On June 5, 2010, Beijing Poly 5th anniversary spring auction successfully brought the curtains down after five days’ of bidding. The auction with 7 catalogues filled with 4000 items, most of which are collected back from overseas, became a gastronomic feast of Chinese art for collectors at home and abroad.

Di Zhu Ming Huang Tingjian Song Dynasty (960-1279)

At Poly International’s Spring Auction, Di Zhu Ming, a calligraphy hand scroll by Song Dynasty master Huang Tingjian, fetched a record price of 436.8 million yuan after 40 minutes of bidding.

Di Zhu Ming features a calligraphic representation of an epigraph originally composed by Wei Zheng, a famous Tang Dynasty (AD 618-907) chancellor. The hand scroll is considered to demonstrate the creativity of Huang’s penmanship and his moral principles.

The item is also adorned with Huang’s portrait and valuable inscriptions from several dynasties ranging from the Song to the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911), stretching the calligraphy work to 15 meters in total.

The piece was considered a counterfeit during the reign of Qing Emperor Qianlong (1736-1799) because it was so different from Huang’s other works in content and style. A Taiwan calligraphy researcher recently appraised it as a rare masterpiece of Huang. It was kept at a Japanese private museum for decades before it was bought back by a collector from Taiwan.

The Desolate Temples and Autumn Mountain Wang Meng Yuan Dynasty (1206-1368)