A monumental Qing porcelain dish made for Empress Dowager Cixi and valued at up to £30,000 spent decades under a north London sofa before specialists cleaned it and set it for auction.
The two-foot dish, weighing 30 pounds, had been brought from China in the early 20th century by Chinese immigrant Wing Lung Goo and passed down through his family. For years it sat under the living-room sofa of a descendant’s townhouse in Barnet, north London, gathering dust until a relative finally acted on a hunch that it might be special.
That relative sent photographs to auctioneers. Asian art specialist John Axford, chairman and head of the Asian art department at Woolley & Wallis and a familiar face from BBC’s Antiques Roadshow, saw the scale and decided the piece deserved a closer look in person.
Axford visited the townhouse, studied the dish, and found a four-character seal mark on the underside. He concluded the mark showed it had been produced in the 1880s specifically to mark the birthday of Empress Dowager Cixi and was associated with Chuxiu Palace, the Palace of Assembled Elegance, one of the six Western palaces in the Inner Court of Beijing’s Forbidden City.
Daily Mail reporting detailed how the family had kept the heavy piece out of sight for decades. Axford offered a practical explanation for the odd storage spot.
He said:
"We are not exactly sure why the dish was kept under a sofa for decades, but it could be that it was too big for them to hang on a wall or display."
Axford also noted the condition when the photos first arrived. The dish was covered in dirt, hardly the treatment one expects for palace porcelain.
He added:
"It is not necessarily the most sensible place to store something like this, and when we were sent photos of the dish it was covered in dirt."
Size alone convinced Axford to make the trip. Once he examined the seal, the imperial connection became clear. The mark “Chuxiugong zhi”, “Made for the Chuxiu Palace”, was the giveaway used on dishes created for the empress’s birthday celebrations.
Axford described the moment of recognition:
"But the size of it meant I thought I should go along and see it, and when studying the dish I identified the very unusual seal mark that was used specifically for dishes made for the empress's birthday."
After cleaning, the piece emerged in near-pristine condition. Axford put it plainly:
"Once it was cleaned the dish has come out beautifully."
Woolley & Wallis called the dish rare and the only known example of its type with a yellow-glazed base. The auction house framed its importance in direct terms, noting the combination of palace provenance, association with Cixi’s court, exceptional scale, and that distinctive yellow base places it among the most significant late Qing palace porcelains to reach the market in recent years.
The Qing dynasty, China’s last imperial house under Manchu leadership, ruled from 1644 to 1912. Objects tied to Cixi’s court still draw serious collector interest long after the dynasty fell, even as debates over modern China’s direction continue in other arenas, including among American activists who pledge support for Chinese socialism.
Axford summed up the rediscovery itself:
"To discover an imperial dish of such monumental scale in near pristine condition and learn that it was stored beneath a living room sofa in London is truly extraordinary."
The dish is scheduled to sell on November 10 through Woolley & Wallis. The house has set an estimate of £20,000 to £30,000. For a piece that spent decades out of sight under ordinary furniture, the figure reflects how sharply specialists distinguish true imperial work from later copies once the seal and glaze are confirmed.
Family members never displayed the dish. Axford suggested the sheer bulk and weight made wall-hanging or open shelving impractical, so the sofa became the default hiding place. No public record in the available reporting explains exactly how Wing Lung Goo first obtained the piece when he left China, only that it traveled with him and stayed in the family line.
Stories of lost palace objects still surface far from Beijing. In an era when some Western institutions prefer ideological campaigns over careful stewardship of history, whether in classrooms or union conference halls, a private household in Barnet quietly preserved a tangible link to late imperial China without fanfare or manifesto.
The relative’s decision to send photos, Axford’s willingness to visit, and a thorough cleaning turned a dirt-covered curiosity into a documented imperial object ready for the block. Collectors will decide its final price on November 10. The larger point is simpler: real heritage often survives in the least dramatic places, waiting for someone to look twice.
Ordinary families sometimes guard history better than the ideologues who claim to speak for the future.
