The British Museum Gets a Giant Gift: $1.27 Billion of Chinese Ceramics

The trustees of one of the world’s most renowned private collection of Chinese ceramics on Wednesday donated all 1,700 objects to the British Museum in a gift that is valued at 1 billion pounds, or $1.27 billion.

The collection, of Sir Percival David, includes the David vases — two blue-and-white porcelains that date to 1351 — and a wine cup decorated with chickens that is thought to have been used by the Chenghua emperor of the Ming dynasty.

Since 2009, the Sir Percival David Foundation had lent the collection to the museum, where it is displayed in a dedicated gallery, but the foundation’s trustees have now decided to make the gift permanent.

George Osborne, the British Museum’s chairman, said in a news release that the donation was “a real vote of confidence” in the museum’s future. The announcement comes about 15 months after the museum fired a curator whom it has accused of stealing from its storerooms.

This is not the first billion-dollar gift to a Western institution. In 1991, Walter H. Annenberg, a publisher and philanthropist, announced he would donate his $1 billion collection of paintings, including works by Manet, van Gogh and Picasso, to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. In 2013, the cosmetics tycoon Leonard A. Lauder promised the Met his collection of Cubist artworks, including 33 Picassos, that was then thought to be worth more than $1 billion.

But such a large donation of objects is rarer for museums in Britain. Two years ago, the British Museum announced “one of the most significant” bequests in its history when a former trustee left the institution his collection of Chinese artworks, including several hundred jades. This year, the museum revealed in its annual report that the donation was worth £123 million, or $156 million.

Sir Percival was born in 1892, in what is now Mumbai, India, to a Jewish family of businessmen with distant links to Iran. An heir to the Sassoon textile and banking fortune, Sir Percival moved to England in 1913; after buying three Chinese ceramics he soon became a passionate collector.

In 1924, he traveled to Beijing for the first time to view the Imperial collection. Finding much of it stored in boxes, he paid for the restoration of a building to display the treasures. Three years later, he became an adviser to China’s National Palace Museums.

Jessica Harrison-Hall, the British Museum’s curator of the Sir Percival David Collections, said in an interview that he was a “remarkable man” dedicated to Chinese culture whose obsessions went beyond collecting to include the translation of 14th-century texts.

Sir Percival, Harrison-Hall said, was not a “stamp collector” who simply looked to acquire a handful of emblematic pieces. Instead, he sought to amass a collection that could be used by scholars, including multiple examples of some works. “You simply couldn’t build up a collection like this today,” she said.