How To Turn A $3 Bowl Into $2.2 Million

By Stefan Lopez

Mar 21, 2013 03:38 PM EDT

It is by all accounts a fairly unassuming bowl, but now this yard sale find comes with a hefty price tag. Specifically, a $2.2 million price tag.

This week a porcelain bowl that looks like it could be purchased at your local Dollar Store went up for sale at a New York state auction. Sotheby's estimated that the piece would fetch anywhere from $200,000 to $300,000, but its sale price soon blew past its owner's wildest imagination.

This expensive piece of pottery is known as a Ding Bowl, and is an exquisite example of ancient Chinese porcelain. Though its exact age is unknown, the bowl is said to be over 1000 years old. It's one of two known examples of a Ding Bowl, with only other one located in the British Museum.

Thought the person who made this incredible find is still unnamed, Sotheby's did confirm that the consignor purchased the Ding Bowl from a tag sale near their home in the summer of 2007. For six years it stayed win its new home without anyone realizing just how special it was. It's purchase price? A whopping $3.

There has been an increase in interest for Chinese porcelain as of late, culminating in 2010 when the auction for an 18^th century vase kept going up until it finally settled on a staggering $53 million sale.

So how do the rest of us find such a steal the next time we are rummaging through our neighbor's 'treasures' at the next yard sale? Nicholas Dawes has appeared frequently as an appraiser on the PBS show "Antiques Roadshow," and he gives this advice to potential antique pickers:

"The essential ingredient in determining value of an art object is no secret: supply and demand. I suggest those on the way to an early-morning yard sale repeat this over and over in the van. Rarity may therefore be a positive factor, but if something is rare, or perhaps unique, and no one wants it (your grandfather's homemade table lamp perhaps?), it has no value," insists Dawes.

Sounds pretty straightforward. Now all that is left is finding a neighborhood populated by a bunch of millennium-old Chinese emperors.