GUEST:
It's been in the family for quite a long time. My grandfather was on business in China, probably around the turn of the last century, and my mother said the emperor of China gave this disc without the frame to my grandfather as a gift.

APPRAISER:
What do you think he was doing in China?

GUEST:
I think he was an engineer.

APPRAISER:
And he was in China in the late 19th century, maybe early 20th century. That was a very tumultuous time in China. China was partitioned by the great European powers and the United States, so there's a lot of commerce that took place between China and the West.

GUEST:
Yeah.

APPRAISER:
And that was with involvement of the Chinese government, and sometimes very reluctant involvement of the Chinese government.

GUEST:
Yes, yes.

APPRAISER:
And that ultimately resulted in a conflagration which we know as the Boxer Rebellion. It's not unlikely, as an engineer, he was involved in trying to help modernize China. But he must have been something that was fairly significant to have received a gift like this. This is an important gift because of the size.

GUEST:
It has a little label on it somewhere saying "Ming Dynasty," but in talking to somebody, they said if it had pink in it, they said it probably wasn't Ming Dynasty.

APPRAISER:
We think of pink as something that just exists, as color that's always with us. It was not always with us. It was with us in nature, but not in Chinese objects.

GUEST:
Okay.

APPRAISER:
Until the early 18th century.

GUEST:
Oh, really?

APPRAISER:
And indeed, there is pink here. So that gives us a bracket. Now, we also have the other end of the bracket, when it was received by your family circa 1900s. One of the things that strikes one about this is that the surface appears very pitted.

GUEST:
Well, yes, it does. And I thought maybe that was just from general abuse.

APPRAISER:
Rest assured it wasn't from an abusive family.

GUEST:
Oh.

APPRAISER:
It was because creating a large object of this size, this scale, was really difficult. Cloisonné and the enamels are effectively glass, and very fragile. The air bubbles would rise and pop, and the result is, particularly for large objects, that one often ends up with a pitted surface. And up here, you can see how pitted this is.

GUEST:
Yes, yeah, I noticed that.

APPRAISER:
Very speckly. That's typical of 18th century workmanship. The other thing that's typical of 18th century workmanship are these lines here, these metal lines, which are called cloisons. Cloisonné, that's where that comes from, French term. And these are gilded. The intent of this was panoramic view of these aged figures. This fellow here is... he's sitting here playing a sheng.

GUEST:
Yeah.

APPRAISER:
It's a musical instrument. These group of individuals, they're playing wei chi. It's a game, a Chinese game.

GUEST:
Yes, I know it.

APPRAISER:
It's a temple complex. And look at these stylized rocks. This is a rockwork garden. So you've got the pink color, you've got the pitting. We have the large cloisonné. It's safe to say that this is 18th century. And it indeed was intended to be hung on a wall.

GUEST:
Oh, it was?

APPRAISER:
It's meant to be evocative of this kind of tranquil, ideal world. Well, my bet is that he was in Beijing. And I bet that he actually did have either a direct or indirect audience with the emperor, and he did receive this as a gift, because this is exactly the kind of object...

GUEST:
How exciting! Oh, that's wonderful.

APPRAISER:
It's exactly the kind of object that would have been given by the emperor to someone who would have been engaged in some sort of commerce at the time that was influential and important to the Chinese government. From my experience, I believe this was a product of the imperial workshops.

GUEST:
Oh, wonderful.

APPRAISER:
Do you have any idea?

GUEST:
I have no idea.

APPRAISER:
Let's try $70,000 to $100,000 at auction.

GUEST:
Wow, that's wonderful! Isn't that wonderful? Yeah, great. I'm hugely pleased.