James Lally, the leading American dealer in top-quality Chinese art, who sells from his New York gallery, says that he did much better in this year’s Asia Week than in 2007 and that the difference was mostly due to Western buyers. Lally sold a rare 8th-century gilt-bronze Guanyin figure, priced just under $1 million, from his catalogue to a New York collector before the March 17 private viewing. By the end of the first week, only 9 of the 28 works illustrated in the catalogue remained available.

Uptown, at PaceWildenstein on 57th Street, where Eskenazi always holds his Asia Week show, Western buyers also dominated. At the March 15 private viewing, a European collector grabbed an eight-lobed silver box of the early 8th century decorated with gilt blossoms. The price was in the region of $400,000, but the object ranks among the most beautiful specimens of Tang silver to be seen anywhere. A so-far-unique bronze and gilt-copper mirror with colored-glass insets was placed by Eskenazi within the Tang period, although the pattern and aesthetic handling show it is not of Chinese manufacture. Possibly hailing from the southern province of Yunnan, which had a non-Chinese population in the 8th century, the mirror was picked up by a collector from the Midwest for around $330,000.

Interestingly, a Taiwan collector bought one of Eskenazi’s finest sculptures, a stone bodhisattva head carved between a.d. 570 and 580, during the Northern Qi Dynasty. Japanese photographs prove that it comes from the Tianlongshan Buddhist rock shrines, where it was broken off one of the statues in Cave 16 well before 1939. Although they traditionally stay away from stone fragments or relics removed from Buddhist shrines, some Chinese collectors have recently started buying such objects, putting the recovery of looted pieces of their national heritage above religious taboos.

From the top to the bottom of the connoisseurship pyramid, Chinese buyers have never been so active, whether goaded by the love of art, the search for status symbols with an imperial aura or the desire to recover what was once legitimately theirs. And where their art is concerned, nothing is likely to stop them.

"The Chinese Surge" originally appeared in the June 2008 issue of Art+Auction. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Art+Auction's June 2008 Table of Contents.