Family’s dinner dish sells for $5.7 million

A hand-me-down dish used for crab dinners fetched a record $5.7 million in an auction this week after art experts determined it was extremely rare Ming Dynasty porcelain.

The flowery copper-red plate, which set a record for Ming art sold in a U.S. auction, once belonged to Elinor Majors Carlisle, a Berkeley businesswoman who became a public education crusader and suffragette in the 1890s.

Carlisle’s father, Alexander Majors, co-founded a transcontinental freight transport company that later became the Pony Express. Carlisle picked up the plate in the early 1900s during one of three voyages to China. She used the plate to serve family-style crab dinners.

Although the 18-inch-diameter underglaze dish was in the family home for about a century, Carlisle’s great-grandchildren didn’t know its origin until art experts examined the piece. It dates from the Hongwu period (1368-98), during the reign of Zhu Yuanzhang, the first Ming emperor. The purchaser was London-based art dealer Giuseppe Eskenazi.