A Chinese 'Nanking Cargo' gold rectangular ingot

The gold ingots offered in the following lots were part of the Nanking cargo, salvaged in 1985 and put up for sale at Christie's Amsterdam in the spring of 1986. The cargo included over a hundred thousand pieces of Chinese porcelain, besides some finds of western metalwork, stonewares and gold. In total, 125 gold ingots were retrieved from the shipwreck, of which 8 are currently re-offered.
Used as a mean of payment in China, the ingots were rarely transported to the Western world, and having been melted down in later days in China, they are rare surviving pieces of a once-known payment system.