CaratSotheby's Hong Kong jewellery sale makes HK$58.8m, 294 lots offered
A 44.90-carat Ceylon sapphire pendant led at HK$1,800,000, 2.57 times its HK$700,000 high estimate. The house's own page carries no sale total; that figure is Rapaport's.
Hong Kong clears the mid-market. Sotheby's Fine Jewelry sale in Hong Kong made HK$58,800,000, Rapaport reports. The house's own page gives the sale 294 lots and shows bidding running from 9 September to a close on 23 September.
If you consign coloured stones: One 44.90-carat Ceylon sapphire cleared 2.57 times its high estimate while four other top lots clustered near theirs.
If you set estimates: The without-reserve earrings closed at 0.60 times the high estimate, the only top-five lot to finish under its range.
What this is not: A house-published result. Sotheby's has released no sale total and the HK$58,800,000 figure is one outlet's report.
| Lot | Price (HKD) | High estimate (HKD) | Against high |
|---|---|---|---|
| 44.90-ct Ceylon sapphire pendant | 1,800,000 | 700,000 | 2.57× |
| 11.08-ct W–X, VVS2 diamond pendant | 832,000 | 450,000 | 1.85× |
| Graff pendant necklace, 27.60 ct | 832,000 | 800,000 | 1.04× |
| 5.13-ct F, VVS2 unmounted diamond | 960,000 | 950,000 | 1.01× |
| Pink diamond earrings, 2.08 and 2.21 ct | 1,200,000 | 2,000,000 | 0.60× |
IThe sapphire clears its range
One lot led. The 44.90-carat pear-shaped Ceylon sapphire sits in a surround of about 17 carats of brilliant-cut diamonds. It made 2.57 times its high estimate.
The rest did not. Two of the other four top lots landed within 5% of their high estimates. The pink diamond earrings, sold without reserve, made 0.60 times theirs.
IITwo dollar figures, two implied rates
The conversions differ. Rapaport converts the sale total to US$7.5m and the top lot to US$228,472. Both are that outlet's arithmetic rather than the house's.
The rates disagree. Those two conversions imply 7.84 and 7.88 Hong Kong dollars to the US dollar. The peg band runs 7.75 to 7.85, so the second sits outside it.
IIIThe sale ran a fortnight
Bidding ran a fortnight. Sotheby's own page records bidding opening 9 September and closing 23 September at 03:00 UTC. The single date in the trade report is that closing date.
No total is published. The auction page and the results index were both fetched and neither carries a sale total. The lot data served covers 48 of the 294 lots, all 48 sold.
01What would change this call+
A house-published total. If Sotheby's posts its own figure for sale hk1782 and it differs from HK$58,800,000, the total printed here is the trade report's and not the record. The lot-level prices would be unaffected: those are carried on the house's own page.
02A timed online sale has no saleroom session+
A timed sale opens for bidding on one date and closes on another, lot by lot, without an auctioneer calling a room. Sotheby's own data for this sale gives an acceptsBids date of 9 September and a startsToClose date of 23 September, with individual lots closing minutes apart after that. A trade report that names one date is naming the close. The distinction matters when a result is compared with a live saleroom sale on the same day, because the bidding behind a timed result accumulated over a fortnight rather than in a few minutes.
03Method · the desk’s arithmetic+
Rapaport's write-up was fetched directly, 467,409 bytes, and its own JSON-LD gives datePublished 2026-09-24T09:19:31+00:00 and dateModified 09:39:29. Every figure taken from it was confirmed present in the raw bytes rather than in a summary: '58.8 million', '228,472', '44.90', 'HKD 700,000', '290 lots' and 'September 23' each grep to at least one hit. Sotheby's own auction page for sale hk1782 was then fetched separately, 781,673 bytes, and read out of the embedded GraphQL state rather than the rendered page. That state carries the sale's own lot connection with totalCount 294 and hasNextPage true, the auction dates acceptsBids 2026-09-09T03:00Z and startsToClose 2026-09-23T03:00Z, and 48 BidState records on the first page, of which 48 carry isSold true and a final price. Those 48 final prices sum to HK$11,572,480, which is not printed as a sale total anywhere in this article because it covers 48 of 294 lots and excludes both of the two largest lots named in the table. The results index was fetched as a third door and returns the sale as a Past Auction dated 9–23 September 2026 with its price element loaded dynamically, so it carries no total in its served bytes either. Neither Sotheby's page yields a sale total, which is why the HK$58,800,000 figure is attributed to Rapaport in the headline furniture, in the table caption and in the desk's view rather than reported as the house's own. The archive was searched by entity and by figure before filing: '44.90' and '228,4' return nothing; 'Fine Jewel' returns 23 older articles, none covering sale hk1782; this paper's 18 September coverage of Sotheby's Hong Kong concerns the Magnificent Jewels sale, a different sale with a different total, so the verdict is a different entity-event rather than a repeat.
Elmwood's puts a £2m high estimate on an 8.03-carat blue
The next blue diamond with a published estimate, and the sale it goes into on 1 October.
The trade, filed before the New York open.
Prices, tenders and the one story that moved the industry overnight. Ninety seconds.
Subscribe free →