The April Hong
Kong Showcase Auction is nearly here and this final preview is a treasure in
the purest sense of the word. It is a Gold
Ingot, cast as a bar in a slight
boat shape, that spent nearly two and a half centuries at the bottom of the
South China Sea. The Dutch East India Company (abbreviated in Dutch as VOC) was
an early multinational company and the first company to be formally listed. The
VOC is one of history’s most powerful companies, though not impervious to the
whims of nature. The merchant ship VOC Retouschip Geldermalsen – built in 1742
– foundered on a coral reef in the South China Sea in 1752. Eighty crew members
died in the wreck, with just 32 survivors. A total of over 800,000 Gulden in
commodities was lost: 147 10 Tael gold bars, over 100,000 pieces of Chinese
blue and white porcelain, tea, spices, textiles, lacquer wares and other trade
goods. The wreck was recovered in 1986 by English divers and auctioned later
that year by Christie’s Amsterdam. The piece offered in our April 2018 Hong
Kong auction includes the original Christie’s box and lot tag (#1863). The bar
displays the Chinese character for “Treasure” at either end of the face, with
“Yuan Ji” (the name of the private bank that produced the bar) in a gourd
shaped stamp at the center. This shipwreck bar is destined for a place of
prestige in the next collection it enters, rightly earning the descriptive
“treasure.”
While we are no
longer accepting consignments for our April Hong Kong Showcase Auction, we are
accepting consignments of Chinese and other Asian coins and currency for our
August 2018 Hong Kong Showcase Auction. In addition to this, we are taking
consignments of world and ancient coins as well as world paper money for our
May 2018 Collector’s Choice Online Auction and August 2018 ANA Auction. Time is
running short, so if you are interested in consigning your coins and paper
currency (whether a whole collection or a single rarity) be sure to contact one
of our consignment directors.
