Yuan Blue & White II

Blue and white  porcelains from the Yuan dynasty are very rare and valuable. It was reported there are only 30 odd pieces in the whole world. Most of these porcelains are kept in museums. With the remaining few in private hands, one can expect these porcelains will be hot items in auction houses. As a result, there will be a lot of high quality fakes in the market to fool the innocent collectors. Do not be tempted if someone shows you a blue and white vase from the Yuan dynasty. Basically, it is  very difficult to find one genuine one around.

I mentioned earlier that a blue and white jar from the Yuan dynasty fetched 230 million RMB. Here is another story on the discovery of another rare blue and white vase and the owner did not even know that the vase was so valuable.


230 million RMB for this Yuan dynasty jar

This happened to an old English man who was living alone with a dog. There was a vase sitting somewhere in the house. Every time the dog would like to go near the vase and wage his tail. One day, some body from the auction house visited the old man. He spotted this blue and white vase and immediately knew that it was good stuff.  He told the old man that the vase was an antique and could be sold in auction. The old man agreed to put it up for sale in a local auction house (in the remote town where he stayed). Guess what, the vase was successfully auctioned for a high  price of 50 million RMB (3.445 million pounds). This was in 2005 in a remote town in England. By today's standard, if the vase is to be auctioned in major auction house (like Sotheby), who knows how much the vase would fetch? The old man was stunned to realise that the most valuable thing in his possession was actually this vase. He looked at the dog (still waging its tails) with thankful eyes. He was thankful that all these years of waging its tails in the vicinity of the vase, the dog did not break it.

British people are known to keep records of things and events. So when the old man checked the records, he realised that the vase was bought (probably by his father) in 1900 at a price of 10 pounds. So 105 years later, the value of the vase rocketed to 3.4 million pounds, an increase of 10 times a day.

Blue and white vase from Yuan dynasty.