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Experts Agree Chinese Porcelain’s Value Rests on Who Made It and For Whom

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Each year in early September, the city’s art institutions and auction houses mount programming timed to coincide with Asia Week New York—a multi-day stretch of gallery presentations and museum shows during which the city’s major auction houses focus on Asian fine and decorative arts. High among the lots in Christie's two-part Important Chinese Art on September 17-18 is a rare three-century-old porcelain “bats and peaches” bowl, painted inside and out as you might expect, with a high estimate of $600,000. But if you get outbid, there’s a lot more to buy, and not just at Christie’s, which alone will host four live auctions and two online auctions.

Meanwhile, Sotheby’s Asia Week New York offering is the 230-lot live Chinese Art sale on September 16, while Bonhams is leaning into the theme with two online sales and three live auctions: Fine Chinese Ceramics and Works of Art, Fine Chinese Paintings and Calligraphy and Fine Japanese and Korean Art. Heritage is also opening its Fine & Decorative Asian Art Signature Auction on September 16, and Doyle’s two-part Asian Works of Art sale featuring works from the collection of Diane A. Nixon will open the same day.

In the Christie’s sale are 110 porcelain items deaccessioned from the Art Institute of Chicago, including the ‘bats and peaches’ bowl, which was produced during the Yongzheng period (1723 to 1735) of the Qing Dynasty (1644-1912), as well as consignments from private collectors. “The majority of these works were produced for domestic use and export,” Tao Wang, chair of Arts of Asia and curator of Chinese art at the Art Institute of Chicago, told Observer. With 1,400 Chinese ceramics in the Art Institute’s permanent holdings, refining the museum’s collection of Chinese fine and decorative art has been an ongoing process, according to Wang, who said that deaccessioning 110 is not even the largest number of objects they’ve let go of at once. In 2018, approximately 250 Chinese works of art were deaccessioned, and in 2025 an additional 100 works were sold. Money raised from this and from previous sales is “used exclusively for future acquisitions across the museum’s Asian collections—not limited to Chinese art—and for the direct care of the collection,” he added.

Pair of lemon-yellow enameled porcelain cups with flared sides and short foot rings against a white background.

The market for Chinese porcelain is filled with highs and lows, largely driven in the past decade-and-a-half by Chinese buyers in what Vicki Paloympis, vice-president and head of the Chinese department at Christie’s New York, calls “Greater China” (the mainland, Hong Kong, Taiwan) and to a lesser extent western collectors and Chinese nationals living in the U.S. “I would say that the 1990s were the peak of American collecting of Chinese porcelain and pottery,” she told Observer, noting that New York collectors were collecting primarily Tang pottery—colorful tomb figurines from the Tang dynasty (618-907)—”because it was the fashion to use them to decorate homes.” In the next dozen years, Chinese buyers came to dominate the market. “I think that has to do more with the distribution of global wealth. There were more millionaires and billionaires in China than there were in the United States at this time. You see pieces going where there’s money.”

The true peak of the market, Paloympis argued, was 2011 “when we saw record prices. We had things at our sales that were estimated at $3,000-5,000 that were reaching $300,000, $400,000, $500,000. There were a lot of new buyers in the market who had large quantities of money, were very excited and would pay any amount to win the piece. Since then, I think the market has been strong, but stable.” And Chinese buyers have taken the prices to levels at which most western collectors do not want to compete.

Prices can and do reach astronomical levels. A large white porcelain vase created for the court of the Qing Dynasty emperor Yongzheng during the period 1723-35 sold at Bonhams in Hong Kong for HK$76,280,000 ($9.7 million—12 times its estimate) in 2014, setting a new auction record. More recently, in 2025, a blue and white vase with a copper red dragon design from the Qianlong period (1736-1795) sold at Bonhams New York for $3.7 million, far in excess of its presale high estimate of $600,000. Dessa Goddard, senior vice-president and U.S. head of Asian art at Bonhams, told Observer that “the principal buyers of Chinese art are Asia-based—Mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore and Japan—or have agents outside of Asia including the United States acting on their behalf.” (Among the porcelain items in the Bonhams’s sales are a late Ming blue and white stem bowl, estimated at $20,000-30,000, and a turquoise-ground puce-enameled dragon altar vase, estimated at $40,000-60,000.)

Goddard added that “there still are active collectors of Chinese ceramics and imperial porcelain of the Ming and Qing dynasties in the U.S., Great Britain and Europe. However, due to the tariffs with their fluctuating percentages, it is more costly for collectors in the U.S. to purchase abroad.”

The largest percentage of available Chinese porcelain in the U.S. and Europe was produced for export and with European tastes in mind. Chinese porcelain factories in the 18th and 19th Centuries “followed English forms and shapes, or were decorated with European subjects, European designs or coat of arms,” Angela McAteer, international head of the Department of Chinese Works of Art, Americas & Europe at Sotheby's told Observer. However, objects that collectors from Greater China seek are “works that were made for the domestic market and more specifically for the Imperial Court.” The difference in prices for porcelain pieces created for export and those produced for the imperial court can be quite wide, she added. The objects themselves don’t look alike, “but if you were to look at a plate, for example, a plate for the court versus a plate for export, an early 18th-century porcelain enamel dish can command as little as sort of $200-500 at auction. A piece of the same period but made for the court could be 10 times that or 100 times that.”

Turquoise-ground porcelain vase with a rounded body, tall neck, red handles and elaborate famille rose floral decoration.

The Trump administration tariffs on imported items from China are on every dealer’s and auctioneer’s mind, and they have made the sale of Chinese porcelain more “challenging” and “extremely expensive,” McAteer said, echoing Goddard, and adding that “we have seen a drop in participation from U.S. buyers transacting in our sales overseas.” The tariffs also have impacted dealers in New York “who would traditionally have catered to this domestic community of collectors. It’s more complicated for them to bring pieces in. And we haven’t had as much international participation from dealers in events like Asia Week New York, because of the challenges and costs for them to bring property into exhibit in the city. So yes, it has had a huge impact on local collectors.”

(A double benefit of buying deaccessioned objects like those from the Art Institute of Chicago is that they already have been in the U.S. and are not subject to Trump administration tariffs on Chinese imports and the provenance has already been thoroughly researched by Art Institute curators and staff.)

Still, according to McAteer, there is an ample supply of Chinese porcelain and other objects in the U.S., the result of a “rich tradition of collecting Chinese art,” which has kept the market strong. Among the notable porcelain lots in the Sotheby’s sale are a rare doucai or painted “mythical beast” dish (estimate $80-120,000), from the period of Yongzheng—the fifth Qing dynasty emperor who ruled from 1722 to 1735—and a pair of lemon-yellow-enameled cups, also of the period of Yongzheng (estimate $80-120,000).

The genesis and rise of porcelain

The Chinese were the first to develop porcelain—a high-fired ceramic made from ground stones with a high percentage of purified minerals like silica, kaolin and feldspar—although the exact starting point is a matter of debate. Some scholars date the beginnings of Chinese porcelain making to the 7th Century C.E. Steven Chait, president of the Manhattan-based R.M. Chait Galleries, which specializes in Chinese porcelain and art, prefers to start the clock in the mid-13th Century, with the Chinese perfecting their process over a period of centuries. In factories, he said, they created what one generally thinks of now as porcelain—”very white in color, sonorous (if we give it a gentle tap, it should have a little bit of a bell-like sound to it), translucent (light can shine through it quite effectively), impervious to liquids and it’s able to take a glaze quite readily.” It was the go-to material for colored and painted dinnerware, vases, pitchers, decorative and sculptural objects when it first came to the attention of world-traveling Portuguese traders in the 1500s who came to China in search of spices, silks and new trade routes, and returned to Europe with what was then a new and exotic type of pottery.

Porcelain became a sensation in Europe. “It was exotic, unusual and beautiful,” according to Chait. “People loved it from the start.” But it wasn’t until the 1700s, first in the German town of Meissen and later in Italy, France, England and elsewhere, that the technique of creating porcelain was developed and perfected in Europe. The Chinese, of course, with their ample head start, still produced considerable amounts of functional and decorative porcelain pieces for export.

According to Samuel Marchant, an Asian art dealer in London, blue and white porcelain from the Yuan Dynasty (1271-1368) “can be exceptionally valuable because comparatively few major examples survive.” However, porcelain from the Ming (1368-1644) and Qing (1644-1912) dynasties represents “the strongest areas of the market,” in part because there is just more of it and a large percentage of it was produced for, and sold to, western traders.

Blue-and-white porcelain dish seen from above, decorated with scrolling lotus blossoms and a scalloped rim.

As is the case in other categories of collectibles, there have been high and low points in Chinese porcelain production. “The Ming dynasty is often regarded as the golden age of Chinese porcelain,” Goddard said, and the subsequent “Qing dynasty brought another major flowering,” particularly during its earlier years. Chinese porcelain also experienced periods of decline, as warfare associated with the late Ming collapse disrupted production, and political turmoil periodically damaged kiln networks. In the 19th Century, domestic rebellions, including the Taiping Rebellion (1850-1864), devastated the areas where much of the porcelain was produced, “interrupting manufacturing. Foreign competition and changing global markets further weakened China’s dominance. Although artistic production continued, the late Qing period did not consistently match the technical and aesthetic heights achieved during earlier imperial eras. By the fall of the Qing dynasty in 1912, centuries of imperial patronage had come to an end, closing a major chapter in Chinese ceramic history.”

Condition, rarity and attractiveness are what principally determines price, but in general, porcelain created for the domestic Chinese market—particularly for the imperial court of the time—is more sought-after by collectors than pieces made specifically for export, John Berwald, a Chinese ceramics dealer in London, told Observer. “Items known as ‘Imperial mark and period’ were made for the Imperial Palace in Beijing and command by far the highest prices. Of these, I would say generally the pieces made during the Qing Dynasty periods of Kangxi, Yongzheng and Qianlong command the highest prices. There are also Imperial reigns of the earlier Ming dynasty which also command high prices and indeed from the earlier Song dynasty when pieces did not have reign marks.”

While thousands of pieces of Chinese porcelain were exported to the West, many did not survive ocean-crossings and some items used as dinnerware in private homes and castles were chipped and broken over time. Additionally, Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution of the 1960s and ’70s led to many items intentionally being destroyed as remnants of capitalism and traditional society. Porcelain is strong—bathroom sinks and tubs are lined with the stuff—but easily damaged. Chait noted that some Chinese porcelain collectors on the West Coast, fearful of earthquakes, “affix pieces to their walls with chicken wire.”