A watch that once belonged to the emperor of her Qing Dynasty. Chinawhose life was made into the award-winning film The Last Emperor sold for a record $5.1 million. auction in Hong Kong.

An Asian collector based in Hong Kong bid over the phone to buy a rare Patek Philippe watch from Aisin Gyoro Pou Yi, the auction house said. The price does not include house fees.

Thomas Peracci, head of the watch department at Phillips Asia auction house, told Reuters that this is the highest price ever paid for a wrist watch that belonged to the emperor. The original estimate was $3 million.

Other watches that once belonged to emperors have also been auctioned in the past. In 2017, a Patek Philippe watch owned by the last emperor of Ethiopia, Haile Selassie, was sold for $2.9 million, and in the same year, a Rolex watch owned by the last emperor of Vietnam, Bao Dai, was sold for $5 million.

Pu Yi was born in 1906 and was proclaimed Emperor of China at the age of only 2 years old. After Japan’s defeat in World War II, it was captured by the Red Army at Shenyang Airport in China. He was considered a prisoner of war and imprisoned for five years in Khabarovsk, Russia.

The auction house said it took three years of research with watch experts, historians, journalists and scientists to verify the watch’s history and origins.

Journalist Russell Working, who interviewed Pu Yi’s translator Georgy Permyakov in 2001, said that the late emperor gave him a watch on his last day in the Soviet Union, before being extradited to China.

Source: APE-MPE, Reuters.