'Antiques Roadshow' expert valued her item at $50,000 — she ended up getting 10 times more at auction

Millions of fans trust experts on "Antiques Roadshow" to provide an accurate valuation for vintage items and collectibles in their possession. But that doesn't mean that the appraisers on the show can never get it wrong. The show's expert, Lark Mason, came across a screen that he believed was Chinese art when a guest brought it to the show. Assuming that it was an important piece of art from Chinese history, Mason estimated the value of the item to be between $30,000 to $50,000. However, when he took the item to an auction along with the guest, everyone was shocked when it fetched more than $540,000. Only then did Mason realize that it wasn't Chinese art but a set of 18th-century Korean Painted Silk Panels, which were a lot more significant.

In the special episode of "Extraordinary Finds," Mason recalled the events from the initial appraisal of the item. "Towards the end of the day, a lady came in with a screen, folded up, that was not in very good condition, opened it up, and my jaw dropped. I couldn't believe what I was seeing. It was extraordinary," he said in the interview. The guest, Dee, brought the item to the show, hoping to get a modest appraisal. "My husband had this when we were first going together. It didn't fit in our home anymore, and so we stored it, and quite regretfully, it got damaged, and I wanna know if it's worth any value or if it's something to just kind of discard and say Too bad, it's gone," she told Mason.

The surprised expert told her that it was a Chinese painting done in a narrative fashion, and it held quite some importance. "This is the figure of a woman named Xiwangmu. She was sort of the leader of the immortals, which is this heavenly band of deities in Chinese mythology," he explained, pointing at the screen. He went on to explain that the dieties in the screen lived on an island called Penglai-Shan, which is the island of the immortals.

"We know that it has eight panels. The first question I have is whether it's supposed to have more than eight or not. If you look at the far side over there, you see there's a cloud border. At the border that's behind us here, you'll see that there isn't. Anyone who could've afforded this screen lived in a tremendously large compound. This was something that was meant for the very highest tiers of Chinese society," he added.

Coming to the appraisal, Mason estimated that the value of the screen at the time was in the range of $30,000 to $50,000. "Oh, my goodness. And I was wondering whether I should.. I didn't know whether it should be saved or not. Oh, my goodness," the guest said in response before hugging Mason. 

In the update, Mason revealed that Dee reached out to him later, willing to sell the item. The guest, her daughter, and Mason eventually prepared the item for auction. "We promoted it to all of our Chinese clients and had it advertised everywhere, and everybody was going 'what a terrific Chinese screen,'" Mason recalled. However, on the day of the auction, the item left everyone in shock as the bid quickly went up from $60,000 to cross the $100,000 mark. Mason revealed that the item finally closed at over $540,000, leaving everyone puzzled. 

"It was the realization that it was actually not incomplete, it was just not a Chinese screen. It was a Korean screen, and it was a Korean screen that was purposely created to copy a Chinese screen. This is an important, important object. It really shocked me, it shocked the audience of Chinese bidders who were bidding, it shocked my staff, it shocked all of us were surprised," Mason noted. 

In the end, the guest expressed that even after selling the item, she just couldn't comprehend that a moldy screen could be worth that much money.