A tiny jade snuff bottle estimated at HK$3.5 to 5.5 million sold for HK$25.91 million at Christie's in Hong Kong, setting a world auction record for a Chinese snuff bottle and leading a quartet of ceramics and works-of-art sales that totalled HK$502.38 million. The four sales, held on 29 October as part of the house's 40th anniversary season in Asia, offered 215 lots, of which 142 found buyers.

The record bottle, a late-Qianlong jade carving in vivid green with taotie masks and paired dragons, drew at least eight telephone bidders and climbed from a HK$3.2 million opening bid to more than seven times its low estimate. It had not changed hands publicly for over a decade, and its rarity, a large, finely carved imperial jade vessel with a documented link to the Qing general Fuk'anggan, helped drive the contest.

The session's top lot by price was a gold ewer made for the Qianlong emperor, inlaid with pearls, rubies, sapphires and turquoise, which sold for HK$55.8 million. The piece can be matched to workshop records from 1740 to 1741, and it once belonged to the Swedish collector Carl Kempe. A Ming Xuande blue-and-white melon-shaped vase from the Au Bak Ling collection made HK$25.3 million, while a Qianlong hundred-deer vase from the Ailian Tang collection reached HK$35.06 million.

The Ailian Tang sale was the strongest of the four sessions, with 29 of 30 lots sold for HK$214.49 million and the hammer total running to 163 percent of the pre-sale low estimate. Across three seasons, the collection has now realised HK$737.82 million, making it the third-highest-grossing private collection of Chinese ceramics and works of art ever sold at auction. Specialists at the house said the results showed collectors still paying strongly for fresh, well-documented private collections, even in a cautious market.