Latest news with #Qianlong
Daily Record
23-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Daily Record
BBC Bargain Hunt star's record-breaking win on £390k rare attic item that was left for 50 years
Bargain Hunt's Charles Hanson uncovered the show's most expensive ever find in an old teapot, which had been left rotting in a loft for half a century, with its owners unaware that it was one of only three in the world. One of Bargain Hunt's best ever finds had been collecting dust in a Derbyshire attic for years before it went on to sell for a staggering £390,000 at auction. Expert Charles Hanson uncovered a Chinese teapot that had been rotting away in a loft for half a century, branding it as 'the most important object' he has ever sold. The 18th century teapot was almost thrown out in a spring clean by its owners. Luckily, the rare Chinese wine ewer was rescued in time for it to make an appearance on the BBC show - and for viewers to discover it's one of only three similar pieces internationally known. The antique had originally been inherited from World War II serviceman Ronald Wadsworth, a Burma Star medal owner. However, it was almost donated to a charity episode before the 2023 episode of the BBC show identified it as playing an important role in Chinese Emperor Qianlong's court, the Express r eports. Antique expert Charles explained on the show: 'Emperor Qianlong who was that great Emperor of the Arts, he wanted his Beijing enamelist to make the very best. And the quality is simply out of this world. "This is one of only three known, one's in a museum in Taiwan, one's in the museum of Beijing, China, and out of humble Burton-Upon-Trent, voila – unbelievably we have another. "It's probably what Faberge is to Russians and what imperial enamel is to Chinese billionaires and this to me, is a must-have object for any important Chinese connoisseur wishing to buy the best of Emperor Qianlong's treasures. 'This object for me, is in its historical placement, the most important object I've ever sold.' He continued: 'Unbeknown to the owner, it had been in his house, in his loft, for over 50 years. "His grandfather, Ronald, was in Japan in the mid-early 1940s, and it came home and it just languished." Despite its tremendous value, the teapot did not immediately stand out as valuable. Explaining why this was to his co-star Natasha Raskin-Sharp, Charles said: ' It was sleepy, it took a while to wake up. "But because we thought, this is interesting, so we booked it in at a low estimate, [thinking] it might be worth £100 to £150." He added: 'And then, as we look at the objects and we begin to research, suddenly we increase that guide to between £20,000 and £40,000. "Now we're advising the market that this important ewer is probably going to be guided at between £100,000 and £150,000. But though, we're still not at boiling point – literally!' In the end, the rare piece made an eye watering £390,000 at auction, breaking a record for the show. BBC Bargain Hunt airs on BBC One at 12:15 and 13:15 through from Mondays to Thursdays each week.
Scientific American
05-05-2025
- Science
- Scientific American
Ancient Poems Reveal the History of the Endangered Yangtze Porpoise
Around 1745, Chinese emperor and poet Qianlong was sailing on the Yangtze River toward the eastern city of Zhenjiang when he encountered a breathtaking sight: a group of what we now call Yangtze finless porpoises (Neophocaena asiaeorientalis asiaeorientalis) emerged from the water's surface. 'Porpoises chased moonlight on silvered tides, as dragons summoned storm-clouds loom in sight,' he wrote in a poem that was later published in the Imperial Collection of Poems, Volume II. Almost 300 years later, scientists wanted to chart the historical range of this critically endangered, bulbous-headed cetacean—so they combed hundreds of ancient Chinese poems to seek mentions of it, hoping to map its historical distribution and thus better understand threats to this fragile subspecies. Found exclusively in China's Yangtze River, it is the world's only freshwater porpoise. About 1,250 individuals are left in the wild. 'Having access to past data allows us to detect when declines began and correlate those changes with potential threats like habitat destruction, climate change, overhunting, disease or the introduction of invasive species,' says Yaoyao Zhang, an ecologist at the Institute of Hydrobiology, Chinese Academy of Sciences. On supporting science journalism If you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today. Zhang and her colleagues turned to ancient poems because official records rarely mentioned these animals. Using an online database of Chinese literature, 'we searched for various historical names of the Yangtze finless porpoise across dynastic poetry, manually verifying each mention to ensure it referred to the porpoise and not other animals,' Zhang says. 'The poets vividly described the actual behaviors of the porpoises [using language] such as 'blowing waves...,' 'surging waves ...' and 'bowing to the wind,'' she adds. The research, published on Monday in Current Biology, revealed 724 poems that mentioned the porpoises. Half contained information about where they were seen. This window into the past revealed that the porpoises' range has decreased by around 65 percent over 1,400 years, with an accelerated decline in the past century. Poems from the distant past mentioned these animals living in tributaries and lakes along the Yangtze, but in more recent poems, these references dramatically decreased. The researchers concluded that the subspecies' range in these tributaries and lakes has declined by 91 percent. The study 'builds on many prior examples on how historical texts of various kinds can help understand past species distributions and, not least, human-caused biodiversity losses,' says Jens-Christian Svenning, a macroecologist at Aarhus University in Denmark, who was not involved with the new research. For example, scientists reconstructed the former composition of fauna in Greece with the aid of descriptions from ancient epic poems. Though there can be challenges to this approach—and sometimes inaccuracies—there's 'certainly much potential' to apply this method to other species and in other areas of the world, Svenning says. For their next step, Zhang says she and her team are planning to dig back into the poems they have collected to search for information about 'what the river looked like in the past, how big the groups of porpoises used to be and how they might have behaved before their numbers dwindled.'
