A Chinese bowl that a family from New York state bought at a garage sale for a mere $3, turned out to be a rare 1,000 year-old treasure and has just sold at auction for $2.2 million. The ceramic Chinese bowl measuring five inches in diameter with a “saw-tooth” pattern etched around its white exterior sat on the family's mantel for years. The artifact went to a London dealer, Giuseppe Eskenazi, at Sotheby’s auction house in New York yesterday, according to an NBC News report on Wednesday, March 20.
Sotheby’s reports that the Chinese bowl hails from the “Northern Song Dynasty”, said to have ruled China from 960 to 1127 a.d., and known for its advances in the arts and culture.
The Wall Street Journal reports that the bowl had a pre-auction estimate of between $200,000 and $300,000. But Tuesday the hammer fell at an astonishing price of $2,225,000.
The N.Y. Daily News called the auction a, “fierce bidding battle”, with the London dealer Eskenazi prevailing in the end.
The family that purchased the bowl at what’s been described as a tag or garage sale in 2007, had kept it on their living room mantel in the years since. They finally became curious about it and brought it to expert appraisers for review.
There were no additional details about exactly where the garage or tag sale which the bowl was purchased from was located, nor the names of the family that just caught a windfall from it.
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