Aisin-Gioro Puyi, also known as Henry Puyi, was the last emperor of the Chinese Qing dynasty. After the death of his uncle, in 1908, he was named emperor with only two years and two months to live, but his reign ended in just four years, after the outbreak of the Xinhai revolution that would establish the republic. But Puyi continued to live in China, in the Forbidden City, with all kinds of luxuries.
At the age of 19, during the Japanese invasion of Manchuria, he was reinstated on the throne. He ruled between 1934 and 1945 under the guidelines of the Japanese empire, and after the end of World War II he abdicated and was arrested by the Soviet Red Army while trying to flee the country, they locked him up in a prison camp, and five years later he was released. They were repatriated to China, where he was taken to a re-education camp.
He spent ten years there until Mao Zedong granted him a special pardon. Finally, the one who was emperor of China, ended up working as a garden assistant in the botanical gardens of Beijing. On October 17, 1967, he passed away at the age of 61.
During the period that he was a prisoner in Russia, from 1945 to 1950, he befriended a Soviet official, Georgy Permyakov, who was fluent in Mandarin and who was tasked with being his interpreter. It is believed that Puyi gave him several personal items, including a highly valuable watch, a Patek Philippe Reference 96 Quantieme Lune of which only eight models were created, and only three of them have a particular silver dial, rose gold chapter ring and enameled hour indices and Feuille hands, plus features a moon phase calendar and three dates: two windows display the day of the week and month, and a long central hand indicates the date.
The emperor's personal effects are supposed to have remained with the Russian guardian's family until a few years ago, when they were sold to a European collector. It is also not known when or how Puyi obtained the watch, but it is believed to have been during his second reign. And although everything is conjecture, it is a watch that in itself has great value, in fact the Patek Philippe brand bought one of these three watches at a Sotheby's auction in 2002 for two million dollars.
Phillipps auction house has researched the origin of the watch for three years to confirm its veracity, and will now put it on display along with other personal items including a paper fan inscribed with a poem composed and written in Chinese by Puyi himself, consisting of four lines: "It is not yet dawn in the courtyard, the moonlight filters through the south window. Sitting together around a lamp, the long, silent lowing is heard."
A handwritten notebook by Puyi, where he wrote various notes about the books and magazines he read during the five years he was in the USSR. The content is diverse, focusing mainly on customs and daily life in China.
A leather-bound edition of the Analects of Confucius attesting to Puyi's attachment to the traditional values and teachings of Confucius, the famous Chinese philosopher and politician (770-481 BC) who was and still is hailed as a model.
Fifteen watercolors attributed to Puyi's brother-in-law Runqi, depicting various aspects of Chinese culture and rural scenes, will also be on display. These watercolors had a didactic purpose; and are carefully labeled with Chinese characters.
Objects that will be available to the public, from March 18 to 31, at Phillips' new Hong Kong office in the West Kowloon district, and will then be taken on an international tour to New York, Singapore, London, Taipei and Geneva, to auction them later.
