The lack of experience of many bidders manifested itself repeatedly, as objects of ill-determined age but dealing with themes dear to the Chinese heart came up. A white-jade rabbit that the Christie’s specialists had very optimistically dated to the 17th or 18th century brought $18,750. Shortly afterward, a greenish white-jade circular box decorated in a manner suggesting a far later vintage than the 18th- or 19th-century date ascribed to it in the catalogue realized $43,000, more than two and a half times its high estimate.

Possibly galvanized by the bullishness of Chinese buyers, Western dealers also proved willing to pay three or four times the high estimates for top-quality objects on the very day the Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped by 2.36 percent. Stuart Marchant, of London, bought an elegant red-glazed bottle with a Qianlong seal mark for $73,000 (est. $20–25,000) and immediately went after another piece. Ignoring the $30,000 to $40,000 estimate, he paid $157,000 to secure a bowl-shaped brush washer with a peach-bloom glaze and the six-character Kangxi mark. Like the Kangxi bowl sold earlier, it too had belonged to Edward T. Chow.

Giuseppe Eskenazi, the leading international dealer in early Chinese art, went up to $421,000 to get a Shang period blade of the late 13th or early 12th century b.c. The few comparable pieces that exist are locked up in museums. No other object of that type and quality is likely to tumble onto the market, making the Christie’s $15,000-to-$18,000 estimate seem absurdly low.

Eskenazi was the underbidder on another Shang object, a bronze vase with a slender body and a trumpet-shaped neck cast in the 11th century b.c. The piece, yet another Edward T. Chow possession, is the finest vessel of this type that I have seen on the market in four decades. Eskenazi gave up as the bidding reached $133,000 and later told me he regretted not having been bolder.

Other bidders may on the contrary feel sorry that they did not stop sooner. The imperial-provenance syndrome affecting many Chinese collectors resulted in some wild prices. A case in point was a large white-jade disk worked in the ancient Chinese style and inscribed with a Qianlong mark and a poem by the emperor. The catalogue entry for the piece noncommitally stated that it was “dated to the jia-yin year corresponding to 1794 and possibly of the period ” (my italics). The $20,000-to-$30,000 estimate reflected the uncertainty concerning the period, as well as the imperfect condition of the work itself, which has big cracks running across the pattern. The anonymous buyer who ran the vase up to an extravagant $337,000 didn’t seem to have any qualms.

The other extraordinarily generous price that day was paid for a porcelain “moon flask” that was not in the impeccable condition one might expect in a piece estimated at $500,000 to $600,000. The vase’s compressed circular body is a revivalist interpretation from the 18th century of a model adopted after the 13th-century Mongol conquest of China. The Qianlong seal mark and the pattern of stylized blossoms carried by swirling scrolls vouch for its authenticity. Unfortunately the foot is ground down on one side, which makes it look lopsided, and the shape itself is slightly off balance. However, the Qianlong flask is the largest known example of its type, and this may have convinced the lone bidder, who bought it against the reserve, to pay $541,000 for it. Some time may have to pass before the inflationary trend in Chinese art so evident in March justifies the price.

Beyond the auction arena, the impact of Chinese bullishness on the market was equally clear. Knapton Rasti Asian Art of London, for one, did brilliantly because it targeted certain types of Chinese buyers, such as those looking for traditionally sought-after mediums like jade, rather than definite schools or styles. The buyers pounced on the white-jade objects Nader Rasti and Christopher Knapton displayed at the International Asian Art Fair. At the private viewing, six of the pieces were sold, including a small screen with a poem by the Qianlong emperor on its period carved-wood stand, which a Shanghai dealer bought for a $320,000. However, their onslaught did not discourage Western collectors. The second-most expensive object sold by Knapton Rasti, a circular brush washer decorated with an imperial dragon and inscribed with the Qianlong seal mark, was the kind of piece beloved by the Chinese, but an English collector jumped in first and bagged the object with a $250,000 price tag.