The Meisterstuck No. 146 attracted 111 bids from around the world against a presale valuation of S$30,000 to S$50,000, the South China Morning Post reported.

The final price, which included the buyer's premium, was nearly nine times the S$52,000 the pen fetched the last time it changed hands, at a Sotheby's charity auction in July 2003.

Auction house Hotlotz listed it as Lot 51 in its "Interiors & Collectibles - August, Fine Art Focus" sale, a timed online auction that opened Aug. 5 and closed on the evening of Aug. 16. Bidding had started at S$20,000.

The pen measures 14.5 cm and is marked 925 for sterling silver, with yellow-toned metal highlights, an 18k gold nib and "SM Lee Kuan Yew" engraved on the cap, AsiaOne reported, citing a statement from the auction house.

The engraving dates it to his years as senior minister from 1990 to 2004, a post he took up after 31 years as prime minister.

Lee Kuan Yew's fountain pen that fetched $360,000 at an auction on Aug. 16, 2026. Photo courtesy of Hotlotz

SCMP reported the pen had carried an estimate of just S$4,000 to S$6,000 at the 2003 sale. Hotlotz said the buyer who took it home then had kept it ever since.

That sale, "The Lee Kuan Yew Family Collection," offered 88 lots of family belongings and raised S$2.04 million, The Straits Times reported.

It was organized by Lee's daughter Lee Wei Ling, a neurologist who died in October 2024, to raise money for The Tent, a welfare organization working with teenage girls.

It also included a black Waterman fountain pen that Lee used to sign the 1957 constitutional agreement in London, the document that laid the groundwork for Singapore's self-government.

An anonymous businessman paid S$350,000 for it.

"Singapore Chinatown, Temple Street," a 1976 oil painting by Chua Mia Tee, sold for S$107,900 ($84,000) after 58 bids at the same Hotlotz sale, more than three times its high estimate of S$30,000.

The price is an auction high for Chua, who died at his Bukit Timah home on July 10 at the age of 94 after being hospitalized for pneumonia, his daughter Chua Yang told The Straits Times.

A Cultural Medallion recipient and the central figure in Singapore's social realist movement, he painted canvases such as "National Language Class" and "Epic Poem of Malaya" that recorded ordinary life in the years around self-governance.

Lee Kuan Yew was Singapore's first prime minister and led the country from 1959 to 1990. He stayed on as senior minister until 2004, then served as Singapore's first and only minister mentor from August 2004 to May 2011.

He remained a member of parliament until his death on March 23, 2015, at the age of 91. He is credited with turning a poor former British colony into one of the world's wealthiest and most stable societies.