Puyi

• 1. Introduction

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  Puyi, the last emperor of China, was born in Beijing on the 7th of February 1906 and died on the 17th of October 1967. A commentator named Wen Yuan-ning once quipped that Puyi had been "made emperor three times without knowing why and apparently without relishing it." The joke carries a hard truth. Puyi took the throne as a toddler, lost it, and was then placed on a throne twice more. Each time, other people chose the moment and wrote the script. This documentary asks how a child raised as a living god learns anything about the real world. It asks who gained from keeping a fallen dynasty's heir alive, and what he gave up in return. And it asks what becomes of an emperor once every empire around him is gone.

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• 2. Childhood Of A God

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  On the evening of the 13th of November 1908, a procession of eunuchs and guardsmen set out from the Forbidden City for the Northern Mansion, home of Prince Chun. The Guangxu Emperor had died without children, and Empress Dowager Cixi had chosen the prince's two-year-old son to succeed him. Nobody warned the family. The toddler screamed and fought as officials ordered the eunuchs to lift him. His parents said nothing. Puyi was forced into a palanquin and carried away. Only his wet nurse, Wang Lianshou, was allowed to go with him from the Northern Mansion.

  Cixi was the first person he met inside the palace, and he never forgot it. Puyi later wrote of "a drab curtain through which I could see an emaciated and terrifying hideous face." He threw the sweets she offered onto the floor and shouted, "I want nanny, I want nanny." Cixi called him a "naughty child" and told someone to take him away to play. She died on the 15th of November, less than two days after the meeting. Puyi's father became Prince Regent.

  The coronation of the Xuantong Emperor took place in the Hall of Supreme Harmony on the 2nd of December 1908. His father carried him onto the Dragon Throne. The deafening drums and ceremonial music frightened the boy, and he began to cry. His father could only whisper, "Don't cry, it'll be over soon." Puyi later admitted that his tears had ruined the great ceremony.

  For the next seven years, Puyi did not see his biological mother. Wang was the one steady figure in his life, and he credited her as the only person who could control him. When he was eight, Empress Dowager Longyu had Wang expelled from the Forbidden City on the grounds that he was too old to be breast-fed. Longyu led five former imperial concubines whom Puyi had to call his "mothers" and visit every day to report on his progress. He hated them. "Although I had many mothers, I never knew any motherly love," he wrote.

  His schooling covered the Chinese classics and nothing else. He recalled that he learnt nothing of mathematics or science, and for a long time had no idea where Peking was situated. At 13 he finally met his parents and siblings, who had to kowtow to him as he sat on the Dragon Throne. By then he had forgotten what his mother looked like. His younger brother Pujie later told the Anglo-French journalist Edward Behr that he had pictured Puyi as "a venerable old man with a beard."

  Wherever Puyi went, grown men knelt in a kowtow and kept their eyes lowered until he passed. He soon discovered his power over the eunuchs and had them beaten for small offences. "Flogging eunuchs was part of my daily routine," he later said. Behr noted that an emperor counted as divine, so firing air-gun pellets at eunuchs was simply his prerogative. Once Puyi planned to reward a eunuch for a good puppet show with a cake baked with iron filings, because he wanted to see the man's face as he ate it. Wang talked him out of it.

  The eunuchs did nearly all the work of the Forbidden City, from cooking and gardening to the paperwork of governing, and they also advised the emperor. They stole treasures constantly and sold them on the black market. Puyi never had any privacy. Eunuchs opened his doors, dressed him, washed him, and even blew on his soup to cool it. Each meal was a vast buffet of which he ate very little. He wore new clothes every day, because emperors never reused theirs.

  After his wedding, Puyi tried to take control, and he described "an orgy of looting" that involved everyone from the highest to the lowest. By the end of the ceremony itself, he said, the pearls and jade had been stolen from the empress's crown. He brought outsiders into the Household Department, the body that ran the imperial household, to replace the aristocratic officers. He made Zheng Xiaoxu its minister, and Zheng hired Tong Jixu as his chief of staff. In June 1923, a fire destroyed a hall in the palace just as Puyi had ordered an inventory of an imperial warehouse. He suspected arson to hide theft.

  The reported losses included 2,685 golden statues of Buddha, 1,675 golden altar ornaments, 435 porcelain antiques and 31 boxes of sable furs. Most were probably sold before the fire. His tutor, Reginald Johnston, reported finding the emperor and empress standing on the charred wood the next day, sadly looking over the ruin. Puyi had overheard eunuch conversations that made him fear for his life. A month after the fire, he evicted the eunuchs with the support of the Beiyang Army. He kept between 50 and 100 after the Dowager Consorts complained that they could not function without them. Puyi and his wife loved tennis, and he had a court made on the grounds where the Hall of Supreme Harmony had once stood. Her brother Rong Qi remembered that once the eunuchs left, the place "took on a desolate, abandoned air."

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• 3. Abdication And Restorations

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  On the 10th of October 1911, the army garrison at Wuhan mutinied and set off a revolt across the Yangtze river valley and beyond. The general Yuan Shikai was sent by the court to crush it, but he could not. Public opinion had turned against the Qing, who had ruled China since 1644, and few people wished to fight for a dynasty that seemed to have lost the mandate of heaven. Prince Chun stepped aside as regent on the 6th of December, and Empress Dowager Longyu took over.

  On the 12th of February 1912, Longyu endorsed the edict of abdication under a deal brokered by Yuan, now prime minister, between the court in Beijing and the Republicans in the south. Puyi remembered the scene in his autobiography. The dowager sat on a platform wiping her eyes, while a fat old man knelt before her on a red cushion with tears streaming down his face. "I was sitting to the right of the widow and wondering why both adults were crying," Puyi wrote.

  The agreement was known as the Articles of Favourable Treatment. Puyi kept his imperial title and was to be treated by the Republic with the protocol due a foreign monarch. The court could stay in the northern half of the Forbidden City and at the Summer Palace. The Republic promised an annual subsidy of four million silver taels, but it was never fully paid and was abolished after a few years. Nobody told Puyi in February 1912 that his reign had ended, and for some time he went on believing he was emperor.

  In 1913, Longyu died, and President Yuan came to the Forbidden City to pay his respects. Puyi's tutors told him this meant major changes were coming. Puyi learned that Yuan wanted him as a kind of custodian of the palace until Yuan could move in himself as emperor of a new dynasty. Yuan began bringing army bands to play whenever he ate. Puyi spent hours staring at the Presidential Palace across from the Forbidden City and cursed Yuan whenever he saw his car. He decided to sabotage the plan by hiding the Imperial Seals, but his tutors pointed out that Yuan would simply make new ones. In 1915, Yuan proclaimed himself emperor and planned to marry his daughter to Puyi. He gave up the throne in the face of popular opposition.

  From the 1st to the 12th of July 1917, the warlord Zhang Xun restored Puyi to the throne. Zhang ordered his soldiers to keep their queues as a show of loyalty to the emperor. Premier Duan Qirui answered with force from the air. A Caudron Type D plane piloted by Pan Shizhong, with the bombardier Du Yuyuan, took off from Nanyuan airfield and dropped three bombs on the Forbidden City. The raid killed one eunuch and did only minor damage. It is recorded as the first aerial bombardment by a Chinese air force, and the restoration collapsed under widespread opposition.

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• 4. The Scottish Tutor

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  Reginald Johnston, a Scottish scholar and diplomat, arrived at the Forbidden City on the 3rd of March 1919 to tutor the young emperor. President Xu Shichang believed the monarchy would eventually return, so he hired Johnston to prepare Puyi for the modern world. The planned subjects were political science, constitutional history and English. The rules allowed Johnston only five English texts: Alice in Wonderland and translations of four Confucian classics, the Analects, the Mencius, the Great Learning and the Doctrine of the Mean. Johnston ignored the limit. He taught world history, with a special focus on Britain, along with philosophy and his conviction that monarchies were superior to republics.

  Puyi found Johnston's piercing blue eyes unsettling. He recalled studying English with him "like a good boy," never daring to wander off topic as he did with his Chinese tutors. The eunuchs began relying on the tutor to steer Puyi away from his darker moods, so Johnston held far more influence than his title suggested. Puyi began insisting that the eunuchs call him "Henry," and later his wife Wanrong "Elizabeth." He started speaking "Chinglish," a blend of Mandarin and English. "Johnston had become the major part of my soul," he wrote.

  After his first interview with the emperor, Johnston sent a report to the British authorities. He described a "very 'human' boy, with liveliness, intelligence and an enthusiastic sense of humour." He feared that the hordes of eunuchs and useless officials around Puyi would do him moral harm. His advice was to move the boy to the Summer Palace, where life would be less artificial and happier.

  In May 1919, thousands of university students protested in Beijing. The great powers at the Paris peace conference had awarded the former German concessions in Shandong, including Qingdao, to Japan. Puyi asked Johnston about the May Fourth Movement. It was the first time he noticed that people outside the Forbidden City had concerns that were not about him.

  Johnston also opened the palace to new machines and habits. Puyi loved the films of Harold Lloyd so much that he installed a film projector over the eunuchs' objections. Johnston was the first to argue that the extremely near-sighted emperor needed glasses, and after a long dispute with Prince Chun, who thought them undignified, he won. Puyi took up the bicycle, cut off his queue, and let his hair grow. He became addicted to the telephone and rang people in Beijing at random just to hear their voices. Johnston introduced him to "new-style" Chinese books and magazines, and Puyi wrote poems that were published anonymously. In 1922, Johnston brought his friend, the writer Hu Shih, to teach Puyi about recent Chinese literature. Puyi also began to dream of studying at Oxford, Johnston's alma mater.

  On the 4th of June 1922, Puyi tried to flee the Forbidden City. He planned to issue an open letter "to the people of China" renouncing his title before leaving for Oxford. Johnston vetoed the plan and refused to call a taxi, and Puyi was too frightened to live alone on the streets of Beijing. His brother Pujie said the attempt had nothing to do with the coming marriage. "He felt cooped up, and wanted out." Puyi also knew only a single word of Manchu, yili, meaning "arise," and called the language his worst subject.

  Johnston was a romantic conservative with an instinctive preference for monarchies, and he believed China needed a benevolent autocrat. He told Puyi that the vast majority of Chinese wanted a Qing restoration. Puyi rarely left the palace and had no way to check. Johnston scorned the republican elite in their top hats and frock coats as not truly Chinese, and he praised the Confucian scholars in traditional robes. He even respected the court astrologers who decided the dates of major events. Johnston wrote about these years in his 1934 book Twilight in the Forbidden City. Behr cautioned that it painted an idealised picture, leaving out Puyi's sexuality among other things.

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• 5. Wedding And Wanrong

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  In March 1922, the Dowager Consorts decided that Puyi should marry and gave him photographs of aristocratic teenage girls to choose from. Puyi first picked Wenxiu, but was told she was acceptable only as a concubine, so he had to choose again. He claimed the faces in the photographs were too small to tell apart. His second choice was Wanrong, the daughter of one of Manchuria's richest aristocrats, who had been educated in English by American missionaries in Tianjin. On the 15th of March 1922, newspapers announced the betrothal. Puyi did not meet Wanrong until the wedding.

  The wedding began on the 21st of October 1922 with betrothal presents marched from the Forbidden City to Wanrong's house: 18 sheep, 2 horses, 40 pieces of satin and 80 rolls of cloth. Court musicians and cavalry accompanied them. Following Manchu tradition, the ceremony took place by moonlight for good luck. Palace guardsmen, eunuchs and musicians escorted Wanrong in a red sedan chair called the Phoenix Chair, while Puyi waited on the Dragon Throne. In her quarters, she kowtowed to him six times as the marriage decree was read. She wore a mask in accordance with tradition. Puyi recalled that only when she appeared under a crimson satin cloth did he feel any curiosity about what she looked like.

  That night Puyi also married his secondary consort Wenxiu. The couple went to the Palace of Earthly Tranquility, where everything was red and where emperors had traditionally consummated their marriages. Puyi, timid and inexperienced, fled the bridal chamber and left his wives to sleep in the Dragon Bed alone. Behr wrote that an adolescent surrounded by eunuchs could hardly be expected to show a seventeen-year-old's maturity, since no one had ever advised him on such matters. Behr also raised other possible explanations, including that Puyi was already aware of homosexual tendencies. An 85-year-old eunuch interviewed in 1986 said the emperor visited the nuptial apartments once every three months and was in a foul temper the next day. Rumours among the eunuchs ran along similar lines.

  Other witnesses described a warmer picture. Wanrong's younger brother Rong Qi remembered the two teenagers racing their bicycles through the palace and forcing eunuchs to scramble out of the way. "There was a lot of laughter," he told Behr, and they were "like kids together."

  The closeness did not last. Years later in Tianjin, the couple met only at mealtimes. Wanrong smoked opium recreationally. She wanted to dance, play tennis, wear Western clothes and make-up, and listen to jazz, and the more conservative courtiers objected to all of it. A butler who secretly spied for Japan reported that the two spent hours screaming at each other in the garden, with Wanrong repeatedly calling Puyi a "eunuch." What she meant by that is unclear. Puyi's sister Yunhe noted in her diary in September 1930 that Wanrong had flown into a rage, claiming he had bullied her. Puyi wrote in his memoir that in his eyes a wife and a consort were "slaves and tools" of their master. In 1931, Wenxiu declared she had had enough of him and his court, walked out, and filed for divorce. The British journalist Henry Woodhead had earlier noticed that she and Wanrong were the only people at court who seemed to get along, "like sisters."

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• 6. Exile And Schemers

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  After the Great Kanto earthquake destroyed Tokyo and Yokohama on the 1st of September 1923, Puyi donated jade antiques worth some 33,000 pounds for disaster relief. A delegation of Japanese diplomats came to the Forbidden City to thank him. Their report described him as highly vain and malleable, and as someone Japan could use. That visit marked the start of Japanese interest in Puyi.

  On the 23rd of October 1924, a coup led by the warlord Feng Yuxiang took control of Beijing. Feng wanted legitimacy, and abolishing the unpopular Articles of Favourable Treatment looked like an easy way to win applause. On the 5th of November 1924, he revised them, stripped Puyi of his imperial title and privileges, and reduced him to a private citizen. Puyi was expelled from the Forbidden City the same day and given three hours to leave. He spent a few days at his father's house and then slipped away with Johnston and his chief servant, Big Li, without telling Prince Chun's servants.

  Puyi had wanted to go to the British Legation, but Johnston insisted he would be safer with the Japanese. Johnston admired a system where Japanese people worshipped their emperor as a living god, and he constantly nudged Puyi in a pro-Japanese direction. At the Japanese legation, the diplomat Kenkichi Yoshizawa told Puyi that the government "will provide protection for you." Puyi's adviser Lu Zongyu, who was secretly working for the Japanese, then suggested a move to Tianjin. He called it safer than Beijing, but the real reason was that Japan wanted Puyi easier to control and out of the legation. On the 23rd of February 1925, Puyi left for Tianjin in a simple gown and skullcap, fearing robbers. He recalled that Japanese policemen and special agents in black suits kept boarding the train, until his car was almost half full of them.

  Puyi settled in the Japanese concession of Tianjin, first in the Zhang Garden and from 1929 in Lu Zongyu's former home, the Garden of Serenity. Woodhead called his court a "doggy paradise" because he and Wanrong owned several spoiled dogs while the courtiers spent their time feuding. Tianjin was the most cosmopolitan Chinese city after Shanghai, with British, French, German, Russian and Japanese communities. Puyi was allowed to join several social clubs that normally admitted only white people. He was bored, and he later admitted an addiction to buying pianos, watches, clocks, radios, Western clothes, leather shoes and spectacles. Visitors constantly begged him for money, including relatives, old Manchu bannermen, journalists willing to write for a Qing restoration at a price, and eunuchs now living in poverty.

  In June 1925, the warlord Zhang Zuolin came to Tianjin. This illiterate former bandit ruled Manchuria, a region as large as Germany and France combined, with 30 million people and the most industry in China. Zhang kowtowed to Puyi and promised to restore the Qing in return for a large donation to his army. He also warned Puyi, in a roundabout way, not to trust his Japanese friends. In 1927, Puyi told The Illustrated London News, "I never wish to be Emperor again." Behr observed that if Puyi had been bolder and returned to Beijing after Zhang captured it that June, he might have regained the Dragon Throne.

  Other suitors proved to be swindlers. Zhang Zongchang, known as the "Dogmeat General," and the White Russian general Grigory Semyonov both promised restoration if Puyi paid, and both kept the money. Semyonov claimed to command Cossack Hosts and to hold 300 million roubles in the bank. Puyi lent him 5,000 pounds, which was never repaid. A more dangerous visitor was the Japanese officer Kenji Doihara, a charming man fluent in Mandarin. He flattered Puyi that a great man should conquer Manchuria and then, like his Qing ancestors in the 17th century, use it as a base to conquer China.

  In 1928, during the Northern Expedition, the warlord Sun Dianying sacked the Qing tombs outside Beijing. The news that Cixi's corpse had been desecrated deeply offended Puyi. He never forgave the Kuomintang and held Chiang Kai-shek personally responsible, partly because of allegations that Kuomintang leaders had taken bribes from Sun's loot. The incident showed Puyi how little powerful support he had, and it pushed him toward the Japanese.

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• 7. Captive Of Japan

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  In September 1931, Puyi sent a letter to Jiro Minami, the Japanese Minister of War, saying he wished to be restored to the throne. On the night of the 18th of September 1931, the Japanese Kwantung Army blew up a section of the South Manchurian Railroad, which Japan owned, and blamed the warlord Zhang Xueliang. This Mukden incident gave the army a pretext to launch an offensive to conquer all of Manchuria. Doihara, head of the army's espionage office, visited Puyi and proposed making him head of a Manchurian state. The Japanese also bribed a cafe worker to tell Puyi that a contract was out on his life, hoping to frighten him into moving.

  Wanrong was firmly against the plan and called it treason. When Puyi hesitated, Doihara sent for Puyi's cousin Yoshiko Kawashima, also known as "Eastern Jewel." Yoshiko was strong-willed and flamboyant, and she often wore male clothing and uniforms. She had great influence on Puyi and helped change his mind.

  In the Tientsin Incident of November 1931, Puyi and Zheng Xiaoxu travelled to Manchuria to finalise plans for the puppet state of Manchukuo. Puyi left his house hidden in the trunk of a car. The Chinese government ordered his arrest for treason but could not breach the Japanese protection. A Japanese ship carried him across the Bohai to Port Arthur, today's Lushun. There General Masahiko Amakasu greeted him and became his minder. Amakasu described the Amakasu Incident of 1923, when he had the feminist Noe Ito, her lover the anarchist Sakae Osugi, and a six-year-old boy strangled as "enemies of the Emperor." He said he would kill Puyi the same way if Puyi proved to be one. Puyi then discovered he was a prisoner who could not leave the Yamato Hotel. Wanrong followed six weeks later, after Eastern Jewel persuaded her that a wife's duty was to follow her husband.

  In early 1932, General Seishiro Itagaki laid out the terms. The new state would be a republic with Puyi as Chief Executive, addressed as "Your Excellency" rather than "Your Imperial Majesty." The capital would be Changchun, and nobody would mention the Mandate of Heaven. Puyi was displeased, but Itagaki told him he was in no position to negotiate. Itagaki hinted that Manchukuo might become a monarchy in a few years and that Japan had ambitions over all of China. Where Doihara was polite and stroked Puyi's ego, Itagaki barked orders as if at a dim-witted common soldier. Itagaki had also promised Zheng the post of prime minister, and that vanity helped Zheng persuade Puyi to agree. Zheng argued that history would repeat itself, as Puyi would conquer China from a Manchurian base just as the Qing had in 1644.

  On the 1st of March 1932, Puyi was installed as Chief Executive of Manchukuo, a puppet state of the Empire of Japan. He believed it was only a first step and had the yellow dragon robes used for Qing coronations brought from Beijing. Japanese propaganda celebrated the state as a Pan-Asian union of five races: Japanese, Chinese, Koreans, Manchus and Mongols. On the 8th of March, Puyi made his ceremonial entry into Changchun, and he later noted that the silent citizens offered him only cold comfort. Woodhead wrote that outside official circles he met no Chinese who felt any enthusiasm for the new regime.

  The Lytton Commission arrived on the 20th of April 1932 to investigate whether Japan had committed aggression. Puyi was interviewed by the Earl of Lytton and badly wanted to ask for political asylum in Britain. Itagaki sat right beside him, so Puyi said that the masses had begged him to come and that his stay was entirely voluntary. Afterward Itagaki praised his performance. The Chinese diplomat Wellington Koo, who was attached to the commission, received a visitor posing as an antique dealer. The man said Wanrong wanted help escaping Changchun, where Japanese maids watched her every move. Koo was touched but could do nothing. Her brother Rong Qi called this the "final blow" that sent her into a downward spiral.

  Resistance by guerrillas, whom the Kwantung Army called "bandits," broke out from the start. Doihara paid a multi-million-dollar bribe to win over a leading guerrilla, the Hui Muslim general Ma Zhanshan, and Puyi appointed him Defence Minister. It was a ruse. Within months Ma took his troops across the border into the Soviet Union to keep fighting the Japanese. In October 1933, Doihara told Puyi that he would be an emperor again, and Puyi went, in his own words, "wild with joy." He was disappointed not to get back the old title of Great Qing Emperor. Doihara added a condition: the Japanese emperor was Puyi's father, represented in Manchukuo by the Kwantung Army, which must be obeyed like a father.

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• 8. Emperor Without Power

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  On the 1st of March 1934, Puyi was crowned Emperor of Manchukuo under the regnal title Kangde. Amakasu attended as the film director recording the event, but his real role was to keep Puyi from going off script. Wanrong was excluded because her opium addiction, anti-Japanese feelings and unpredictability made her untrustworthy in Amakasu's eyes. Puyi and Japan clashed over dress. They wanted a military uniform, while he considered anything but Manchu robes an insult. In a typical compromise, he wore a Western military uniform at the enthronement, the only Chinese emperor ever to do so, and a dragon robe at the Temple of Heaven. A Lincoln limousine with bulletproof windows carried him, followed by nine Packards. The Kwantung Army issued the invitations, and 70 percent of the guests were Japanese.

  The Japanese made Changchun the capital and renamed it Xinjing, overruling Puyi's wish for Mukden, the old Qing capital. He considered Xinjing an undistinguished industrial city. With no palace available, he moved into a former Russian-era office of the Salt Tax Administration, which became known as Salt Tax Palace and is now a museum. He could not leave without permission. The American historian Carter Eckert noted that the Kwantung Army had a massive headquarters downtown, while Puyi lived in a small, shabby building near the railroad station, close to factories, slaughterhouses, the chief prison and the red-light district.

  Shortly after the coronation, Prince Chun came to Xinjing by train. He told his son he was an idiot if he believed the Japanese would restore him to the Dragon Throne, and warned that Puyi was only being used. The Japanese embassy issued a protest over the Manchukuo imperial guard welcoming him at a station that only Japanese soldiers were allowed to control.

  Puyi's days filled with ritual. He opened factories and mines, attended celebrations of Hirohito's birthday, and on a Japanese holiday paid his respects to the Japanese soldiers killed fighting the "bandits." Every morning, schoolchildren kowtowed first toward Tokyo and then to a portrait of Puyi, which he found intoxicating. When he thanked a Japanese foreman at a coal mine in rudimentary Japanese, the man burst into tears. Whenever Japan wanted a law, the decree was dropped at Salt Tax Palace for him to sign, and he always did. He signed decrees seizing farmland for Japanese colonists and a law making certain thoughts a crime. Behr noted that Puyi thus bore full responsibility, in theory, for atrocities committed in his name. Behr called the supposed Pan-Asian empire one of the most brutally run countries in the world. From 1935 to 1945, a Kwantung Army officer named Yoshioka Yasunori was attached to the household as a spy who controlled Puyi through fear and direct orders. There were many attempts on Puyi's life, including a stabbing by a palace servant in 1937. Puyi later said he had put his head in the tiger's mouth.

  In 1935, Puyi visited Japan. His interpreter, the diplomat Kenjiro Hayashide, wrote a book on the trip that Behr called absurd, presenting every banal remark as wisdom. A booklet promoting the visit claimed Puyi was an excellent horseman and archer. Hirohito took this seriously and gave him a horse to review the Japanese army. In fact Puyi was afraid of horses and refused to mount it, so the Japanese hurriedly brought a carriage for the two emperors. Back in Xinjing, Puyi hired the American public relations man George Bronson Rea to lobby Washington for recognition. Rea published The Case for Manchukuo and worked for Puyi until Pearl Harbor, but he never won recognition.

  The murder of Simon Kaspe, a French Jewish pianist visiting his father in Harbin, damaged Manchukuo's image abroad. In 1933 he was kidnapped, tortured and killed by a Russian fascist gang. Evidence tied the gang to the Kempeitai, the Japanese army's military police, and two trials followed in 1935 and 1936. In the second, Chinese judges convicted six defendants, but Japanese judges on the Xinjing Supreme Court quashed the verdict and ordered them freed. Russian fascists petitioned Puyi to pardon the men. He refused, yet he accepted the reversal without complaint. The case, along with the state's high crime rate and nine competing Japanese police and intelligence agencies told to fund themselves through organised crime, made a mockery of Japan's claim to have rescued Manchuria from lawlessness.

  In 1936, Ling Sheng, a provincial governor whose son was engaged to one of Puyi's younger sisters, was arrested after complaining about Japanese interference. Puyi asked Yoshioka whether anything could be done. The Kwantung Army commander, Kenkichi Ueda, told him the matter was settled, since a Japanese court-martial had convicted Ling of plotting rebellion and he had been beheaded. Puyi cancelled his sister's engagement. His moods swung between hours of staring into space and having servants beaten, and servants were flogged in the basement for such offences as "irresponsible conversations." The phrase "Take him downstairs" was much feared. Puyi wrote that his orphaned page boys, many of whose parents the Japanese had killed, were the size of 10-year-olds at the age of 18.

  The Second Sino-Japanese War ended in 1945, and the Soviet Red Army captured Puyi. He testified at the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal in 1946 and was repatriated to the People's Republic of China in 1950. Held as a war criminal in the Soviet Union and China, he was granted amnesty by the Chinese Communist Party in 1959, which presented him as a model of successful reeducation. Under pressure from the government, he published an autobiography ghostwritten by Li Wenda. He worked as a gardener and then became a researcher at the Central Research Institute of Culture and History. He had no children. During the Cultural Revolution, Zhou Enlai protected him.

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