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Retirement present worth £1m

A long-lost vase of an emperor of China was sold for £92,000 this week, after first being given to a cleaner as a retirement present in 1940. The Daily Telegraph reported the gift has spent the last few years sat next to the cleaner’s grandson’s television, where it was presumed worthless until a similar looking vase fetched £240,800 last November. The vase was made for the Emperor Qianlong over 200 years ago, and could have been worth over £1 million in perfect condition, but was loved so much by the cleaner that most of the gold had been polished off. Julian King, a specialist at auction house Bonhams said: “When I saw it for the first time, I was staggered. This is a lost treasure of the Qing dynasty. I had gone to view it with little excitement because discoveries of this kind are rare. But there it was.”

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Ruth Mitchell .