Information only..... ........ here we go ........

It's been several years since adding anything to my collection.  The only additions I can add to my site now are in the form of information.

Since both Ebay and the Internet community are no longer new to one-another, I thought I'd look around and see if things have changed since I last gave a good study. It's been about 7 years since my last assessment.

As with my first study, it didn't take long, and I didn't have to go very far. A search for Chinese Porcelain on Ebay now returns about 30,000 items for sale, and the first few I looked at told me things have not changed, but gotten worse.  

I looked at a very obvious fake Ming Dynasty dish that was offered, not even a good fake.  The mark was stamped on the back, the design for the period (Xuande) totally wrong. The seller was offering about 1000 items for sale. I looked at their feedback rating, it was 100%. They had racked up thousands of sales. Just the sales for the past 4 weeks alone totalled over $15,000 US dollars.

I guess you can't blame Ebay anymore. I love Ebay and have enjoyed them for over 15 years now. I've saved a lot in the many areas that I shop in. I haven't bought a piece of Chinese porcelain for many years now, and of the very few pieces I've seen that were worth bidding on, they always go to a very high bidder. I suspect the Chinese themselves have bidders on the lookout for national treasures. A curator at a museum would have a very deep pocket. Who could blame them.

There are enough sites on the Internet to educate people in the area of collecting Chinese porcelain, but many continue to throw their money away on very obvious fakes. Hopefully, sites such as this one, as well as the many forums out there, have prevented some from losing their hard earned money.

I love the old proverbs like "You can lead a horse to water ... but you can't make it drink."  So I'll close with one of my own.

You can lead a buyer to the Internet .... but you can't make them think.

Be careful out there.

JP