GT: What's the largest sale of porcelain ever?

Hyams: The biggest sale ever took place in 2000 in Stuttgart, Germany, the sunken porcelain recovered from the shipwreck of the Tek Sing. The enormous Tek Sing, over 50 meters long, was a great trading ship from Amoy (modern Xiamen) that sunk in 1822. This particular ship had over 2,000 people on board. Out of those, 1,600 were looking for a new life in Java, and on their way to Jakarta at that time.

Interesting enough, none of the Chinese shipping voyages were recorded in China. But this particular shipwreck was recorded in a hydrographic handbook Directions for Sailing to the East Indies. At that time, many of the passengers and crew survivors were picked up by the English trading ship Indiana under a Captain James Pearl as it passed by. The ship belonged to the East India Company, a huge trading company that controlled trade in the Far East from the 17th century right up to the middle of the 19th century.

So the shipwreck was recorded by the East India Company, which later enabled professional salvager Captain Mike Hatcher to track down where the ship sank. Using his experienced crew, Hatcher quickly found this amazing wreck, and recovered the largest among ever cargo from a sunken ship, 300,000 pieces of porcelains from the sank ship. Most of the porcelain was made in Fujian.

GT: Are the prices paid too high?

McKillop: I think works of art are rather like houses. It is very difficult to put a price on them. It is worth what someone is willing to pay. Sometimes you get a crazy price at an auction, just because two people are fighting, it's like a kind of passion. So there is no such thing as a price, it's what somebody's willing to pay.

Hyams: The value of an object is what is paid in public auction against the rest of the world. As far as exploitation goes, I would say that the vast majority of Chinese, Japanese, Greeks, Romans, French, and any other nation that has had their heritage stolen, are today resigned to the status quo, and can buy their pieces when they come on to the market, if they have the resources.

Jonsson Li, director of The Big Ben Award, also contributed to this article.