Vase in shoe box sells for millions

– An 18th-century Chinese vase forgotten for decades in a shoe box in a French attic sold for €16.2 million (R250 million) at Sotheby’s in Paris yesterday – more than 30 times the estimate.

Experts at the auction house said the exquisite porcelain vessel was made for the Qing dynasty Emperor Qianlong and had set a guide price of a much more modest €500 000.

“This is a major work of art, it is as if we had just discovered a Caravaggio,” Olivier Valmier, the Asian arts expert at the auction house, said.

The vase – decorated with idealised images of deer and cranes – was found by chance among dozens of other pieces of Chinoiserie in the attic of a house in France earlier this year. – AFP