A New York family scored a huge payday when this small bowl, which they bought at a garage sale for $3, turned out to be a 1,000-year old Chinese piece that sold for $2.2 million at Sotheby’s yesterday. The family bought the rare bowl at the secondhand sale in 2007, and kept it sitting on their mantle for years, the auction house said. 
 
 After becoming curious, the bargain hunters began consulting experts about the bowl. They finally brought the piece to Sotheby’s, which estimated it would sell for somewhere in the $200,000 to $300,000 range. 
 
 But yesterday, London art dealer Giuseppe Eskenazi blew away those figures when he plunked down $2.2 million for the museum-quality piece. 
 
 He beat four other bidders for the Northern Song dynasty bowl — known as a Ding bowl — which dates back to the 10th or 11th century. 
 
 There is only one other bowl like it in the world, and it is in the British Museum. 
 
 A little less than 5 1/2 inches in diameter, the multimillion-dollar bowl could be mistaken for a decorative ashtray. 
 
 Early-era Ding wares are known for their small utilitarian qualities, Sotheby’s said. 
 
 Author Rose Kerr believes the ornamental Ding bowls were made to mimic the more elaborate gold and silver wares that were common in palaces. 
 
 The ancient piece is described as a Ding bowl because of the county Ding in the Hebei province where the kilns used to make the bowls were housed. 
 
 The Ding bowl owned by the British Museum in London has been on display for more than 60 years, since it was bequeathed by famous collector Henry J. Oppenheim. 
 
 This isn’t the first big buy for Eskenazi. In 2005, the Turkish-born dealer paid $23.5 million for a rare blue-and-white jar from the 14th century at a Christie’s auction. 
 
 Sotheby’s would not identify the lucky bowl sellers, only to say that they were a family from somewhere in New York state. 
 
 Earlier this month, a collection of abstract Impressionist art found in a Long Island garage was appraised at $30 million. 
 
 The owners of the bungalow found thousands of paintings and drawings by the Armenian-American artist Arthur Pinajian in 2007. They were later appraised by art historian Peter Hastings Falk and shown at the Antiquorum Gallery in Midtown. ||||| A rare Qing dynasty vase that was discovered in the attic of a French family home has sold at auction in Paris for €16.2 million, or about $19 million. 
 
 That's the absolute record for a piece sold at Sotheby's Paris, and the record for a Chinese porcelain sale in France. 
 
 The intricately decorated vase was hidden away in an old shoebox. After finding it, the owners took it to Sotheby's Paris to be appraised, whereupon the auction house told them it dated from the 18th-century. They set an auction estimate of €500,000 to €700,000 (about $590,000 to $825,000), which was blown away by the sale. 
 
 According to Sotheby's , the vase was left to the grandparents of its present owners by an uncle, in a will which also included several other works of Chinese porcelain, and some Japanese artworks, including an "unusual bronze mirror" which will also be sold at auction at the same time as the vase. 
 
 The vase was stored in a shoebox in an attic for decades. Credit: THOMAS SAMSON/AFP/AFP/Getty Images 
 
 Sotheby's expert Olivier Valmier said in a statement that on opening the shoebox he was "immediately struck" by the quality of the item, which he said was a Yangcai Famille-Rose porcelain vase bearing a mark from the reign of the Qianlong Emperor, who ruled China from 1736 to 1795. 
 
 "The vase is of exceptional rarity: the only known example of its kind," Sotheby's said. "Famille Rose porcelains of the period (or yangcai porcelains, as they are known) are extremely rare on the market, with most examples currently housed in the National Palace Museum in Taipei and other museums around the world." 
 
 In April, a Famille-Rose porcelain bowl sold in Hong Kong for over $30 million, the auction house said. 
 
 Despite its rarity and potential value, the current owners weren't originally very keen. "We didn't like the vase too much, and my grandparents didn't like it either," one of them told Agence France-Presse. 
 
 Henry Howard-Sneyd, Sotheby's chairman of Asian Art for Europe and the Americas, was optimistic about future such discoveries. 
 
 "Chinese art has been admired and collected across Europe for centuries, but the importance of certain pieces is occasionally lost over time," he said in a statement. 
 
 "Given the huge appetite for Chinese art among today's collectors, now is the moment to scour your homes and attics, and to come to us with anything you might find!" ||||| The present bowl displays all the characteristics attributed to the finest ‘Ding’ wares known in museum and private collections. Celebrated for their thin potting, fine near-white body and an ivory-colored glaze which tends to run down in somewhat darker ‘tears’, ‘Ding’ wares were ranked among the ‘five great wares’ of the Song a term coined by collectors of the Ming and Qing dynasties. The high quality of the potting seen here is evident in the feather light weight of the bowl with the carved walls especially thin and delicate. The whiteness of the body is also special, as is the case with most ‘Ding’ wares, it did not require the application of a slip to appear white after firing. The glaze is expertly applied with the incised lotus spray design seen in the interior of the bowl in harmony with the overlapping leaves applied to the exterior of the piece. ‘Ding’ designs generally display a high level of naturalness and fluidity, however, the maker of this bowl appears to have been particularly skilled at rendering his lines in a spontaneous manner, creating a decoration that is especially free in style. The shape of the bowl is also worth noting as, while rare amongst ‘Ding’ bowls, the type is known from silver examples of the Song period. For example, see a bowl illustrated in Zhongguo jin yin poli falangqi quanji, vol. 2 (2), Shijiazhuang, 2000, pl. 261, together with another silver bowl of more rounded body but the exterior molded with layers of overlapping upright leaves, reminiscent of that seen on this bowl, pl. 262. 
 
 Only one other bowl of the same form, size and almost identical decoration is known; the piece in the British Museum London, published in The World’s Great Collections. Oriental Ceramics, vol. 5, Tokyo, 1981, pl. 57. This bowl was bequeathed to the museum in 1947 by Henry J. Oppenheim, together with a small number of other ‘Ding’ pieces, including a plain dish with foliate rim, pl. 62, and a bowl with molded decoration of boys and flowers, pl. 61. 
 
 The kiln site identified with ‘Ding’ ware is located at Quyang in Ding county, Hebei province. This was an area formerly known as ‘Dingzhou’. ‘Ding’ production consisted mostly of small utilitarian wares such as dishes and bowls, generally left in their natural form undecorated in 10th and early 11th century. From the late 11th century and early 12th century they are increasingly incised and carved and later through the thirteenth century mold-impressed and densely patterned. Rose Kerr in her work on the collection of Song ceramics in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, mentions that the ‘fact that Ding ware was an official ware made one feature of its decoration especially pronounced. This was its tendency to mimic other, more precious materials such as gold and silver, huge quantities of which were stored in palace treasures’. See Rose Kerr, Song Ceramics, London, 1982, p. 102, for further information.
– One lucky New York family sold a tiny Chinese bowl this week for $2,224,997 more than they paid for it: $3, at a garage sale six years ago. The bowl, which measures roughly 5.5 inches in diameter, sat in the unnamed family's home for years; eventually, a quest to see what it was worth took them to Sotheby's, which identified it as a "Ding" bowl from the 10th or 11th century. Making their windfall even sweeter: Sotheby's had anticipated it would sell for up to $300,000, reports the New York Post. It's one of only two known bowls of its kind. (And it's not the only great buy in the news: A cottage purchased in 2007 was found to contain $30 million worth of art.)