The first complete version of the Bible in Chinese has sold at auction for over £56,000 after being given to an Oxfam store in Essex.
The Chinese edition Bible was translated by John Lassar and Joshua Marsham and published as a series between 1815 and 1822, and starting with the Pentateuch.
It was found in a pile of donations by volunteers at Oxfam’s Chelmsford branch, who suspected it might be more valuable than their usual material.
The Bible was put up for auction by Bonhams and was expected to sell for around £600-£800. In fact, after two weeks of bidding, it was bought for a staggering £56,280.
Nick Reeves, Oxfam Chelmsford’s bookshop manager, said of the auction, “We never imagined it might go for this much. We were sat watching the bidding and just seeing it go up and up. When it finally ended, I was in complete shock. We were absolutely speechless.
“It’s amazing to think that a donation from our shop could help raise that much money for Oxfam. It’s just wonderful.”
Various Oxfam stores around the country also came into the possession of a number of rare books and put them up for auction with Bonhams. In total the auction of 23 books raised a total of £105,000, of which more than half came from the proceeds of the Chinese Bible.
Charles Dickens proved to be the next most sought after author. A first edition of “A Christmas Carol” sold for £16,640, while a Dickens’ autograph with a quotation from the novel also went for £12,160.
The first English translation of Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto raised £7,040, while a first edition of Jane Austen’s "Pride and Prejudice" sold for £2,560.
A first edition of J.R.R. Tolkien’s “Return of the King” sold for £2,048.
According to Sotheby’s the most expensive text ever bought at auction was the Codex Leicester, a manuscript created by Leonardo da Vinci. It was bought by Bill Gates in 1994 for $30.8 million, which, adjusted for inflation, would be around $63.3 million today.
