A British brother and sister cleaned out their late parents’ dusty suburban attic and stumbled onto a fortune — an 18th century Chinese porcelain vase that sold at auction last night for a whopping $69.3 million.
That’s 40 times the auction house’s estimate, and the highest price ever paid for a single piece of Asian art, according to representatives at Bainbridge’s of West London, where the artwork was sold.
The stunned siblings — who had no clue the 16-inch vase was so valuable — immediately bolted out of the auction house after the gavel fell to take in some air.
The blue and yellow vase is believed to have been made around 1740 and dates back to the royal court of Qianlong, the fifth emperor in the Qing dynasty.
It’s unclear how the vase — decorated with a fish motif — ended up in suburban London, but experts think it was taken out of China probably around the end of the Second Opium War in 1860.
After 30 minutes, the sale finally went to an unidentified Chinese man seated in the front row on a gilded sofa who refused to divulge his identity.
On its blog, the auction house called the vase a “masterpiece.”