Sotheby's recent eight-day Hong Kong auction earned a staggering $447 million for a vast array of Asian and Chinese art, as well as fine wines, watches, and jewels, but the rise of voracious Chinese buyers has not been free of setbacks. For one, there is the issue of payment: after bidding up works, particularly in the hypercharged sector of imperial antiques, Chinese buyers have been incredibly slow to make
payments on purchases, a habit that is leading auction houses around the globe to demand
deposits from high bidders.

The most prominent example of this delinquent behavior concerns the shocking $83.2 million sale of an 18th-century vase at the suburban British auction house Bainbridges in November — a sale that has become symbolic of the skyrocketing market for Chinese antiques, and of Chinese buyers' infinitely deep pockets when it comes to snatching up Chinese art objects. In the months since the vase was hammered, making international headlines, the buyer has failed to deliver the money. As a result, the Bainbridges vase has still not been claimed.

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Thus far, there has been no suggestion that the buyer deliberately sabotaged the sale on behalf of Chinese nationalist interests, as was the case with the Beijing businessman who won two contested Chinese imperial bronzes at the 2008 Yves Saint Laurent and Pierre Bergé sale, and then refused to pay the $45.5 million he owed.

The new system of requiring deposits for auctions is sure to be a contentious one at a time when Bloomberg calculates the market for Chinese antiquities alone to be valued at $10 billion, and when a recent study found the overall Chinese art market to be the biggest in the world. While such safeguards  certainly could protect vendors from buyers who turn out to be reluctant to pay their auction bills, they also risk cooling the ever-hotter prices for Chinese artifacts and art.

"There must be a problem with payment, otherwise the auction houses wouldn't do this," London-based dealer John Berwald told Bloomberg. "It's a difficult balance to strike between being stringent with the buyers and not making them discouraged."

Perhaps it is just such discouragement that accounts, at least in part, for the lackluster auction of ceramics from the storied Meiyintang Collection that was held at Sotheby's Hong Kong last week, and where bidding on "premium lots" required deposits up to $500,000, according to Bloomberg. At that sale, 22 of the 77 lots were bought in, including the headliner, a Qianlong period falangcai ("foreign color") vase. (After being bought in, the falangcai vase and the other top lot, a Chenghua palace bowl, sold privately immediately after the auction.)

"The auction houses are going to have to get tougher," the London-based dealer Roger Keverne, who waited half a year for payment on a Chinese porcelain piece that was hammered for £150,000 ($245,440), told Bloomberg. "With new money, you get waves of new buyers. Deposits are a good idea if the bidder hasn't got a track record. Otherwise we'll end up with a false market."