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Ceramic Bowl Bought At Yard Sale For $3 Gets Auctioned For $2 Million

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8 years ago

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May 13, 2016 10:19pm EDT

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Mark Andrew

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Ever purchased something from a yard sale that turned out to be more valuable than what you got it for? One family from New York had such experience and it actually changed their lives. Why, you may ask? Well, it’s because they later found out that an old ceramic bowl they bought from was actually worth a fortune.

It’s really a hard-to-believe story about unexpectedly finding a treasure at a yard sale. But reports verify that yes, it did happen to a certain New York-based family. In 2007, the said family went to a local yard sale to check out some items. They later went home with several stuff, including a beige ceramic bowl with a lovely floral pattern.

In 2007, a family in New York bought this old ceramic bowl at a yard sale for $3.

Source: Sotherby's

The years went by and the family didn’t give the 5-inch bowl much thought and simply placed it on the living room’s mantel for years. Besides, it is something they got for merely $3.

Unknown to them, the bowl is of majestic roots. They discovered about this when they eventually took the bowl to an assessor who told them they had an extremely rare historical treasure in their possession.

In an interview with CNN, Sotherby’s Cecilia Leung said:

“At the time, the purchaser had no idea that they had happened upon a 1,000-year-old treasure.”

The “Ding” Bowl was eventually auctioned and sold for more than $2 million.

Source: Sotherby's

As it turned out, the floral ceramic bowl was a “Ding” Bowl from the Northern Song Dynasty in China. Sotherby’s said that the bowl is so rare that the “only one other bowl of the same form, size and almost identical decoration is known; the piece in the British Museum London.”

Fast forward to 2013, the bowl went on auction and was priced at around $200,000 to $300,000. The family eventually managed to sell it for a whooping amount of $2,225,000.