A calligraphic album of 37 poems by Mao Zedong with sound provenance fetched 14.26 million yuan ($2.34 million) at an auction in Beijing on Saturday night.

The calligraphic works were painted in running script (xing shu) by Guo Moruo (1892-1978), a government official and leading author and scholar of 20th-century China.

Guo finished the album in 1967, a year after the start of the "cultural revolution" (1966-76). He gave them to his sister-in-law Yu Lixiu as a gift.