Chinese famille-rose (rose family) porcelain wares of the Qianlong period are extremely rare on the market, with most examples currently housed in the National Palace Museum in Taipei and other museums around the world.

When these pieces do come to auction, they sell for astronomical prices. Earlier this year at Sotheby’s Hong Kong, a famille-rose porcelain bowl was sold for HK$239 million ($30.4 million).

Sotheby’s said that these so-called yangcai porcelain commissions were the very epitome of the ware produced by the Jingdezhen imperial kilns. They were made as one-of-a-kind items, sometimes in pairs, but never in large quantities.

“This is a major work of art, it is as if we had just discovered a Caravaggio,” Olivier Valmier, the Asian arts expert at the auction house, said before the sale.