Wrist watches that once belonged to emperors rarely cross the auction block. For example, a Patek Philippe that was a personal gift to Haile Selassie of Ethiopia during his 1954 state visit to Switzerland was sold for $2.9 million at Christie’s Geneva in 2017.
Now, however, Phillips is offering a Patek once owned by Aisin-Gioro Pu Yi, who became emperor of China in 1908, when he was 2 years old. His story was told in “The Last Emperor,” the Bernardo Bertolucci film that won the 1988 Oscar for best picture.
In 1912, Pu Yi was forced to abdicate, becoming the final monarch of the Qing dynasty’s 276-year rule. By 1934, the Japanese had installed him as the puppet leader of occupied Manchuria, where he remained until the fall of Japan in 1945 and his capture by Russian forces in World War II.
The Soviets sent him to a detention camp but allowed him to take a suitcase full of treasures, including a platinum Patek Philippe Ref. 96 Quantieme Lune, a moon phase calendar watch. Before he was returned to China in 1950 (where he died in 1967), Pu Yi gave the watch to his Soviet interpreter, Georgy Permyakov. Permyakov’s family inherited the piece in 2005, and it was sold to the current owner about four years ago.
According to Aurel Bacs, a senior consultant to Phillips’s watch division, the auction house has spent more than three years authenticating the watch, including commissioning a radiocarbon dating test of the timepiece and hiring a calligraphy expert to examine the inscription on a fan that Pu Yi gave Permyakov.
“In the course of our research,” Mr. Bacs said in a recent phone interview from Geneva, “we discovered that, during his imprisonment, Pu Yi asked his servant Li Guoxiong — known as ‘Big Li’ — to scratch off some of the paint from the dial of the watch in order to determine if, like the case, it was also made from platinum.”
“Other than that,” Mr. Bacs said, “the watch appears to be totally original and has probably never been serviced since it was sold from the Patek Philippe manufacturer to the long-defunct Parisian retailer Guillermin in October 1937.”
According to Mr. Bacs, the watch is one of three platinum Ref. 96 Quantieme Lune models that were made with two-tone (silver and rose) dials. Of the other two, one is in Patek Philippe’s museum in Geneva and the other was sold by Sotheby’s 20 years ago for $2.1 million.
He said he believed the emperor’s timepiece to be “one of the most important Patek Philippe watches the world has ever seen” and did not think that the modification of the dial would deter bidders. “In my opinion, the fact that it shows the signs of the life it has had adds another layer of history,” he said. “It would be wrong to restore it.”
The watch, the fan and other items belonging to Pu Yi have been on display in Hong Kong in recent weeks and now are scheduled to tour New York, Singapore, London, Taipei and Geneva. The auction house has not determined a pre-sale estimate for the watch or set a date for its sale, but Mr. Bacs said it would be this year.
Simon De Burton
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