For many Chinese, the Juancheng meteorite shower of February 15, 1997 portended Communist Party Chairman Deng Xiaopeng’s death. Said one man who journeyed to the site near the Yellow River in Shandong Province, “Our Leader protects us from all frontiers, even from above, and when the sky-tissue which separates us from the heavens is torn by a rain of stones, it is time for Our Leader to go and protect us from his new home high in the heavens.” Chairman Deng obliged this directive and died four days later. The Juancheng specimens offered in this assemblage are uncommonly fresh. Most specimens were recovered by schoolchildren in what became an extraterrestrial Easter Egg hunt. As they were paid by weight, the young capitalists soon realized that soaking their stony, porous finds in water would result in greater weights, without realizing the staining effect on the meteorites by doing so. The complete specimen now offered is unusually pristine.

Christie's would like to thank Dr. Alan E. Rubin at the Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics, University of California, Los Angeles for his assistance in preparing this catalog note.