A prestigious auction house in France has fired an art expert after valuing a Chinese vase 4,000 times under its sale price, The Guardian reported.
"The expert made a mistake. One person alone against 300 interested Chinese buyers cannot be right," Jean-Pierre Osenat, the auction house owner, told The Guardian. "He was working for us. He no longer works for us. It was, after all, a serious mistake."
A woman from the United Kingdom sold the vase to Osenat after clearing her mother's house and decided to part ways with it.
The vase was described as a "Large TIANQIUPING porcelain and polychrome enamel vase in the style of the blue-white with globular body and long cylindrical neck, decorated with nine fierce dragons and clouds."
The expert who analyzed the vase regarded it as a 20th-century decoration that couldn't be worth more than $1,950.
But the auction house soon realized this couldn't be after a pre-auction showing flooded with interested buyers, some of which held "lamps and magnifying glasses" up inspecting the piece.
"There were so many registrations we had to stop them," Osenat said. "At that point, we understood something was happening."
The seller was shocked when the vase finally sold for its final bid.
"It's as if she had won the EuroMillions," Osenat commented.
As the director of the auction house's Asian Arts department, Cédric Laborde, put it, it's unclear why the vase sold for as much as it did.
"We don't know whether it [the vase] is old or not or why it sold for such a price. Perhaps we will never know," Laborde said.
Still, the antique expert who gave the original low valuation stands by the original assessment.
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