Market dispatch·Taipei
Bonhams Hong Kong Previews Autumn Buddhist Art Sales in Taipei
Bonhams Hong Kong will hold its autumn 'Indian, Himalayan and Southeast Asian Art' sales on October 29, previewing 15 highlights in Taipei on October 2–3, led by the single-owner 'Navaratna' collection of nine museum-quality Buddhist sculptures.

Bonhams Hong Kong is staging two dedicated sales of Indian, Himalayan, and Southeast Asian art on October 29, and the 15 star lots arrived in Taipei first for a two-day preview on October 2–3. The autumn offering centers on 'Navaratna' — Sanskrit for 'nine jewels' — a single-collector sale of nine museum-grade Buddhist sculptures assembled over nearly half a century, alongside a second sale, 'Cheng Qian Yun Ying,' with a broader panorama of Buddhist imagery across Asia. The 'Navaratna' group spans Gandhara stone carving, Central Javanese bronzes, Tibetan and Nepalese gilt sculpture, and Mongolian Zanabazar-style works. The earliest piece, a third-to-fourth-century Gandharan schist preaching-Buddha stele, is estimated at HK$2–3 million. The top estimate of the nine goes to a twelfth-to-thirteenth-century central Tibetan bronze Shakyamuni, 62 centimeters tall — an unusually large scale for early Tibetan bronze — at HK$4.5–6.5 million. Bonhams' specialist Dora Tan notes the collector never confined himself to one region or medium, approaching the sculptures through aesthetics and art history rather than devotion alone, and valued scholarly provenance, with many pieces carrying publication records linked to researchers such as Ulrich von Schroeder. The companion sale's lead is a seventeenth-century gilt-bronze Vajra Dakini from Tashilhunpo Monastery in central Tibet, estimated at HK$4–6 million, followed by a Yongle-marked gilt-bronze Green Tara at HK$2.5–3.5 million. The geographic sweep runs from Gandharan stone with recognizable Greco-Roman vocabulary, through Pala India and Nepal, into Tibet and onward to the Mongolian Zanabazar idiom, with Indonesian and Javanese religious sculpture included — what the house presents as a millennium-long route of Buddhist image-making shaped by faith, craft, and aesthetic exchange. The preview deliberately dovetails with the National Palace Museum's southern branch exhibition 'Traversing the Himalayas: An Artistic Journey from the Ganges to the Snowy Lands,' opening October 8, offering collectors and the public a market-side lens on the same art-historical terrain.


