Oh, how we love these stories! When someone keeps a valuable item in their home for years and then one lucky day they found out it is worth a fortune. Take this seemingly normal bowl for instance. It was bought by a family in New York at an ordinary yard sale for only $3 – a perfectly normal price for a second hand work of pottery.
After that, the piece kept a special place in the buyers living room for years, and nobody ever thought of it as anything else than a nice bowl. Five years after the purchase, though, the item proved to be way more than “nice”. After the family became curious about its origin, they had it assessed and discovered that it actually was an extremely rare Chinese piece of pottery from the Song Dynasty, meaning that it was approximately 1,000 years old!
Sotheby’sdescribes the piece as exceptionally beautiful, and we can all agree to that. Experts had believed that it would fetch between $200,000 and $300,000 at auction, but everybody was shocked to see bids go as high as $2 million! The winning bid was a mind blowing $2.225 million, a life-changing sum, as the sellers would probably put it.
The buyer was Giuseppe Eskenazi, a London dealer who knew how to value such a rare and important piece of Eastern history. After all, only one other bowl of similar dimension, shape and decoration is known to have survived the harsh test of time, and that one has been kept in the London British Museum for over six decades!
