The Meiyintang 'Chicken Cup'

A porcelain wine cup 8.2 centimetres across, made at the imperial kilns at Jingdezhen during the Chenghua reign and painted in doucai with a cock, a hen and their chicks among rocks and flowers. On 8 April 2014 Sotheby's Hong Kong sold it from the Meiyintang collection of the Swiss brothers Stephen and Gilbert Zuellig. The hammer fell at HKD 250 million; with commission the total was HKD 281.24 million, then the highest price ever paid at auction for any Chinese porcelain. The buyer was the Shanghai collector Liu Yiqian, who settled the account with twenty-four swipes of an American Express card.

Sotheby's counted seventeen surviving Chenghua chicken cups at the time of the sale, thirteen of them in museums and four, including this one, in private hands. The National Palace Museum in Taipei alone holds eight. Two further examples in the Palace Museum in Beijing are disputed by Western specialists, and the reign has been imitated continuously for five centuries, which is why the census is contested and why the words mark and period do the heavy lifting in any description of this object.

When the cup was handed over in Hong Kong on 18 July 2014, Liu poured tea into it and drank. The photograph set off a public argument in China about what an owner of such a thing is permitted to do with it, and that argument is now part of the object's history.

The most expensive porcelain ever sold is a wine cup you could close your hand around

The cup is 8.2 centimetres wide. It has a flared mouth, shallow curving sides and a countersunk, ringed foot. The inside is plain white with no decoration at all. The outside carries two groups of chickens: a cock and a hen leading chicks across open ground, the hen stooping to peck, the chicks with their wings up, the two groups separated by a garden rock, peonies and orchid grass. That is the whole design. There is no gilding, no inscription on the wall, no ostentation of any kind.

It is a wine cup. It was made to be picked up and drunk from, which is a fact worth holding on to, because it becomes the crux of the argument this object set off in 2014.

Small size is not incidental to the Chenghua reputation. The reign is admired for palace bowls, stem cups and wine cups rather than for large vessels, and the qualities it is admired for are qualities that only read at close range: a body so finely potted that it transmits light, a glaze with a soft, slightly unctuous surface, and painting done at the scale of a fingernail without any loss of nerve.

Doucai is two firings, and most attempts did not survive the second

Doucai has been translated as contrasting, contending, interlocking, joined or dovetailed colours. All those readings point at the same procedure. The decoration is drawn first in cobalt blue directly on the unfired body, as outline only. The piece is then glazed and fired at high temperature exactly as a blue-and-white vessel would be. What comes out of that first firing is a finished white cup with a blue drawing on it, a coloured-in outline waiting to be filled.

The colours are then laid over the glaze inside those blue outlines, in iron red, several greens from bright to olive, yellow and pale aubergine, and the cup goes back into a lower-temperature muffle kiln to fix them. For the chickens' plumage several enamels were superimposed on one another to build a variegated surface, and each superimposition meant another pass through the fire.

The consequence is arithmetical rather than mystical. Every additional firing is another chance for the cup to crack, for an enamel to blister, for a colour to shift. The Sotheby's catalogue puts it plainly: the repeat firings necessary for the process would naturally have reduced the number of successfully completed examples. The scarcity of these cups begins in the kiln, before any question of five centuries of breakage.

The softness that specialists praise in the underglaze blue is also technical. The cobalt is domestic Chinese ore, not the imported cobalt used earlier in the Ming, and it fires to a quieter, greyer, less assertive blue. Under Chenghua that was not a limitation to be overcome. It was the effect being sought, and it is one of the things that distinguishes the period from the reigns that later imitated it.

The cup was already a legend under the Ming

This is not a modern valuation. The chicken cup was a famous object within a century of being made, and it was expensive within a century of being made.

The subject itself was new. A cock and a hen with chicks in a garden is not encountered on porcelain before the Chenghua reign, although it derives from a tradition of Song dynasty painting. Someone at court chose to put a domestic barnyard scene on an imperial wine cup, and the choice held.

The Wanli Emperor, who reigned from 1572 to 1620, is recorded as admiring Chenghua chicken cups in particular, and that admiration had already made them expensive in his own century. The figure that circulates in Chinese sources is that a pair was reckoned at a hundred thousand cash, or something close to a hundred taels of silver, in the Wanli period. The Qianlong Emperor, reigning from 1736 to 1795, wrote an ode in praise of chicken cups. Liu Yiqian's remark in 2014, that Qianlong had used it and now he had used it, was not an invented pedigree. It was a reasonably accurate reading of the object's standing.

An object that has been prestigious continuously for five hundred years accumulates two things: a market, and a body of forgeries.

Seventeen cups, and the census is contested

Sotheby's stated at the time of the sale that seventeen Chenghua chicken cups survive, four of them in private hands and the rest in museums. The catalogue note enumerates the museum side: the National Palace Museum in Taipei holds eight; the British Museum, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Collections Baur in Geneva hold one each. That is thirteen. Only three other Chenghua chicken cups, on the catalogue's account, appear to remain in private hands, which with this cup makes four, and thirteen plus four is seventeen. The arithmetic is internally consistent.

Other counts do not agree. Agence France-Presse reported sixteen on the day. The reference literature gives sixteen with three in private hands. The Australian National University study of the object gives nineteen. Two examples in the Palace Museum in Beijing are disputed by Western specialists and are excluded from the Sotheby's figure, which accounts for part of the spread. The rest of the spread comes from the fact that no one has authority to close the list: a census of surviving examples of a heavily forged type is an argument about authentication, not a headcount.

This record therefore states seventeen, on Sotheby's own enumeration, and states that the figure is a specialist's opinion rather than a fact. Nicolas Chow, then Sotheby's deputy chairman for Asia, described this particular cup as one of only three perfect chicken cups ever to come to the market, which is a narrower and more defensible claim than any total.

From a pair in London in 1957 to a Swiss vault

The documented chain begins in 1957, when the cup was in the possession of Mrs Leopold Dreyfus and was shown in The Arts of the Ming Dynasty at the Oriental Ceramic Society in London as catalogue number 175. The catalogue entry describes it as one of a pair. The whereabouts of the other cup of that pair is not established in the sources consulted, and it is one of the sharper unanswered questions about this object.

Sotheby's records a connection to the collector-dealer Edward T. Chow, but marks it by repute rather than as documented: the cup came in a box commissioned by Chow, which is suggestive and is not proof. It was sold at Sotheby's Hong Kong in 1980 for HKD 5.28 million to the Japanese collector Sakamoto Goro, and again at Sotheby's Hong Kong on 27 April 1999, as lot 410, for HKD 29.17 million, which was itself a world record for Chinese porcelain at the time. The buyer in 1999 was the London dealer Giuseppe Eskenazi, acting for the Meiyintang collection.

Meiyintang, which translates as Hall among Rosebeds, was assembled from the late 1950s by two brothers born in Manila, Stephen Zuellig, 1917 to 2017, and Gilbert Zuellig, 1918 to 2009, on the proceeds of a business built in the Far East. Gilbert took the early material, from the Neolithic through the Song; Stephen took Yuan, Ming and Qing porcelain and archaic bronzes. Regina Krahl catalogued the collection in four volumes between 1994 and 2010, and Eskenazi, its chief adviser, sold or acquired more than 160 pieces for it over a quarter of a century. The bulk of the collection is on long-term loan to the Museum Rietberg in Zurich. Between 2011 and 2013 Sotheby's Hong Kong sold a large part of the later porcelain, and this cup followed in 2014.

Before 1957 the chain is blank. One Chinese account places the cup with a Hong Kong collector, Qiu Yanzhi, in 1949 at a price of HKD 1,000. That claim rests on a single newspaper source and is recorded here as unverified rather than folded into the chain.

Two figures, and only one of them is a price

The sale was on 8 April 2014 at Sotheby's Hong Kong, sale HK0545, a single-lot sale built around this object. The estimate was on request. Press reporting before the sale put the expectation at around HKD 300 million at the top, or roughly USD 38.6 million.

The hammer fell at HKD 250 million. With the buyer's premium the total came to HKD 281.24 million. Those are two different numbers and they measure two different things: what the bidder bid, and what the bidder paid.

Almost every account of this sale reports one figure, in dollars, and does not say which of the two it is. The premium-inclusive total was converted at the time to USD 36.05 million, and also appears as 36.1, 36.12 and 36.3 million depending on who was doing the arithmetic and when. The hammer converts to about USD 32.2 million. The Hong Kong dollar figures are the real ones. Everything in dollars on this page is derived, and the implied rate between the two published totals is 7.80 Hong Kong dollars to the US dollar, which is where the Hong Kong currency board holds it.

The buyer bid by telephone. He was Liu Yiqian, a Shanghai collector who began as a taxi driver, made a fortune in securities and had founded the Long Museum with his wife Wang Wei. Sotheby's caps a credit card transaction at USD 1.6 million, so the settlement required twenty-four separate swipes of an American Express card. Reporting at the time established that Liu had not considered the reward points until a Bloomberg journalist raised it with him. The detail is comic and it is also the clearest single illustration of what happens when the machinery of ordinary retail payment is asked to carry a museum-grade object.

He drank from it, and that is now part of the object

The cup was handed over in Hong Kong on 18 July 2014, with Nicolas Chow presenting it. Liu picked it up, poured tea into it and drank. He then flew home to Shanghai with it.

His own account was not defensive. He told China Daily that he had been so excited when he finally saw the cup that he poured tea in and drank it without even wiping it, and that the cup had endured six hundred years, that emperors and imperial concubines might have used it, that it was magic and he could not help himself. Elsewhere he put it more flatly: Emperor Qianlong has used it, now I have used it, I just wanted to see how it felt.

The photograph went across Chinese social media and the reaction was hostile. He was called tuhao, the sneer for money without cultivation. He was accused of vanity, vulgarity, ostentation and of risking damage to the cup. One line that circulated was that this was probably the most expensive cup of tea in history. Others were blunter about civilised people not treating a cultural treasure that way.

The defence is not weak, and it was made at the time. A chicken cup is a wine cup. Use is its original function, not a violation of it; a porcelain specialist quoted by China Daily argued that there are cheap porcelains and expensive ones and they are all for people to use, and that Liu had properly appreciated what the object was for. The collector Ma Weidu had drunk from a chicken cup at a Japanese collector's house before Liu ever did. The counter-argument is equally clear: seventeen of these exist, thirteen of them are held in public trust, and an owner of one of the four remaining is in practice a custodian whether or not the law says so.

The episode had one measurable consequence. Sales of replica chicken cups on Taobao surged, with more than eight hundred listings running from a few yuan to tens of thousands. The market for copies of this object, which is five centuries old, got a fresh boost from a photograph of a man drinking tea.

Neither side of that argument is settled, and the record's position is that the argument itself is now attached to the cup as firmly as the 1957 exhibition or the 1999 hammer. An object's history does not stop when it enters a private collection.

Why the words mark and period carry the whole valuation

Everything above depends on a judgement that this cup was made between 1465 and 1487 rather than at any point in the five centuries since. The Chenghua reign mark is one of the two most frequently copied inscriptions in Chinese ceramics, alongside Xuande. Copies of doucai chicken cups were made in quantity in the early Qing, some carrying genuine Kangxi, Yongzheng or Qianlong marks and some carrying spurious Chenghua marks. The Percival David collection at the British Museum displays a Chenghua chicken cup and a Qing chicken cup within the same room, which is the most honest possible presentation of the problem.

Much of that copying was not fraud. Kangxi and Qianlong potters put Chenghua marks on their finest work as homage to an acknowledged summit, openly and without deceit, and a Kangxi piece with a Chenghua mark is a collectable object in its own right. The Cleveland Museum of Art has a pair of famille verte bowls dated 1662 to 1722 that carry Chenghua marks and are catalogued as exactly what they are. Fraud came later and is still coming: cups continue to be reproduced for antique markets in China, where they are sold both as declared replicas and as something else.

Period is therefore established not from the mark but from everything the mark sits on. The body and its translucency, the character and thickness of the glaze, the specific range and quality of the enamels, the drawing, the foot and its finish, and only then the calligraphy of the six characters and the double square around them. A mark alone establishes nothing except an intention. That is the discipline behind the price, and it is why the phrase mark and period appears in the lot title of an object that sold for HKD 281.24 million.