Unemployed? Bonhams auction house has plenty of jobs they want to fill. All you need is a Ph.D. in Chinese art and fluency in Mandarin.

Expansion into Chinese art is all the rage these days, given the economic boom in east Asia that has Chinese growth hovering just below 10 percent of GDP (that's down from nearly 12 percent in 2010, but the U.S. is growing at a rate of less than 2 percent). While global markets are trending downward, and the demand for Chinese art showed cracks duringSotheby's week of auctions in Hong Kong, there still seems to be collector demand for real treasures — just yesterday a new record was set for Ming porcelain in Hong Kong.  

For Colin Sheaf, the chairman of Bonhams Asia and head of Bonhams global Asian art department, expansion into China is an old hat — he's been doing it since 1984, when he was at Christie's helping them expand to Hong Kong. Most recently, he hired no less than five new Asian art experts to expand Bonhams operations in Scotland, Australia, and Europe, focusing specifically on the Chinese and Japanese markets.

Though it may not be the first place you would think of, Scotland holds a wealth of Chinese art, according to Sheaf. Back in the 19th century, he said, the Scots "were very big in Hong Kong." They did a robust trading business in Asia, and as a result ended up bringing home many Chinese treasures. To tap into that supply, Bonhams has hired Asha Edwards to coordinate consignments coming from the northernmost part of the UK.

Other new recruits for the UK and Europe include Gigi Yu and Helen Ho, both Chinese nationals, to work in London, and Leonore de Magnée, hired to drum up Asian art business in Paris. Yvette Klein, another hire originally from the Chinese mainland, has been working on buffing up Bonhams's Asian art department in Sydney, Australia for the last couple of months. While the market for Asian art in Australia is in Sheaf's words "quite lean," Bonhams is expanding there, hoping to start Asian art sales soon

"One of the first things we wanted to do was to have an Asian art specialist at the end of the line who could speak Mandarin to the Chinese clients," he said, adding that the house also wanted someone with "access to the sort of expertise for Japanese art that we felt was going to be important to us." Klein, with a Ph.D. in Chinese ceramics, fit the bill.

She and her new colleagues appear to be some of the few people in the world who can meet the demand for Chinese art specialists who, increasingly, must be highly educated and fluent in one or more dialects spoken on the Chinese mainland. Sheaf told ARTINFO that he is always looking for new people for Bonhams's business in Asia, but he is hesitant to take on people who don't have the ability to develop client relationships with the growing population of collectors who are unlikely to speak English.

"At the moment our market is so strong that we would be happy to employ several more if we could find ones with the right combination of academic background and language skills," he said, dwelling on the language requirement. "That's our problem at the moment."