A Chinese face or two in the crowd at the world’s auction houses often means one thing: the gavel will fall on a price far beyond the seller’s wildest dreams.

Fierce bidding by Chinese buyers for a vase at a small London auctioneer in November, for example, drove the price up nearly 40 times beyond its estimate, from around $1.9 million to $70 million.

It was the highest price ever paid for a Chinese artwork sold at auction and equivalent to a huge lottery win for the sellers, who found the 18th Century Qianlong Emperor-era piece while clearing out a house after a relative died.

Christie’s notched up the biggest sales figures in the art auction industry’s history last year, the firm announced Thursday, with record global sales of $5 billion.

And Chinese collectors continued to increase their prominence in the auction rooms as the number of buyers from China, Taiwan and HK accounted for a fifth of the total.

Sales in 2010 were up 53 percent with the firm selling more than half the world’s works over $50 million, including the most expensive painting ever to sell at auction: Pablo Picasso’s “Nude, Green Leaves, and Bust” for $106.5 million.

A sumptuous painting of the Madonna and child by Renaissance master Titian sold for a record $16,882,500 Thursday in New York.

The Sotheby’s auction easily broke a 20-year-old record of $13.6 million for a Titian.

The painting, “A Sacra Conversazione: The Madonna and Child with Saints Luke and Catherine of Alexandria,” depicts the Virgin Mary and the two saints posed around a chubby infant Jesus as he stretches out his left hand.

A painting of sunflowers and a nude by French artist Paul Gauguin is expected to fetch up to 10 million pounds at auction next month, Christie’s said Friday.

Gauguin’s Nature morte à l’Esperance, a still life painted in 1901 when he was living in Tahiti, will be the star lot of a sale of impressionist and modern art in London.

The painting was presented to the media on Friday, the first time it has been seen in public since 1989.

A monster bluefin tuna sold for a record 396,000 dollars in the year’s first auction at the world’s biggest fish market in Tokyo Wednesday amid intense pre-dawn bidding.

The 342-kilogramme (752-pound) fish — caught off Japan‘s northern island of Hokkaido — fetched a winning bid of 32.49 million yen (396,000 dollars).

It was the highest such bid yet, topping the previous record of 20.02 million yen paid for a bluefin tuna in 2001, the officials said.

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s 1977 Peugeot 504 has received a one million dollar bid after the car was put on an international auction Saturday

Proceeds from the sale of the Peugeot 504 will go to a fund for homes for disabled people and to needy.

Earlier, officials had said they hoped the car would fetch more than the $2,000 such cars usually sell for in Iran.