The Council auction (Photo/Courtesy of the Council auction house)
A single page from Karl Marx's London Notebooks sold for 3.33 million yuan ($523,000) at a Beijing Council International Auction Co., Ltd auction on Monday, far above its estimated price of 1 million to 1.2 million yuan.
The handwritten document contains Marx's notes written in English and German concerning James William Gilbart's A Practical Treatise on Banking, which Marx referred to many times while writing the third volume of his Das Kapital.
The page was originally part of the 24 notebooks on economics Marx wrote while living in London from 1850 to 1853. Collectively known as the London Notebooks, the notebooks are now stored in archives in Berlin and Amsterdam.
The page was the first item that went under the hammer that night, starting off at 300,000 yuan and quickly climbing to 1 million yuan before finally selling for 2.9 million yuan. Taking commission into account, the final price is 3.33 million yuan.
The second item at the auction was a manuscript from Marx's best friend Friedrich Engels, which sold for 1.67 million yuan from a starting price of 100,000 yuan.
The manuscript's estimated sale price was 450,000 to 550,000 yuan.
Engels' manuscript was a commentary written for Allgemeine Millitr Zeitung, a German newspaper, in November of 1862, and included the analysis of a war whose main focus was the siege of an enemy fortress. According to experts, the manuscript is possibly talking about the invasion of Sevastopol by Anglo-French allied forces during the Crimean War (1853-56).
The two pages were put up for auction by Feng Lun, a Chinese collector and businessman.
"I read Marx's books when I was in school. I sought out both the original German versions and the English versions to help my study, but it was still very difficult to understand Das Kapital," Feng told the Xinhua News Agency.
A decade ago a friend of Feng's showed him the handwritten page from the London Notebooks.
"Previously I had just read printed versions of his works, [seeing that page] I finally felt that I was reading something actually written by Karl Marx," Feng explained.
Feng said he bought the page for a high price at the time, roughly equivalent to the selling price for a three-room apartment (estimated 1 million yuan) in Beijing at the time.
According to the Council, this was the first time that these items have been up for auction in China.
