Letter signed by China's Mao Zedong sells for $900,000

LONDON, Dec. 16 (UPI) -- A typed letter from 1937 signed by Chinese Communist Party leader Mao Zedong sold for $918,000 at Sotheby's, far surpassing estimates.

The letter, addressed to British Labor Party leader Clement Attlee, requested British support in China's armed resistance to Japan, the BBC reported.

"We believe that the British people, when they know the truth about Japanese aggression in China, will rise in support of the Chinese people, will organize practical assistance on their behalf, and will compel their own government to adopt a policy of active resistance to a danger that ultimately threatens them no less than ourselves," the letter read.

Sotheby's sale catalog stated the "highly important" letter was an early example of "Mao engaging in international diplomacy and is an exceptionally rare example of Mao's signature," CNN reported.

The second letter with Mao's signature to be sold in the last few decades, the document, which was expected to sell for $225,000, went to an unidentified Chinese buyer who paid nearly $1 million on Tuesday.

The letter, written in English, is presumably a translation undertaken by James Munro Bertram, a New Zealand journalist who traveled to Yan'an in the Chinese province of Shaanxi. Bertram met with Mao and typed the letter using the original Chinese document.

Attlee, who later became Britain's prime minister in 1945, opposed the letter's delivery, but once in power became the first leader to recognize the People's Republic of China, founded in 1949. Mao and Attlee also held a three-hour conversation while taking tea in 1954, according to Sotheby's.

Mao was born in 1893 during the late Qing dynasty. He joined forces with China's nationalist Kuomintang but also fought Chiang Kai-shek for control of China, until 1949.