A vase expected to sell for 2,000 euros US $1,975 at auction in France surprised everyone by changing hands for almost 8 million euros.
The vase, described by the Osenat auction house as ordinary before the sale, attracted frantic bidding from potential buyers who seemed to be convinced that it was an overlooked tianqiuping, or heavenly sphere porcelain artifact made in China during the 18th century.
The auction house in Fontainebleau said it had been inundated with bids from around 30 Chinese buyers.
Le Parisien said the successful buyer was Chinese and submitted bids by phone.
Auctioneer Jean-Pierre Osenat told The Guardian that the buyer was not the only one acting remotely.
The seller lives far away and didn't even see the vase, he said, explaining that the woman who sold the item inherited it from her mother, who was a big Paris collector in the last century, Ireland's state broadcaster RTE said the vase was among a collection of furniture and various works of art that had been in the apartment of the seller's late mother in Saint-Briac sur-Mer on the Brittany coast.
Osenat said the seller lives in a French overseas territory and arranged for the auctioneers to take the 54 centimeter vase from Brittany to the sale room ahead of Saturday's auction.
The vase sold for 7.7 million euros, which was almost 4,000 times its estimated value. The seller will end up paying 9.12 million euros for the item with the auction house's fees added.
The auction house insisted that the vase decorated with dragons and clouds had been made in the 20th century, with its appraiser noting it would have been extremely rare if it had been made 200 years earlier.
The auction house described the item as a porcelain and polychrome enamel vase in the style of blue-white with globular body and long cylindrical neck decorated with nine fierce dragons and clouds, but would-be buyers clearly thought it had been wrongly identified and was far older than the auction house believed, with interest in it intensifying from the outset, said Cedric Laborde, director at the Osenat auction house.