The Asia trade comes to London Anyone inspired by the National Portrait Gallery's The Lost Prince to visit the Weiss Gallery for the handsome Tudor and Stuart portraits which it sells is in for a surprise this week. Weiss, which is sponsoring The Lost Prince, has taken down its portraits, and in their place will be an assortment of ancient Himalayan works of art, the walls bedecked with central Asian textiles. This sudden, radical transformation is only a temporary one. The gallery has taken its pictures to Paris for the Paris Tableau fair for Old Masters and, like another dozen or so central London galleries, is being used to accommodate an influx of overseas dealers in art from the Asian continent who are setting up shop for Asian Art in London, a festival of Indian, Chinese, Japanese and Himalayan art that involves not only dealers, but auction rooms and museums. Now in its 15th year, it has attracted more overseas galleries to take part than ever. The message, according to Roger Keverne, a dealer in Chinese works of art, is that not only is London historically a centre for the Asian art trade - the family firms Marchant, Sydney L Moss and A&J Speelman, have been active in London since early in the last century - but that it is still, in spite of burgeoning markets in Hong Kong, Tokyo, New York and Paris, a centre of expertise in Asian art, with a huge pool of stock - enough to attract collectors and scholars from all over the world. Keverne, who has been in the business since he started working at Spink nearly 40 years ago, before setting up on his own in 1997, is expecting hundreds of mainland Chinese to make the trip to London this year. For the event, he has assembled more than 100 works, ranging from a simple Neolithic pottery jar priced at £2,750 to a blue-and-green-enamelled Kangxi period dish decorated with flaming, pearl-chasing dragons at £187,000. Across the street in Mayfair is Giuseppe Eskenazi, whose father founded a gallery in London specialising in Chinese ceramics in 1960. Eskenazi has long had a reputation as one of the leading dealers in the field internationally, and next week opens his first exhibition devoted to richly ornamental imperial Qing dynasty porcelain of the kind that the Chinese have been particularly keen to repatriate. Twenty works all herald from a private European collection and were acquired in the 1980s and 1990s, when prices were not comparable to today's. These examples are now valued at between £100,000 and several million pounds each. An elaborately decorated, pear-shaped famille rose ruby vase, just 22cm high and made at the imperial kiln in Jingdezhen, is priced at £7.5 million. Indian, Islamic and Japanese exhibitions are also prominent among the 54 galleries taking part, with contemporary art more of a feature than before. Here, Rossi & Rossi, which specialises in classical and contemporary Tibetan art, has already opened the first exhibition for US-based artist, Tsherin Sherpa, and it has sold out. Sherpa paints images of Tibetan Buddhist spirits and gods using the traditional thangka technique, but places them in foreign environments. Against rich backgrounds of gold and platinum leaf, the paintings (example pictured) were priced from $10,000 to $38,000. The acid test of the market, though, will come with the auctions which begin next week, focusing on China and Japan. After last year's gold rush, in which UK sellers reaped over £70 million pounds in a week, this year the expectations are not so high. Sotheby's, Christie's and Bonhams estimate that their sales could bring between £30 million and £45 million, and only one lot, a rare, blue-and-white Yuan dynasty jar at Bonhams, is estimated to fetch more than £1 million. This tallies with the spring auction figures this year for Sotheby's and Christie's in Hong Kong, together with the main Beijing auctioneers, Guardian and Poly, which fell by 43 per cent from 2011. Among the contributing factors have been the slow down in Chinese economic growth, the tightening of bank loans and a stricter surveillance of imports into the country, which can entail customs duties of up to 34 per cent. Recently a number of individuals working for shipping companies have been detained by the authorities on the suspicion of misrepresenting the value of imported art and antiques. "The Chinese market has cooled down," concedes Keverne, "but competition for the best things is still going to be intense."