The CollectorBBC Antiques Roadshow expert in Hong Kong to assess your heirlooms and treasures

Have you ever wondered whether your grandmother’s old dinner service is worth anything? Or that bundle of coins your uncle gave you when you were a child? Next week in Hong Kong, you can have them evaluated free of charge by an expert from BBC show Antiques Roadshow.

The show’s presenter, Fiona Bruce, will not be in Hong Kong, sadly, and you won’t be getting your keepsakes valued in the glare of television cameras. Still, on Thursday and Friday, Lee Young, a British antiques expert who has appeared on the TV series, together with two other appraisers, will offer free 15-minute inspections to anyone showing up at the offices of auctioneers Macey & Sons, in Central.

Young, international director at the Scottish auction house Lyon & Turnbull, is an Asian art specialist but his interests extend to some very quirky objects. He once told a lucky participant on Antiques Roadshow that the 19th-century “penny dreadfuls” – leaflets advertising public executions – that he picked up at a car boot sale were worth up to a hundred times what he had paid for them.

Last year, Young’s team held the first Lyon & Turnbull Hong Kong auction and sold the Thornhill Stem Cup, a Ming Xuande blue-and-white ceramic vessel, for HK$41.6 million including premiums. The firm is also keen to tap Hong Kong as a source of consignments for its regular British sales, according to Jonathan Macey, an art dealer who has signed a partnership with the Edinburgh-based auction house and whose office is hosting the valuation days.