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Last week’s Christie’s and Sotheby’s Asian art sales were led by three important troves of Chinese works that reflected the collecting history in the category and demonstrated the importance of provenance in the current market. The works themselves also told another story about this complicated genre. There are still plenty of collectors who chase trophy works to suit their tastes, but they are paying much closer attention to chain of ownership, as are the auction houses when filling and pricing their sales. And these discerning buyers have very clear demands that must be met before shelling out the big bucks—or even medium bucks.

Christie’s, for instance, sold pieces from the collection of Thomas R. Vaughan—who helmed a New York–based mining company, expanded his operations overseas to places like New Guinea and Indonesia, and amassed a portfolio of delicate Chinese ceramics, with most pieces smaller than four inches. But Vaughan died nearly 50 years ago, and the provenance on all 48 objects in the catalogue states simply, “Thomas R. Vaughan (1908-1979) Collection, New York, and thence by descent within the family.” That murkiness likely gave some buyers pause.

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Altogether the collection made $7.5 million, led by a rare ruby-ground Falangcai “Indian Lotus” wine cup from the Yongzheng period (1723-1735) that sold for $1.6 million. That seems like a remarkable sum for a 2 ½-inch-high cup—except, it’s not. Christie’s cited in the catalogue a less desirable ruby-ground Falangcai “Prunus” cup from the same period, but from a known collection, that sold in 2016 at Sotheby’s Hong Kong for more than three times as much.

On the other side of the coin, provenance was hugely important to Christie’s offering of a dozen pieces of 16th and 17th century huanghuali and zitan furniture in the same sale. The collection fell under the anonymous property title “Shanruoshui Xuan: Property from an American Collection,” but art world insiders suggest it likely belonged to the late Fidelity Investments C.E.O. Edward “Ned” Johnson III, who used his billions to amass vast holdings of Asian works of art, buying much of it from Hong Kong in the 1990s. (Christie’s did not immediately respond to a request for comment.) In any case, 10 of the 12 pieces sold, totaling $10.9 million against an estimate of $3.8 million. A 10-foot-long trestle-leg table sold for $2.3 million against an estimate of $800,000, and an extremely rare waistless rectangular table sold for $914,400 against an estimate of $200,000. A rare 6-foot-long corner-leg table sold for $3.4 million, more than 10 times its estimate of $300,000. There will likely be a lot more from this collection in coming seasons.

The ceramics collection, which Sotheby’s had guaranteed, brought in a total of $46 million. The top lot was a rare guan lobed dish from the Southern Song dynasty (“guan” refers to the kiln where it was fired), which more than doubled its estimate to make $7.2 million after a battle between three bidders.

Ise acquired some of the items at auction in recent years, which gives us useful market case studies. A Longquan celadon “kinuta” vase from the Southern Song dynasty that he purchased nine years ago for about $605,000 sold for only about $440,000, and a Junyao blue-glazed tripod incense burner from the Northern Song–Jin dynasty that he bought eight years ago for $368,000 sold for only $228,000. In comparison, a rare “beishoku” guan vase from the Southern Song dynasty (“beishoku” refers to its rice color) that he bought in 2015 for just $1.7 million doubled in price this time around, after it appeared on the cover of a book about the collection.

Bonhams, for its part, had a similarly mixed sale this week. The top lot of their Fine Chinese Art sale was a blue and white “boys” jar and cover from the Jiajing period that had once been in the collections of both J.M. Hu and T.T. Tsui. It last sold at auction at Christie’s Hong Kong in the frothy days of 2007, when it made $3.9 million. This week, it made half that. On the flip side, an olive-green-glazed vase and cover from the Northern Qi dynasty that last sold at Bonhams in 2017 for £150,000 ($198,000) doubled that this time around.

Indeed, this market, more than many, has countless outside forces weighing on it, as the complex matrix of results amply demonstrated. As Mason told me, “When I first started [at Sotheby’s in the late 1970s], we were gentlemen in England discussing the quality of the blue on the cup; now we are like James Bond figuring out international intrigue.”