$25 million for a bowl: a unique Chinese bowl of the 18th century went under the hammer at Sotheby's auction

At an auction in Hong Kong, Sotheby's sold a rare porcelain bowl with a diameter of less than 11.5 cm. The pottery was made by imperial craftsmen in Beijing in the 18th century and belongs to a group known as "falanzai" or "foreign colors". Experts say that the enamel was applied to the pottery shortly after the death of the Yongzheng Emperor, the ruler of China from 1722 to 1735. Experts describe this bowl as the pinnacle of the art of porcelain painting, whose masters have never been surpassed.

This is reported by CNN.

The decoration on the bowl depicts two swallows, apricot blossoms, and a willow tree, and contains an excerpt from a poem written during the time of Yongzheng's predecessor, the Ming emperor Zhu Yijun. The bowl was sold for $25.3 million.

Read also: A tomb with the remains of a meal was found in Italy.

There were two such bowls, they were owned by the sea merchant Charles Oswald Liddell, whose business was based in Shanghai at the end of the 19th century. In 1929, bowls began to be sold separately. One of them is now kept in the British Museum in London.

We will remind you that we have already written about a fishing hook found by archaeologists, which is 6000 years old.

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