Sold for Rs 265 Crore: How a Sacred Nepali Bronze Ended Up at a Hong Kong Auction

A 12th-century Newar Manjushri has become the most expensive Himalayan gilt-bronze ever sold at auction. The price celebrates Kathmandu’s master casters. It also reopens questions about how such objects left Nepal, and who has a say in where they go next.

A record in Hong Kong

On 30 October 2026, a gilt-copper figure of Manjushri, the bodhisattva of wisdom, sold at Christie’s Hong Kong for HK137.35million,about US17.5 million or roughly Rs 265 crore. It was offered in a standalone single-owner sale, Awakening Wisdom: Masterpieces of Buddhist Art from a Private Asian Collection, held during Hong Kong Asian Art Week.

The result was more than double the low estimate. It set a world auction record for a Himalayan gilt-bronze sculpture and was the most expensive lot of Christie’s entire autumn season in Hong Kong. 

The sculpture stands 93 cm high. Christie’s describes it as a masterpiece of the Newar sculptural tradition and compares it with early gilt-copper bodhisattvas held by the British Museum, the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Norton Simon Museum. 

The kings of bronze

The sculpture’s value rests on a lineage of skill that belongs to one community in one valley. The Newar people of the Kathmandu Valley specialised for centuries in casting religious figures, many of which were exported to India and Tibet. Art historian Ian Alsop notes that Newar metal sculpture has continued without a break in the Kathmandu Valley from its earliest known examples to the present. He records that Newar casters worked almost exclusively in nearly pure copper, which they then gilded. 

That tradition is alive. Uku Bahal in Patan remains a centre of bronze casting by Shakya families, using the same lost-wax and fire-gilding methods.

From the Kathmandu Valley to Geneva to Hong Kong

The sculpture’s recorded history begins centuries after it was made. The provenance listed for the lot places it in the George Ortiz Collection, Geneva, by 2002. It was then consigned by an unnamed private Asian collector for the October sale. 

Who was George Ortiz?

George Ortiz (1927–2013) was a Paris-born collector based in Geneva. A trip to Greece in 1949 began a lifetime of collecting. He built what is widely described as one of the finest private collections of ancient and tribal art, shown at the Hermitage, the Pushkin Museum, the Royal Academy in London and the Altes Museum in Berlin.

His reputation as a connoisseur sits beside a record of disputes.He was accused in 1961 of holding stolen property; the matter ended 15 years later with a short suspended sentence. And he campaigned against the 1970 UNESCO and 1995 UNIDROIT conventions, which restrict the export of cultural objects.

The provenance gap

An object with no documented exit from its country of origin is not proof of theft. It is also not proof of lawful sale. The ethical problem sits in that uncertainty, and in who carries the burden of resolving it.

What the law says

Nepal’s Ancient Monument Preservation Act of 1956 criminalises theft from ancient monuments and restricts the export of cultural objects without permission from the Department of Archaeology (Trafficking Culture). Under the system that followed, only objects certified as curios, defined as less than 100 years old, can be sold by registered dealers. A 12th-century religious sculpture falls well outside that category.

Why it matters to the market

Archaeologist Colin Renfrew has argued that buying unprovenanced antiquities indirectly finances the destruction of heritage. What is lost, he says, is not only the object but its context, the record of where and how it was used. 

For a Himalayan sculpture, context means a shrine, a guthi (a community trust that cares for a deity) and a living ritual. The auction trade answers that it acts in good faith, checks stolen-art registers and complies with the law where it sells. Those are real safeguards. 

Nepal’s empty pedestals

Nepal’s interest in this sale is not abstract. After the country opened to the outside world in the 1950s, thousands of sculptures, paintings, windows and doors were removed from temples to supply markets in the United States, Europe and elsewhere, sometimes with the help of corrupt officials. The painter and art historian Lain Singh Bangdel watched it happen. As thefts peaked in the mid-1980s, he prepared Stolen Images of Nepal, published by the Royal Nepal Academy in 1989. The book set photographs of sculptures in their shrines beside images of the same sites after the theft. 

India knows this story well

For Indian readers, Nepal’s experience is familiar. India has lost temple bronzes, stone sculptures and terracottas on a vast scale, and many surfaced in Western museums with provenance papers that later proved false.

The Kapoor case

The central figure is Subhash Kapoor, who ran the Art of the Past gallery on Madison Avenue in New York. US prosecutors say he and his associates trafficked thousands of objects taken from temples, ruins and archaeological sites. Under “Operation Hidden Idol”, US authorities seized more than 2,500 artefacts linked to him, valued at about US$143 million. 

Kapoor’s network also reached Nepal. The Manhattan District Attorney has described him as a trafficker whose material came from Afghanistan, Cambodia, India, Nepal, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and other countries. 

What a record should mean

The Manjushri may have left Nepal lawfully, before 1956, through a channel no one now remembers. It may not have. On the public record, no one outside the sale can say. That uncertainty is the point. 

A world record turns a sacred image into a benchmark. The next seller of a Newar bronze will cite this price. If the market rewards masterpieces without asking how they left the Kathmandu Valley, it tells looters and middlemen that the missing chapter costs nothing.

Questions worth asking

None of these require assuming wrongdoing. They are questions an art and design readership can reasonably put to the trade:

  1. Full provenance before sale. Auction houses could publish everything they know about an object’s movement before its first documented owner, including what they do not know.
  2. Consultation with the source country. Nepal’s Department of Archaeology and campaigners hold photographic archives such as Bangdel’s. A routine pre-sale check against them would cost little.
  3. Transparency after sale. Buyers of sacred objects could be encouraged to make them available for study and public viewing, and to respond openly if a claim emerges.
  4. Investment at home. Restitution is only half the task. With 137 returned objects still waiting in a Kathmandu museum, Nepal needs funding, records and secure shrines to bring gods back to the places they belong.

References

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