A watch that once belonged to the last emperor of China’s Qing Dynasty, on whose life the award-winning film The Last Emperor was based, has sold for a record $5.1 million at an auction in Hong Kong, against an original estimate of 3 million dollars.

An Asian collector, a resident of Hong Kong, bid by phone to acquire the rare Patek Philippe watch by Aisin Gyoro Pou Yi, according to the auction house.

Thomas Peraci, the head of watches at auction house Phillips Asia, told Reuters it was the highest price ever paid for a wristwatch that belonged to an emperor.

It is only the eighth known Patek Philippe Reference 96 Quantieme Lune watch and was given by Pou Yi to his Russian interpreter when he was imprisoned in the Soviet Union.

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

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

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

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