Experts couldn’t believe their eyes when they stumbled across a rare Chinese dish whilst carrying out a house contents valuation recently.

1st Call Probate Valuation were called out by a pensioner value the contents of a house in the London area. The team of valuers had no idea, however, that they were set to uncover a real treasure worth a whopping £50,000.

The house looked like a standard three bedroom semi-detached property and on the face of it showed no signs of the gem it held inside. The valuation got under way and as anticipated, all the items within the house proved to be of low value.

That was until one valuer looked inside a china cabinet and could not believe his eyes. He discovered at the very back of the cabinet a wonderful, intricately decorated, Chinese lacquer dish. The valuer instantly realised this was more than an average household serving plate. The hunch was proved correct as after further research, the Chinese dish was found to be an extremely rare Chinese carved cinnabar lacquer foliated dish.

The 1st Call probate valuation team sent the dish off to be sold on behalf of their elderly client through a specialised Asian art auction. It went under the hammer for an impressive £50,000 on the day.

It appears even their client, Mr Slavery, had no idea of the value of what had been concealed in that china cabinet. He thought it had been worth very little cash and had planned to call in a house clearance company to take away all the contents of the property after the probate valuation was complete. The dish could therefore have been completely lost had it not been for the expert eye of the 1st Call Probate Valuation team.

A spokesperson for the company said the discovery of the Chinese dish “had been one of those heart thumping moments that only happened infrequently during the course of our work”.

The spokesperson continued that it was a fantastic find in what had appeared on first glance a completely innocuous property and they were overjoyed to have been able to able to sell it off for such a fantastic sum on behalf of Mr Slavery.

Following a death, some estates require a professional valuation to be submitted to the Inland Revenue. This is where companies like 1st Call Probate Valuation come in.

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Name: James Lavelle
Company Name: 1st Call Probate Valuations
Town: London
Country: United Kingdom
Email: [email protected]
Telephone: 08006127963
Language: English