The gods were certainly smiling on the family of a former civil servant after his lifelong collection of Chinese deities sold for £192,000 at auction.

Keith Stevens became a world expert on Chinese gods and goddesses after amassing a collection of thousands of statues and items before his death in July last year.

The ex-Royal Navy, Army and Foreign Office official kept the collection at his home in Mersham, in what visitors dubbed The Cave of a Thousand Buddhas.

His collection was a who’s who of deities which included door gods, hungry ghosts, a heavenly dog who eats the moon, and a sex-changing goddess with 1,000 arms.

It had been expected to bring in £100,000 when it went under the hammer at the Canterbury Auction Galleries, but in a mammoth five-hour sale the valuations were blown away.

Auctioneer Cliona Kilroy said: “This was an excellent result, underlying Mr Stevens’ connoisseurship, collecting prowess, and scholarly approach to a subject few outside of Asia knew so intimately.

“The fact the several buyers knew Mr Stevens and had visited him at his home in Mersham in the Cave of a Thousand Buddhas speaks greatly of the respect and admiration they had for him.”

One of the main bidders was a Singaporean man adding to his 800-strong collection.

Mr Stevens’ family had a front row seat as the sale opened with the sale of a lacquered giltwood figure which had a guide price of £3,000 to £5,000 and sold for £8,600.

It was made in the 1860s and depicted the Imperial Commissioner Lin Tse-hsu, who had defied the British and attempted to crush the opium trade in the 19th century.

Mr Stevens, originally from Heswall on the Wirral in Merseyside, first became fascinated when visiting Chinatown near the docks in Liverpool as a child.

After joining the Foreign Office he bought his first porcelain deity for £5 from an antique shop in the 1950s. He later studied literary Chinese at the London University School of African and Oriental Studies (SOAS) and Hong Kong University.

He was to visit 3,500 temples across China and meticulously documented his discoveries with 30,000 photographs and research. These sold for £3,000 to a Malaysian bidder who vowed to continue Mr Stevens’ research.