Topic: Now thats expensive

[rustybayonet]

HONG KONG (AP) — A Shanghai collector bought a rare Ming Dynasty cup that's touted as the "holy grail" of China's art world for $36 million at a Hong Kong auction on Tuesday, smashing the previous world record price for Chinese porcelain.

Sotheby's said Liu Yiqian was the winning bidder for the small white cup, which measures just 8 centimeters (3.1 Inches) in diameter and is more than 500 years old. The vessel is known as a "chicken cup" because it's decorated with a rooster and hen tending to their chicks.




http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2014/04/08/ming-dynasty-chicken-cup/7456759/

[Libertas]

Must be nice to literally have money to burn...

$36m...

That's 13 of these (plus change!) -



http://www.topgear.com/uk/car-news/veyron-ss-record-2010-07-06

Rather have the cars...

Or maybe just one of the cars and the rest in bullion to be lost in a boating accident...

[ToddF]

Thar be money in Hong Kong for sure.  Wondered into a store front close to the clock tower, downtown, thinking I might find a little magnet or something touristy for the fridge.  Had a feeling I was in over my head when I noted there were two sales ladies at attention, on every aisle.  A lot of multi million dollar items on open display.  No refrigerator magnets, though. 

[Libertas]

Common people must be herded into the alleys...

I remember (Jeez, 30 some years ago!  Am I that old?    ) getting bootleg anything in HK, Singapore etc was like...hard to miss!

Greed still survives, eh?  How many Party Aparatchuks from the mainland get a piece of this action?  A lot I bet!

[ToddF]

The open selling of bootleg stuff has moved to Manila.  A lot of $5 "official" NBA merch, $2 DVDs of the hottest new movies, $10 Microsoft software suites, and the like.

[Libertas]

Ahh, that makes sense...

The Jewels of the Orient scaled up...Manila, not so much.

Even Korea is immensely more prosperous today than when I was last there...

[ToddF]

Hong Kong may be richer and freer economically, but you know you're behind a wall of totalitarianism when you try to google something.  You can't get past the Chinese version of Google, no matter how hard you try.  It really started pissing me off, whenever I wanted to look up something.   

TV News.  You ain't getting Fox News in Hong Kong.  Heck they don't even have CNN.  You can get Russia Today, AlGorezeera, and CCTV.  BBC was the only thing remotely watchable with news.

Manila gets the main news channels.  For about 5 minutes I thought of how cool it was to turn on O'Reilly, at 8am, with my morning coffee.  Then he started interviewing Karl Rove.  The cool factor was gone.  Click. 

[Libertas]

Hee hee..."cool factor" gone...   

Yeah, surprised the Chi-Com's allow even BBC!  They got that on a half-hour delay or something so the censors can scrub stuff or what?!

Too bad, other than the Chi-Com's...HK would be great...I was only there once, long ago, and it was still in free hands then...

Singapore is still quite nice I hear...that was always a nice place to visit...

The PI could have been so much more, if not for corruption and commie and Muzzie agitators...not sure if their eventual fate is a good one...if I had to guess it would be those two agitators dividing up...whatever...

And if South Korea can survive the North and keep the Beijing Bandits at bay, they have a chance to build a decent nation...

Japan's economic and societal trends are all bad, they may implode...