They're the stuff of legends, the ornately carved, jewel-encrusted eggs commissioned by the last Russian royals as gifts for their family.
George Clooney stole one in Ocean's Twelve, and Japanese detective novelists like to centre plots around them. Now four of the surviving 42 eggs are on display at the Hong Kong Heritage Museum in an exhibition about the company that made them, Fabergé, and the artistic legacy of Imperial Russia.
"They remind you that everything is temporary. We are temporary, but these pieces of art will stay until eternity," said Victor Garanin, director of Moscow's Fersman Mineralogical Museum, which has the world's only unfinished imperial Fabergé egg in its collection.
That egg was commissioned in 1917, when the Russian revolution ended the Romanov dynasty and led to the communist Bolshevik takeover.
"Nicholas II dedicated it to his only son, Alexei," said Tatiana Muntyan, curator of Moscow's Kremlin Museums, pointing at a delicate blue egg at the Hong Kong exhibition. It is engraved with a pattern of stars in the night sky.
"It was supposed to be made of blue glass adorned by diamonds, on a cloud made of rock crystal, with silver angels all over the clouds, and placed on a stand made of nephrite, a jade-like material," she said.