An English family’s spring cleaning will soon see them really cleaning up, as they discovered a box dating from the Ming dynasty (1426-1435) amid forgotten attic bric-a-brac.
According to Asian antiquities experts at the U.K. auction house Dreweats, the Chinese cloisonné “pomegranate” box was “discovered in a dust-filled cabinet in the attic of a family home,” where it has remained undisturbed since the home’s original owner stashed it away in 1967.
The piece, “the lost example from a rare cloisonné group made for Xuande, the fifth Emperor of the Ming dynasty,” was part of a collection of the late Maj. Edward Copleston Radcliffe. He apparently bought it from Sotheby’s London in 1946 and seemingly forgot all about it after storing it next to, presumably, Christmas decorations and whatever else people keep in their attics.
The box is one of only five known examples, including one in the Palace Museum, Beijing. Dr. Yingwen Tao, specialist in Chinese and Asian Art at Dreweatts, explains, “There is every indication that all five were made in the same Imperial workshop, for the Emperor.”
The box is hitting the auction block with others from the major’s collection May17-18. It is expected to be worth at least £10,000 — more than $12,000 — but that estimate is being called “extremely modest” considering how rare the box is.
So maybe give those basements and crawl spaces a closer look before you go about tossing out what you presume doesn’t spark joy this spring.