Arts market: A bubble in its infancy?

The country's rapidly growing class of brash tycoons is spending money on fine art and antiques that several decades ago were regarded as useless remains of a feudal past.

Last year, several price records were broken at auctions of Chinese arts, especially traditional arts and crafts.

At a Sotheby's auction in Hong Kong last October, an unidentified Shanghai businessman - who turned out to be mainland stock investor Liu Yiqian - paid an astonishing HK$85.7 million for a rare red saddlewood dragon throne from the period of Emperor Qianlong in the middle Qing Dynasty (1644-1911), a record auction price for a piece of Chinese furniture.