I got some interesting stuff from a garage sale this Saturday. Just look at this thing and tell me it's not amazing, if perhaps worryingly stereotypical:
FEEEEEEEESH.
"They're quite valuable, you know," said the woman who sold two of these figurines to me, from a table in the laneway behind her house.
"Really?" I said. "Then why did you just sell them to me for ten dollars?"
She didn't have the time to find a collector to sell them to, she said.
"This woman is a fool," I thought. "I will profit handsomely from this transaction."
"Muahahahaha."
It turns out the woman who sold me the figurines was somewhat correct about them. To collectors, these types of statuettes are known as "mud men." According to the one comprehensive essay on them I was able to find, they've been made as souvenirs in small southern Chinese towns for about two centuries. In times past, entire villages would collaborate to produce mud men by hand, as a way of making money after harvest season was over.
Early mud men are, in fact, very collectible, and fairly valuable. It's not uncommon to see them sell for a few hundred dollars on eBay.
But most of the mud men one finds today—at places like Toronto garage sales, for instance—were produced at the Shiwan Artistic Ceramic Factory, founded in 1952. Shiwan cranks out millions of pieces per year, of mostly uniform quality. Their handiwork sells for ten to twenty dollars per figurine on eBay, and even less on Amazon.
I don't think I need to tell you what kind of mud men my guys turned out to be.
They're on my shelf now, where they'll likely remain until I decide to hold a garage sale of my own. And what a garage sale that will be. Thankfully, I won't be able to buy anything at it.
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