Gurr Johns Achieves High Price for Imperial Souvenir

Imperial Chinese provenance has long commanded a premium price in the saleroom, and so the experts at Gurr Johns were delighted to meet a client with a gilt-metal box and a very compelling story. The owner, a direct descendent of a Dragoon Guards officer who had taken part in the sack of Beijing’s Summer Palace at the end of the Second Opium War, had a true collector’s trophy: a splendid Imperial Chinese box in the European taste, embellished with pearls and foil ‘enamelling’ and carrying a crucial inscription:

Loot from the Summer Palace, Pekin, Oct. 1860. Capt. James Gunter, King’s Dragoon Guards.

This engraving was confirmation of the place of the box in history, both as a possession of the Emperor and as a souvenir of a critical campaign in both British and Chinese history. The destruction of the Summer Palace marked the end of China’s resistance to the West and started the country on a new, more international path.

Gurr Johns handled the consignment of the box to Salisbury’s Woolley & Wallis auction rooms, with a conservative pre-sale estimate of £50,000-80,000 ($77,500-124,000). As is so often the case in this market, an attractive estimate attracts bidders in quantity, and so the box proved the star lot of the day, finally selling for £490,000 ($759,500).

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