Barely a week after a British survey concluded that China had overtaken the United Kingdom to become the world's second-largest art market after the United States, Artprice has re-crunched the numbers and crowned China number one.

To get there, Artprice limited its scope to fine-art sales at public auctions, filtering out results from what they refer to as the "opaque" gallery market. On that basis, they found that in 2010 "China accounted for 33% of global Fine Art sales (paintings, installations, sculptures, drawings, photography, prints), versus 30% in the USA, 19 % in the UK and 5% in France." The gallery and private-dealer scene is still seriously underdeveloped in China, so it's no surprise that excluding it boosted China's percentage while depressing the West's market share.

Looking closer, what the Artprice survey highlights most clearly is the rapid growth of China's domestic auction houses. While a lot of attention has been paid to the recent success of Sotheby's and Christie's in Hong Kong, China's homegrown market leaders, China Guardian and Poly Auctions, have been flying under the radar. Both these houses clocked up record results in 2010, with total annual sales far in excess of Sotheby's and Christie's results in Hong Kong. Guardian, China's oldest auction house, took RMB 7.55 billion yuan ($1.14 billion) in sales last year, while Poly chalked up RMB 9.15 billion ($1.45 billion). By way of comparison, sales at Christie's and Sotheby's Hong Kong last year totalled $722 million and $685 million respectively.

It's also instructive to see how Chinese artists whose names are almost unknown in the West — like modern masters Fu Baishi, Qi Baishi, Xu Beihong, and Zhang Daqian — are now entering the global rankings. These four all appeared in Artprice's top-ten ranking of global artists by auction revenue for 2010, with Qi Baishi coming in second, edging Andy Warhol into third place.

Much speculation now centers on what treasures might be put on the block as collectors seek to take advantage of the boiling hot Chinese auction market. The pull of the market has already seen 77 lots of imperial porcelain from the storied Meiyintang Collection being consigned to Sotheby's Hong Kong for their Spring sales next month. The Meiyintang Collection is widely considered to be the greatest collection of Chinese porcelain still in private hands in the West, and the lots in this sale, which include superb pieces from the Yuan, Ming, and Qing dynasties, are expected to be hotly contested.