LONDON — At the time, the price was so mind-bogglingly large that the auctioneer, in his excitement, broke his wooden gavel as he hammered down the lot.
Sadly for the sellers and for Bainbridge’s, a small auction house in Ruislip, in northwest London, the Beijing businessman Wang Yaohui never paid for the opulently decorated 18th-century porcelain vase he had bid to a record 51.6 million pounds, or about $82 million, on Nov. 11, 2010. Thought to have been made for the Qianlong emperor, and turning up two-and-a-half centuries later in a suburban house clearance, the vase was discreetly sold to another Asian collector in a private transaction brokered by Bonhams in January 2013 for between £20 million and £25 million.
That colossal bid for the so-called Ruislip Vase was the most extreme of the many being pledged, if not always actually paid, by Asian clients during the boom for Chinese antiques three or four years ago. Things are different now. The growth of China’s economy has slowed, fake pieces have proliferated and the government’s crackdown on corruption has put a lid on the culture of luxury gift-giving, which encouraged frothy prices. On Oct. 24, the Knight Frank Luxury Investment Index said that values of antique Chinese ceramics had declined 2 percent over the preceding 12 months.
“The crackdown has got to have made a difference,” said the Mayfair dealer John Berwald. “A few years ago people were buying everything. Now we have a more discerning market with proper unsold lots at auction.”
Mr. Berwald was one of 62 dealers and auction houses to collaborate on the 17th annual Asian Art in London, which ran from Oct. 30 through Saturday. Though this year’s event coincided with the British Museum’s exhibition “Ming: 50 Years That Changed China,” and highly regarded dealers like Eskenazi and Marchant put on their own mini-blockbuster shows, there were not as many Asian buyers in town as in recent years.
Dealers said this November’s sales at Sotheby’s, Bonhams and, above all, Christie’s were short of star lots, reflecting a shift in the auction market to Hong Kong and the shortage of quality material in Britain and Europe.
That said, the English regions continue to unearth desirable Chinese artworks. On Oct. 22 the Cheltenham auctioneers Mallams sold a Ming dynasty jade horse to a Hong Kong dealer on the telephone for about £205,000. The seller’s late husband bought the piece in Hong Kong in 1962 for 900 Hong Kong dollars, about $115 today.
Back in November 2010, Sotheby’s, Bonhams and Christie’s all sold individual lots priced at more than £2 million each. Though historic Chinese pieces now rarely sell for seven figures at London auctions, the Asian visitors who attend these sales can still generate a tidy total.
Sotheby’s offering of 336 lots on Wednesday took in £8.9 million with fees against a low estimate of £5.4 million, based on hammer prices. Sixty-three percent of the entries were successful, including a top price of £782,500 — far above the £300,000 high estimate — paid by an Asian collector for a pair of Qianlong green-ground “famille rose” vases fresh to the market from an Irish collection. The price typified the prevailing Chinese taste for polychrome 18th-century wares, or Qing bling, as some Westerners rudely call it.
Christie’s, by contrast, was only prepared to test the market with a two-day auction of Chinese pieces valued up to £30,000 at its South Kensington salesroom on Tuesday and Friday. Its decision not to hold a sale in its St. James’s headquarters during Asian Art in London angered participating dealers.
“I think they’ve behaved very badly,” said Giuseppe Eskenazi, who was showing 22 museum-quality Chinese sculptures from A.D. 500 to 1,500 in his Mayfair gallery. One of those was an imposing Northern Song or Jin period wooden statue of a seated Guanyin, the Buddhist goddess of Mercy, priced at $25 million. “Hong Kong has been built up to the detriment of London for years. Dealers and auction houses should have a symbiotic relationship, but Christie’s aren’t supporting the London market.” A letter of complaint also went out from the British Antique Dealers’ Association.
Jonathan Stone, the chairman of Asian art at Christie’s, had said in a statement that Christie’s was “redefining” its calendar of Chinese art sales in Europe, “to meet the demands of a strong and sophisticated market, and to serve best our clients’ changing needs.” He said there would be just one main auction in London and one in Paris each year. As before, New York and Hong Kong would each stage two auctions a year.
Asked in a phone interview whether Christie’s would hold its London sales in November next year, Mr. Stone said: “The date of next year’s London auction hasn’t been confirmed as of now.” Mr. Stone did not explain why his department has given Paris, a city with few top dealers in Chinese art, parity with London in the calendar. But in a statement he added that Christie’s was “committed to promoting” Asian art from London and elsewhere on a “global basis.” Christie’s is owned by the French billionaire François Pinault, and Paris is Europe’s most popular destination for Chinese luxury shoppers, according to the European Federation of Chinese Tourism.
Mr. Eskenazi came up with a marketing initiative of his own by opening his Chinese sculpture exhibition on Oct. 15 to coincide with the Frieze Art Fair in Regent’s Park, two weeks before Asian Art in London. The show was visited by several collectors of big-ticket contemporary art, including a New Yorker who bought a 1,000-year-old marble head of a monk priced at $380,000. A pair of Northern Song or Jin polychrome wood Bodhisattvas, marked at $3.5 million, was the most valuable of 16 sculptures that had been sold at the time of writing.
The Kensington dealer Marchant’s encyclopedic exhibition of 132 Chinese monochrome blanc-de-chine wares from the late Ming and early Qing dynasties made more than 40 sales within the first week of opening on Oct. 30. Two white porcelain figures of Guanyins by the late Ming master potter He Chaozong sold for about $200,000 each.
More and more Chinese antiques are being sold at auctions in Hong Kong. With its outstanding museum collections and scholarly dealers, however, London continues to be a draw for anyone who is serious about Chinese art. The problem for Asian Art in London is that being serious about art, and being serious about making money out of art, can be two very different things.