercial speculation, has helped expand the art market all over the country. On the mainland, auction houses were banned until 1992. Ms McAndrew of Arts Economics, who made a particular study of the art business in China last year, estimates that the country now has 50,000 art dealers and more than 2,000 auction houses. The biggest of these are Poly International, a subsidiary of the Chinese army, and China Guardian Auctions, founded by Yannan Wang, the daughter of a former Chinese leader, Zhao Ziyang, who died under house arrest about five years ago.
Foreigners are still forbidden to own auction houses in China, but the Chinese are eager to learn from them. Since 2005 Christie's, the region's leading auctioneer, has had a licensing agreement with Forever International Auction Company in Beijing, which uses the British name and benefits from increased transparency and consumer protection, as well as international standards in training and accounting. Neither of the Western auction giants is yet a household name in the country. Art-market observers speculate that the Chinese might one day acquire a leading Western auctioneer, but that could be some way off.
Still, plenty of other things are happening. Last June, for example, 50 fine-art dealers, a quarter of them from the West, exhibited at the first serious antiques fair in China, in Taiyuan in Shanxi province. It adopted many of the rules of other international fairs, with a vetting committee made up of Western and Chinese experts with the power to order the removal of items believed to be misattributed or fake. A similar, earlier experiment in Hong Kong had descended into chaos when dealers refused to remove fakes from their stands, but in Taiyuan the vetters were given a free hand. And the curious crowds queued to get in, some for hours.
China's new interest in bringing home its works of art has caused fears as well as satisfaction. Many are concerned by the increase in the number of fakes on the market, the best of which are made in Japan as well as China. Rising prices fuel the trade in fakes and also lead to more grave-robbing. In addition, China has become increasingly vocal about restricting the trade in its treasures. After nearly five years of negotiation the Bush administration in its final days at last agreed to prohibit the import of a wide range of antiquities into America. The agreement was not as strong as China would have liked, and in recent weeks its government has said that it will tighten up on the movement of cultural relics out of the country. Its plan is to ban the export of anything made before 1911, the end of the Qing dynasty. No matter that China is now a member of the World Trade Organisation, it still seems to be uncomfortable with free trade-except when it suits it.
读后感，一个国家，和一个家庭一样，决不能被人闯进门抄家！ 
作者：ceo/cfo 在 海归商务 发贴, 来自【海归网】 http://www.haiguinet.com
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 要发财，倒古董。请波姐回避，是谈钱的，有请校长，呵呵 英文版。38年买进，今年抛出，算下回报率吧 -- ceo/cfo - (15798 Byte) 2009-12-03 周四, 03:27 (2448 reads) - 回报率委实是高 -- yeahy - (129 Byte) 2009-12-03 周四, 18:15 (330 reads)
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