The British kitchen vase turned out to be a treasure of the Qing Dynasty and sold for $1.8 million.

An 18th-century blue Chinese vase decorated with gold and silver has been sold at auction for nearly $1.8 million after historians determine it once belonged to a Chinese emperor. The post writes about it Life Science.

The rather large vase, about 0.6 m high, is marked with a symbol associated with Qianlong (1711-1799), the sixth emperor of the Qing Dynasty, who ruled China from 1735 to 1795. Dreweatts, the auction company that sold the vase on May 18, listed the color as “sacrificial blue”, named after the same color adorning parts of the Temple of Heaven in Beijing. In this temple, the Chinese emperor used to sacrifice animals in the hope that these sacrifices would bring a good harvest.

The combination of silver and gold used in this vase is “technically very difficult to obtain, and that’s what makes it so special and unusual,” explains Mark Newstead, Dreweatts Asia ceramics and arts consultant, and is sometimes credited with the technique’s creation. It is attributed to Tang Ying (1682-1756), who was in charge. According to Newsted, this vase was probably located in the Forbidden City or one of his other palaces, where the Chinese emperor once lived. During the reign of the Qianlong Emperor, the government had to suppress a series of uprisings, but despite the unrest, the arts in China flourished at the time.

However, most of the history of this vase remained a mystery. When and how he left China is unknown. The vase has long belonged to a certain surgeon who bought it at a discount in the early 1980s for almost zero. After the surgeon’s death, the vase passed to his son. Neither the surgeon nor his son realized the true value of the item, and the vase sat in his son’s kitchen for a while until Newsted first saw it in the late 1990s.