Collectors may spend a combined US$100 million at Hong Kong’s first major art sale since the one-year anniversary of the collapse of Lehman Brothers, said Sotheby’s, as accelerating economic growth in China spurs demand.

A single Chinese stamp has sold for $332,000 at Zurich Asia’s “Stamps and Postal History” autumn auction in Hong Kong Friday.

The 1897 Qing dynasty stamp was bought by a Beijing collector and set a new world record for a single Chinese stamp.

It is an extremely rare 1897 small one-dollar overprint on a three-cent Chinese Red Revenue stamp.

A Rembrandt masterpiece is expected to fetch up to £25 million ($41 million) when it goes under the hammer at Christie’s on December 8, 2009.

The painting could break the record price for a Rembrandt, which currently stands at £19,800,000 paid for Portrait Of A Lady Aged 62, in December 2003.

The painting, titled “Portrait of a man, half-length, with his arms akimbo,” was painted in 1658 and has been unseen in public for nearly 40 years.

Three boats previously owned by jailed financier Bernard Madoff, that was sentenced in June to 150 years in prison, will be auctioned off in Fort Lauderdale on November 17.

Among the boats to be sold are a 55-foot, 1969 Rybovich luxury fishing boat called Bull that’s said to be worth about $2.2 million and Little Bull, a 24-foot center-console boat.

“We anticipate strong interest in the auction,” Matt Amata, vice president of National Liquidators, said in a statement Wednesday.

A 66 million-year-old skeleton of one of the largest known Tyrannosaurus rex specimens ever discovered will be up for sale at an auction in LasVegas on October 3.

The rare skeleton - dubbed ‘Samson’ - is arguably one of the three most complete specimens to have been discovered, auction house Bonhams said.

Native to North America, Tyrannosaurus rex is recognized as the ‘Tyrant Lizard King’ and is the most famous of the behemoths of the “Age of Dinosaurs.”

One of the earliest Bugatti racing cars is expected to fetch up to 2.4 million euros ($3.4 million) at a sale in France, said auction house Bonhams.

Built in 1912, it was raced by by the manufacturer’s eponymous founder, Ettore, at Le Mans and on the Mont Ventoux.

Compared to the other Bugattis of the era, it has an unusually large engine and uses chains to drive the rear wheels.