APPRAISER: How did this come into the family?
GUEST: It actually... it took a lot of begging on my part, but after a number of years, my grandmother gave it to me. She acquired it somehow, somewhere in their travels when my grandfather was an ambassador.
APPRAISER: Oh, really?
GUEST: So many years ago, probably sometime in the '30s, '40s, '50s, something like that.
APPRAISER: Well, you knew what you were looking at, and they did, too.
GUEST: I did, I did. And then... (chuckles) Yeah, it took a while.
APPRAISER: Well, do you know how old it is?
GUEST: Well, I did a little bit of investigation on the Internet, which never pans out to anything. But about 1910 or so, I would guess.
APPRAISER: It was made during the Ming period, between 1368 and 1644.
GUEST: Okay, now we're getting somewhere.
APPRAISER: And probably in the 1550s, 1570s. And it's an image of Amida Buddha. And in his hand there is a jewel that's bestowing wisdom. And Amida means "the lord of light."
GUEST: Okay.
APPRAISER: And there's a swastika that's on the chest of the figure. That's not a swastika in any negative term. It's a Chinese abbreviation for the character 10,000.
GUEST: Okay.
APPRAISER: So it's wishing you, like, 10,000 years of long life. And the iconography of this is a lotus growing up out of the mud and producing the faith.
GUESTS: That shoots down everything I thought about a cloud and a... but it makes sense.
APPRAISER: But it's a beautiful sculpture. There are very, very few flaws. Sometimes a lot of these bronzes have these rectangular marks in them that are casting flaws. There are very few on this one. Generally the gilding isn't intact. You know, this is very, very much intact. It's a spectacular image, particularly because a lot of them this size never survived. They were destroyed. A lot of little ones made it. A lot of very big ones made it. But this kind of intermediate size is pretty unusual. Did you have any idea of the value?
GUEST: Well, if the Internet is any judge, which obviously it is not, $3,000.
APPRAISER: Do you have any idea what the family paid for it?
GUEST: No, I wouldn't have a clue.
APPRAISER: An auction estimate on this piece would be $40,000 to $60,000.
GUEST: All right. That's no $3,000. It's good to hear.
APPRAISER: And even a conservative estimate. Could be higher.
GUEST: Wow. And it's a lot older than I thought, too. It all... starting to make sense, I guess. Wow, that's impressive.
