15 Old Teacups That Are Worth Millions (You Might Own One)

Somewhere in your China cabinet, right now, there may be a single cup worth more than everything else in your house put together. There are 15 old teacups that are secretly worth a fortune, and you might own one of them without knowing it. Not the good set, the one that comes out at Christmas. I mean the odd cups, the mismatched ones at the back of the China cabinet, the single cup and saucer inherited from an aunt, the one wrapped in newspaper in a box-marked kitchen since the last house move. Cups exactly like these have sold for hundreds, for thousands, for tens of thousands. And I have arranged tonight in order of value, so the prices climb with every single item, and I have saved the most valuable for last. Stay with me to the end, because number one is the most expensive cup ever sold anywhere on earth. A little painted cup, small enough to hide in your fist, the kind of thing that gets 50 pence at a car boot sale, and it sold for 36 million dollars. By the end of this video, you will take every single cup in that cabinet, turn it over, and read the bottom like a banker reads a cheque. Let me be honest with you before we open the cabinet, because false hope is the enemy of good judgment. Most old China is worth almost nothing. The brutal truth of my trade is that brown furniture and everyday China have fallen further in value than anything else in the auction world. And your grandmother's ordinary tea service, the one with the roses, is probably 20 pounds, and I will not pretend otherwise. But here is what 40 years in the trade taught me. Tea cups are the category with the widest gap between what a thing looks like and what a thing is. Two cups can sit side by side on the same shelf, the same size, the same shape, both with flowers, and one is 50 pence and the other is 4,000 pounds, and the entire difference is a mark on the base the size of your thumbnail. My name is Malcolm Ashby, 40 years an auctioneer and valuer across the English counties, thousands of sales from the rostrum, and more probate valuations and house clearances than any man should admit to. I am retired now, which means I have no reason left to flatter you, and nothing to gain from you, only 40 years of watching China cabinets get emptied into crates for pennies. The China cabinet is where fortunes go to be dusted once a year and never once examined, and knowledge is the only protection you have got. So whatever you do, don't sell it, don't box it for the charity shop, don't let the house clearance man sweep the shelf into a crate. Not yet. Not until you have heard all 15. Now before we begin, a quick word. Most of the people watching this channel are not subscribed. If you enjoy finding out what old and ordinary things are really worth, press subscribe. It costs you nothing, and you can always change your mind later. Right. Number 15, Royal Albert, and I start here because Royal Albert is the most common name in the English cabinet, and most of it, including the famous old country roses, was made in such quantity that it is 10 or 20 pounds a trio. That is the honest part. But the early Royal Albert, the 1920s and 30s patterns, and the short-lived discontinued patterns that collectors chase to complete sets, sell cup by cup for 50, 80, 150 pounds because a woman in Canada with 11 place settings needs your 12th. Your test tonight, turn the cup over and photograph the pattern name and number on the base and search exactly that because in this game, the pattern is the price. The loss I saw constantly was the mixed box lot, 30 cups for 10 pounds with two discontinued patterns in it that a replacement dealer sold the same week for more than the family got for the whole cabinet. Number 14, Nippon and occupied Japan. The Japanese cups, and here the truth splits cleanly in two, the words occupied Japan on the base from the years just after the war mean modest money, 5 to 30 pounds mostly, and only the unusual figural pieces do better. But Nippon, the mark used before 1921, is another matter. The finest hand-painted Nippon with raised gold beading and moriage decoration thick enough to feel with your thumb, sells for 100 to several hundred pounds a piece and rare portrait pieces make more. Your test tonight, run your fingertip over the decoration. If the gold and the details stand proud of the surface like piped icing, a human hand did that and hands cost money. The families I cleared always assumed Japanese meant cheap and the van men agreed with them and that agreement was worth a great deal to the van men. Number 13, Bellique. The Irish porcelain so thin you can read a newspaper through it, with a pearly shine like the inside of a shell, modern Bellique is nice and cheap. But early Bellique, marked with the black stamp used from 1863 to 1946, is seriously collected and the earliest first period pieces, 1863 to 1890, sell for hundreds of pounds with rare shapes making four figures. Your test tonight, look at the colour of the mark on the base. Black marks are old, green and gold marks are modern and with the black marks, the more words and detail in the stamp, generally, the earlier the piece. And handle it over a towel on the table, never over the sink because Bellique is eggshell and I have watched 200 pounds become two pence in the time it takes a tap to run. Number 12, Limage. The word every family knows and nobody understands, Limage is a French town, not a maker and factory decorated Limage with printed patterns is pretty and cheap. The money is in hand painted Limage, the blanks that were painted by professional studio artists a century ago with signed work, heavy raised gold and portrait and fruit painting that looks like it belongs in a frame. Those pieces sell for 100 to several hundred pounds and the finest studio pieces make thousands. Your test tonight, look for a painted signature on the front or base, often near the artwork itself and use the icing test again, feel for brushwork and raised gold. The pattern stamped set gets the headlines in the family and the single odd signed cup, the one that never matched anything, goes in the jumble box. It is always the odd one. Number 11, Paragon. An English name that hides in cabinets because it sounds ordinary and much of it is affordable. But Paragon held royal warrants and the collector's money is in the twenties and thirties pieces, the patterns made to mark royal births and coronations and the striking art deco florals. Rare Paragon patterns sell for 100 to 400 pounds a trio and unusual commemoratives climb higher. Your test tonight, read the base for the words by appointment and the royal coat of arms and date the cup by the style of the mark and then search the exact pattern because with Paragon too, near identical roses can be 30 pounds apart or 300 apart. I knew a dealer who did nothing else but drive the county boot sales, buying Paragon at a pound a cup from people who thought they were selling wedding china. He retired before I did. Number 10, Susie Cooper and the Art Deco Studio Names. The 1930s cups that look modern, plain, bold shapes, banded colours, little deer and leaping gazelles, families donate them first because they do not look like treasure. They look like the sixties. But Susie Cooper is one of the great names of English ceramic design and her early hand painted patterns and rare shapes sell for 80 to several hundred pounds with studio rarities making more. Shelley's Rivals, Foley, Weilman and the Small Deco Studios all have their own collectors. Your test tonight, any cup where the decoration is bold, geometric and hand painted, turn it over and search the name and do not let the simplicity fool you because in deco simplicity was the expensive part. Number 9, Ainslie. Specifically the hand painted fruit and flower cups, orchards of plums and berries painted so richly, the cup looks like a harvest festival often signed by the artist, names like D. Jones. These are not the ordinary Ainslie floral sets which are modest. The signed hand painted fruit pieces sell for 100 to 400 pounds each and rare shapes and large pieces climb beyond that. Your test tonight, look for a painted artist signature within the decoration itself, usually tucked near the fruit and check for the pattern being painted right into the bowl of the cup, not just outside because the inside painting is the sign of the top grade. The lost story here is a foursome of signed fruit cups I saw priced at a car boot as a set of pretty cups, five pounds. They were bought before nine in the morning by a man who knew from a family who did not. Number 8, Shelley. If you learn one English name from tonight, make it this one. Shelley made superb bone china into the 1960s and the market for it is worldwide and hungry. Ordinary Shelley florals bring 30 to 80 pounds a trio, already better than most. But the Art Deco shapes, the ones named Vogue, Mode and Eve, triangular handles, cups like inverted cones, patterns like lightning bolts and sun rays, those sell for 200 to 800 pounds a trio and the rarest patterns have made into the thousands. Your test tonight, look for the word Shelley in a shield on the base and then look at the shape before the pattern because with Shelley, the geometry is the money. And check the box in the loft as well as the cabinet because Deco China went out of fashion for 50 years and out of fashion is exactly how things survive unsold. Number 7, moustache cups. The Victorian oddity, a cup with a little porcelain ledge inside the rim made so a gentleman could drink his tea without dunking his moustache. Families keep them as jokes and sell them as jokes but collectors take them very seriously. Ordinary examples bring 40 to 100 pounds, fine hand-painted and unusual examples make several hundred and here is the beautiful part, the rarities are the left-handed ones made in tiny numbers worth multiples of the ordinary. Your test tonight, hold the cup as if drinking and if the ledge sits on the left side, you may be holding the rare one. And before we climb to the top 6, let me tell you the thing about China cabinets that took me 20 years on the rostrum to properly understand. A China cabinet is a museum where the labels fell off two generations ago. The pieces in it were chosen by somebody who knew exactly what each one was, what it cost and who gave it and all of that knowledge died with her. And what is left is a shelf of shapes that the family reads purely as sentiment. The clearance trade reads it differently, I promise you. The van men will quote a price for the cabinet, contents included, unseen and somebody in that transaction knows which cup has the mark that matters. It is never the family. If an old auctioneer telling you these things is useful, press the like button because there is a great deal more of this to come. Now back to the cabinet because the top 6 is where the real money starts. Number 6, Clarice Cliff. The most famous name in English art deco pottery, the bizarre ware, hand painted in oranges and blues that look almost too cheerful to be valuable. A single Clarice Cliff conical cup and saucer in a good pattern sells for 200 to 600 pounds. Rare patterns, the ones collectors call by name, May Avenue above all, turn ordinary shapes into 4 and 5 figure items and complete early tea sets have made tens of thousands. Your test tonight, look for the hand painted or stamped Clarice Cliff and bizarre marks and study the pattern name online because with Cliff the pattern rarity is nearly the whole price. And watch for fakes because she is famous enough to counterfeit so anything major gets a specialist's eye before it gets a price. Number 5, Royal Worcester, the hand painted and signed pieces. Ordinarily printed Worcester is modest but Worcester employed genuine artists and the painted fruit pieces, peaches and blackberries glowing against a mossy background signed by the painter, a blue chip English porcelain. The great family of painters here is the Stintons who painted Highland cattle in the mist across three generations. Signed Worcester cups and saucers sell for 200 to 800 pounds. Larger signed pieces make thousands. Your test tonight, look for the tiny painted signature at the edge of the scene and then look up the artist because the name multiplies the piece. I sold the contents of a bungalow where the family had used a signed Stinton cup as the place they kept the spare buttons. It made 640 pounds with a chip and the buttons, I am pleased to say, were rehoused. Number 4, Wedgwood Fairyland luster. Now we are in serious water. In the 1920s, a designer named Daisy Maki Jones created a range for Wedgwood unlike anything before or since. Midnight blues and greens shot with iridescent luster painted with elves, fairies, imps and goblin bridges in gold. It did not sell well at the time, which is exactly why it is rare and today Fairyland luster is one of the most valuable things Wedgwood ever made. Small pieces start in the high hundreds. Cups and saucers make 1 to 3,000 pounds and the important vases sell for tens of thousands. Your test tonight, any piece of china in the house with a deep midnight ground, a rainbow luster sheen and tiny fantastical figures, stop, touch nothing more and photograph the Wedgwood mark on the base because this is a category where a single odd cup pays for a holiday. The one I handled came out of a spare room in a terrace house wrapped in a 1962 newspaper and the family had kept it wrapped because they thought it was too gaudy to display. Gaudy paid their fees that year. Number 3, Meissen, the crossed swords. Meissen was Europe's first true porcelain, made in Germany from 1710 and it has been the aristocrat of the China cabinet for 300 years. Genuine antique Meissen cups and saucers sell for 300 to several thousand pounds and the early 18th century pieces climb far beyond that. The mark is two crossed swords in blue under the glaze and now the warning that comes with the money. Because Meissen has been famous for three centuries, it has been faked for three centuries and half the crossed swords in England are on pieces Meissen never saw. Your test tonight, look for the swords painted in blue underneath the glaze, softly, by hand, not stamped on top and treat any candidate as guilty until an expert proves it innocent. But do not let the fakes scare you off the shelf because real ones absolutely do sit in ordinary cabinets. They came home from the grand tour, from war service, from an auntie in service at the big house and the family stopped seeing them a lifetime ago. Number 2, Sèvres, the French royal porcelain made for Versailles, painted like jewellery and here is the strange, wonderful truth about Sèvres. Genuine 18th century Sèvres sells for thousands to hundreds of thousands of pounds but even the pieces the trade calls Sèvres style, the 19th century copies made in its manner sell for hundreds because the quality is still superb. Your test tonight, look for the mark of two interlaced letters L painted in blue, often with a letter inside dating the piece and look at the painting under a magnifying glass because on real Sèvres the faces of the little painted figures have expressions, actual expressions and on the copies they have dots. Either way, a cup with interlaced L's gets an expert opinion before it gets a car boot table. I watched a supposed copy, bought as a copy, catalogued as a copy, turn out under proper examination to be the real thing and the difference between those two words was a young family's house deposit. Number 1, Chinese porcelain and the most expensive cup ever sold anywhere on earth. The cups and little bowls at the back of the cabinet that the family calls the oriental bits, brought home by a sailor great-grandfather, bought at a mission bazaar, inherited from nobody remembers whom. Most export ware is worth modest money and there, as always, is the honest part. But Chinese porcelain is the single most explosive category in the entire auction world because the finest imperial pieces are the most valuable ceramics on earth and they are identified by rain marks, small stacked Chinese characters on the base that no ordinary family can read. In 2014, a tiny Ming dynasty cup painted with chickens, the famous chicken cup, small enough to sit in your palm, sold in Hong Kong for 36 million dollars, the record for a cup, any cup, from any century, anywhere. And before you tell me that could never be your cabinet, know that British and American families have found 5, 6 and 7 figure Chinese pieces in ordinary houses again and again in the last 20 years, bought for shillings generations ago when China's treasures were scattered and the finders were simply the families who checked. Your test tonight is the reframe this whole video has been walking you toward. Stop judging cups by whether they are pretty and start turning every single one over because in this category the bottom of the cup is worth more than the top. Photograph any mark you cannot read, Chinese characters above all, and get them in front of a specialist. It costs nothing, it takes a minute, and it is the entire difference between the family that sold the shelf for 10 pounds and the family whose little bowl retired them. Every single thing tonight came down to the same habit. Take the cup out of the cabinet, turn it over in good light, read the mark, feel the decoration and decide nothing from the doorway. Everything valuable in this video looked like the ordinary China around it and that camouflage is exactly why it survived in your cabinet and exactly why it is in danger the day the house gets cleared. So before the boxes get packed, before your most efficient relative arrives with the newspaper and the bin bags, sit down at that cabinet yourself with a towel on the table and a cup of tea in your hand, ideally a cheap one, and whatever you do, don't sell it, don't donate it. Don't let the clearance van quote you a price for the lot, not until you know what you have. If this video has you looking sideways at your own cabinet right now, press like before you open it, it truly does tell me to keep making these, and subscribe, because next time we are opening the drawer below the cabinet, the silverware drawer, the one that has not been polished since the silver jubilee, because certain spoons and forks sitting in ordinary drawers are worth hundreds and thousands of pounds each. The scrap shops are paying families melt value for them every single day, and the video ends with the most expensive piece of silverware ever sold on earth, over 10 million dollars. Then tell me down in the comments, what is the oldest cup in your cabinet, and whose was it before it was yours? I read every single one, and I have been proven wrong by China cabinets too many times to doubt yours. Go and have a proper look in that loft, you never know. See you next time.