6 Million Dollars for the "Last Emperor" Watch

On Tuesday, a watch that once belonged to the last emperor of the Qing Dynasty in China, whose life inspired the Oscar-winning film "The Last Emperor," was sold for a record amount of $6.2 million at an auction in Hong Kong. The rare Patek Philippe watch was purchased by a resident Asian collector via telephone, according to the auction house. Thomas Perazzi, head of the watch department at Phillips Asia, stated to Reuters that it is the "highest result" ever for a wristwatch owned by an emperor. The auction house noted that Emperor Puyi gifted the watch to his Russian translator during his imprisonment in the Soviet Union. The price significantly exceeded the pre-sale estimate of three million dollars. Puyi was born in 1906 and was the last emperor of the Qing Dynasty, beginning his reign at the age of two. After Japan's defeat in World War II in 1945, the Soviet Red Army captured Puyi at a Chinese airport in Shenyang and detained him as a prisoner of war in Russia for five years. The auction house stated it spent three years collaborating with watch specialists, historians, journalists, and scholars to research the history of the watch and verify its provenance.