A single page of manuscript written by German philosopher Karl Marx was sold for over 3 million yuan at a recent auction in China, Chinanew.com reported on Tuesday.

Karl Marx’s manuscript (Photo provided by Beijing Council International Auction Company)

The auction was held on the evening of May 21 upon the 200th anniversary of the great philosopher’s birth.

The notes on the manuscript, which were written in London, were in English as well as a little German, according to the Beijing Council, a domestic auction company who held the early Spring auction specializing in celebrity manuscripts.

The bid for this manuscript in particular started at 300,000 yuan. Ten minutes later, the closing bid had reached 2.9 million yuan (almost $455,000).

Counting the 15-percent commission, the auction ended with a higher price than the pre-sale valuation of 1-1.2 million yuan.

In the same auction, a manuscript by Friedrich Engels, who founded Marxist theory alongside Karl Marx, was also sold for 1.67 million yuan (about $261,000), a price also well above its original estimate.

The auction house said this was the first time they had been able to auction such manuscripts by these two great thinkers.