GUEST: I bought it at an auction. It was an estate auction. The woman had quite a number of Oriental items. I guessed that it was probably from Japan, or...
APPRAISER: You say an estate auction-- where?
GUEST: In Winchester, Virginia.
APRAISER: And what'd you pay for it then?
GUEST: I paid $60.
APPRAISER: $60 at an estate auction.
GUEST: There wasn't much interest in it.
APPRAISER: In the middle of Virginia, okay. Let me tell you why I thought this—why this is interesting. During the ninth, tenth, 11th century in China there was a great flowering of scientific knowledge, cultural inspiration; it was equivalent to what we call our Renaissance. This knowledge and this inspiration for the arts was disseminated from China to the other Asian cultures. So what you have here, basically, are Chinese designs, but they're Korean.
GUEST: Oh.
APPRAISER: Dating from the 11th, 12th century, a period called the Koryo Dynasty.
GUEST: Oh, my God.
APPRAISER: Can you believe it?
GUEST: Wow! I thought they were old. The auctioneer at the time had mentioned that he thought they were buried-- that they buried objects with them...
APPRAISER: Absolutely were buried.
GUEST: And I assumed that's why there was a crack in it.
APPRAISER: They were food offerings for life in the next world, and this was intended to go with the person to the next world so they could eat. Now, they're made of bronze. They look very similar to the ones you get in China. The difference is with this bowl, the very steep-sided, rounded shape is much more typical of Korean material from that period, from the Koryo period. This patination, this green color you see here, that's an indication of authenticity and age because that only results from the action of minerals with water and acids in the soil that create this sort of natural patina that includes other minerals-- malachite and other minerals-- that would form on the surface, transforming the bronze. Probably dug up in Korea and discovered sometime, I would think, back in the 1920s. And the value for the entire group has got to be somewhere between about $1,500 and $2,000.
GUEST: Oh, that's great.
APPRAISER: So that's a pretty good find, too.
GUEST: Yeah, that is good, very good.
