Beijing's auction houses are in buoyant mood about the upcoming spring season after last year's autumn sales and the March quarterly bidding wars showed signs that the art market was emerging from the economic downturn.

Last year, the autumn auction results for the city's major auction houses demonstrated a strong recovery. The total sales of the major auction houses reached over 5.67 billion yuan. For Beijing-based China Guardian Auction, China's largest auction company, sales reached 1.532 billion yuan, a new peak in its 16-year history.

A woman submits a bid during a charity auction at China Guardian Auction Co Ltd that was in aid of quake-ravaged Haiti. [China Daily]

The regular and small-scale March quarterly auctions are usually considered as warm-ups for the big Spring auctions, most of which are scheduled to go under hammer in early June, and which are one of the two major auctions of the year.

China Guardian Auction claimed that the total sales of their quarterly auction from March 20 to 22 reached 260 million yuan, another record for the company, and a significant increase on last year's March sales of 140 million yuan.

Beijing Poly Auction, another major auction house, announced nearly 120 million yuan in sales in its recent auction that wrapped up on March 25, compared with a miserly 40 million yuan for the same period last year.