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| A 3,000-year-old Chinese wine vessel is set to reunite with its lid for the first time in nearly a century. |
A 3,000-year-old Chinese wine vessel is set to reunite with its lid for the first time in nearly a century. The ancient vessel called Min Fanglei is considered the "king" of its kind, because it’s the biggest and finest ever excavated in China.
A reunion of the ancient bronze vessel and its long-separated lid.
Hunan Provincial Museum in central China will welcome home the 3,000-year-old bronze wine vessel. A group of Chinese collectors have struck a private deal for its sale with Christie's auction house in New York and donated it to the museum, which has kept the vessel’s lid since 1956.
The Min FangLei vessel was slated for auction during Christie’s Asian art event, in which it could have fetched more than 20 million dollars. It arrived at the airport of Changsha, capital of Hunan Province on June 21st.
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A 3,000-year-old Chinese wine vessel is set to reunite with its lid for the first time in nearly a century.
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This vessel ranks amongst the most important Chinese archaic bronzes to ever appear at auction. When offered for sale at Christie’s New York auction house in March 2001, it set a world record for any Asian work of art. With its combination of massive size, powerful proportions, and superb casting, this exceptional wine vessel represents a defining masterpiece, not only of Chinese art, but also in the context of global art history.
The "Min FangLei" was first discovered in Hunan Province by villagers in the 1920s. The lid was then bought by an army officer and later collected by the Hunan Provincial Museum in the 1950s. The vessel however was brought to Shanghai and then sold among foreign collectors, hence the long separation...
The reunited parts will be permanently kept by Hunan Provincial Museum, which will reopen in mid-2015 after a three-year renovation.
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