简体中文
A court in Tianjin has decided to auction a house decorated with ceramic chips on August 8 to pay off its landlord's debt.
The People's Court of Dongli District in Tianjin previously planned to do the public sale on July 22, but it was postponed for 17 days. The building's initial bidding price would be more than 140 million yuan ($20.8 million), the Beijing News reported.
The Porcelain House, located in Chifeng street, Heping district, is a four-story art museum owned by Zhang Lianzhi. Zhang has to sell the house due to an economic dispute, but he claimed the ceramic building was worth nearly 9.79 billion yuan ($1.5 billion), citing an assessment report from an evaluation company he commissioned.
Why the huge price difference?
The Porcelain House was originally a French style building dating back to the 1920s. It was the former residence of Huang Rongliang, a Chinese diplomat in the Republic of China era (1912 - 1949). Zhang bought it for 30 million yuan from Tianjin commercial authorities in 2000, according to Huang Xiaoyan, Zhang's assistant.
Zhang, a porcelain collector, began renovating the house in 2000. It took him 10 years to complete the decoration, which involved covering the inside and outside of the building with hundreds of thousands of porcelain pieces, a staff worker in the house said. The house opened to the public as a museum in 2007.
More than 700 million fragments of ancient porcelain, 13,000 ancient porcelain vases and bowls, and many other antiques were used in his decoration, as well as hundreds of pieces of furniture dating to Ming (1368 - 1644) and Qing (1644 - 1911) dynasties, claimed Zhang.
However, the court's evaluation excluded those porcelain pieces. Zhang and the building's bid winner can decide for themselves about the porcelain pieces after the deal is finished, a judge surnamed Zheng working at the Dongli district court told Tianjin media.
On the contrary, Zhang's assessment involved two parts: the house property that's worth 330 million yuan and the porcelain, 946 million yuan.
Is it really worth that much?
A netizen who visited the Porcelain House of Tianjin said seeing that many chips embedded in the ceiling made them "suffer trypophobia".
In a photography forum, someone looking to visit the house asked veteran photographers how to beautifully shoot the house. "Don't bother. It's ugly," said another surfing the forum.
Beijing News also interviewed several visitors at the museum. "Special. Not like other museums," and "Very odd," were some of the answers.
But Zhang Lianzhi, the house owner, said he was just trying to pass on porcelain culture and it's inevitable that it won't satisfy everyone.
Besides aesthetics, the authenticity of the porcelain is also doubted.
Bian Zhengming, a cultural relic expert, said most of the porcelain chips decorating the house walls or ceilings were from the late Qing Dynasty and some of them are just modern pieces, much different from Zhang's claims.
Did the house owner violate the law?
The previously mentioned problems don't even provoke the most criticism. What concerns cultural experts the most was that Zhang's behaviors may have damaged the cultural relic.
After Zhang's decoration, the house was no longer one of the model buildings that represent Tianjin's historical features, said Fu Lei, director of Tianjin Memory, a local volunteer organization devoted to protecting architectural heritage. In fact, the renovation destroyed the historic house, and made it a scar of the city, Fu added.
The renovation of the Porcelain House broke the law, a staff member at the cultural relic institute in Heping district of Tianjin said in an interview with local media. As Huang Rongliang's former residence, the building's decoration must be authorized by related governmental departments. But Zhang didn't do that.
As for his alleged violation of the law, Zhang said his ceramic chip layer was corrosion-resistant and protected the house from collapse. According to Zhang, the house was on the verge of falling down when he bought it.
(CHINA DAILY)
