A British couple once brought a family curio -- an ornate Chinese vase that they owned for decades -- onto the precursor of the "Antiques Roadshow" for a little bit of history about the heirloom.
The snooty curator of "Going For a Song" declared the 16-inch-tall porcelain vase nothing more than a "very clever reproduction."
Luckily, the couple, longtime residents of the working-class London suburb of Pinner, didn't listen to the "expert" some 40 years ago, and held onto the piece.
The vase went back to a bookshelf, and later to the dusty attic of their modest home.
The couple grew old, and eventually passed away. The vase was nearly forgotten.
Then this year, their surviving relatives, the 70-year-old sister of the husband and her adult two children, were cleaning out the attic.
They were hunting for family heirlooms and items to sell at a run-of-the-mill estate auction, like furniture or carpets.
"We were clearing her brother's house after he died, and I looked at the vase and said, 'Oh, that looks nice.' It had just sat on the bookcase doing absolutely nothing," David Reay, manager of the Bainbridges auction house, told the London Evening Standard.
"They told me it had been valued at just [$1,300] two months earlier. They also told me the owner had taken it on 'Going For a Song' on the BBC about 40 years ago. He was told it was a very clever reproduction."
Reay knew it was valuable, but he still had it sent to the Arts Club of London where it sat on a metal table in a busy kitchen in between public viewings.
Finally, experts evaluated the piece and estimated it could sell for over a million dollars, noting it was made around 1740 for the royal court of Qianlong, the fifth emperor of the Qing dynasty -- a period when Chinese porcelain-making had reached its zenith.
The two adult children, a brother and sister, believed it was "just an ornament" that had been in the family since the 1930s, and passed down from a relative who traveled internationally.
The auction house of Peter Bainbridge -- a tiny business with just three full-time employees -- went ahead with the auction on Thursday.
The vase had attracted worldwide attention, particularly from China's nascent but growing cadre of wealthy art collectors.
Bainbridge's modest auction house was packed.
"The room was crackling with excitement. The couple were down in the middle of the audience, but no one knew," said Bainbridge staffer Peggy Bates.
Then the bidding began.
Bainbridge, whose big gest sale to that point had been $160,000, kept his cool as bids pushed the price past $10 million, then $30 million, then $50 million, to finally close at $69.5 million after 30 minutes of in tense bidding.
"There was a si lence that wrapped it self around the sale as the figure grew slowly but surely up to the sky," Bainbridge said.
"I'm an auctioneer, so at that point, I'm just doing the professional job I'm paid to do. But once the hammer's down, you do take stock slightly, and think, Oh, wow, that's really rather a lot of money."
The couple had to run out of the room to catch their breath.
And Bainbridge himself had to pause to realize he'll collect a $13 million premium on top of the closing sale price.
Once Britain's value-added tax was tacked on, the final price was $85.9 million, won by an anonymous buyer in China who phoned in the bid.
The brother and sister were utterly stunned.
"She told me she wished it happened 30 years ago," Reay, the Bainbridge manager, said.
Bainbridge himself called it a "fairy tale" for an "utterly normal" family.
The couple, like the buyer, insisted on remaining anonymous.
Their sale was the most expensive piece of Chinese artwork ever. .
Little is known about the vase, but it was likely looted from a Peking imperial palace by British and French soldiers during the Second Opium War, some 150 years ago.
British troops were given free rein to loot Emperor Xianfeng's Summer Palace of Gold.
They then torched the place and marched away laden with tons of booty.
China's booming economy means new collectors are joining the market all the time, and wealthy buyers are keen to repatriate treasures from their heritage.
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