A wristwatch once owned by China's last emperor, Aisin-Gioro Puyi is expected to fetch a hefty sum at auction. According to a CNN report, the luxury wristwatch could fetch over $3 million at auction in Hong Kong.
According to media reports, the valuation of the wristwatch is partly due to the rarity of the Patek Philippe Reference 96 Quantieme Lune, one of just eight known to exist. But Phillips auction house says that the watch has a remarkable history- one that saw it taken to Siberia during the former ruler's five-year imprisonment in the USSR.
The 1.2-inch-diameter platinum timepiece features an Arabic numeral dial, pink gold hands and a "moon phase" function that shows how visible the moon is from Earth at any given time. Some of its internal mechanisms date to 1929, though the model was not sold by Patek Philippe - a Swiss watchmaker known for fitting complicated movements into slim cases - until 1937, CNN reported.
According to Phillips auction house, Phillips researchers have traced the watch to a sale in Guillermin, a Parisian luxury store then located on Place Vendome, home of some of the world's leading jewellers.
The documentation is clear that Puyi brought this watch to a Khabarovsk prison camp known as Special Object No. 45 and gave it to Permyakov. This was where the deposed emperor and his entourage were held, along with Japanese officers and Manchurian ministers captured by the Soviet Red Army in 1945. Puyi, as well as the other ranking officials, was accused of being a war criminal.
Philips said Yuvi passed it to Georgy Permyakov, a fluent Mandarin speaker who served as his tutor and Russian translator during his time in detention. The Russian slipped the watch into his pocket. Upon his death, he bequeathed the watch to his heirs.
According to a press release, Phillips spent three years researching the object's history and confirming its provenance - a process that Thomas Perazzi, the auction house's head of watches for Asia, described in a statement as an "unprecedented research project with a worldwide team of watch specialists, historians, journalists and scientists."
