Bloomberg’s Le-Min Lim offers some observations on Chinese buying behavior:

Shanghai-listed stocks now trading at 25 times earnings and China’s biggest property-price jump in two years are pushing some mainlanders to park money in other assets, said collector and My Humble Art Space Chief Executive Michael Wang.

“In China, there’s now a lot of money with few places to go,” Wang said in a telephone interview. “Rare antiques and art are now appreciated for their aesthetics and investment value.”

That also means objects are traded with greater frequency than in the past:

“That some items were so recently sold isn’t a comment on their quality,” Chow said in a phone interview. “Some mainland collectors’ attention span is quite short; after they had bought something and showed it around to their friends, they might think, ‘Maybe it’s time to buy this, this or that.’”

Emperor’s Pearls Star in $167 Million Sotheby’s Hong Kong Sale (Bloomberg)