Following the war, Puyi was captured by the Soviet army on the runway tarmac as he attempted to flee to Tokyo. He was surprisingly well-treated as a prisoner of the Russians, since Stalin viewed him as a political asset, but he was ultimately extradited to the new Chinese regime in 1950, and spent a decade in the Fushun War Criminals Management Centre, undergoing re-education. After his release, he ended his days back in Beijing, working as a street-sweeper, gardener and finally a researcher, and completing a memoir, From Emperor to Citizen (1961), which was larded with Communist self-flagellation. He died in 1967, aged just 61.
Paul French’s new history, The Last Emperor of China, focuses on the years 1922-1924, that brief period of optimism between the emperor’s marriages and his expulsion from the Forbidden City. French tells the story of Puyi’s “salad days” through a group of four: Puyi himself, his empress “Elizabeth” Wanrong, Reginald Johnston, and Wanrong’s American tutor Isabel Ingram. In French’s account, the Forbidden Palace in these years was a place of largely Anglophile fun, the deposed monarchs – nicknamed after English monarchs by their tutors – indulging their fondness for tennis, photography, cycling and, that very British passion, spoilt dogs.
Puyi, for one, seemed to be “cultivating the air of an Oxford dandy”. He attempted at least once to flee to these shores, though he was foiled by the surveillance of the imperial household department. When in 1924 soldiers arrived to expel them, they found the emperor’s party playing tennis in sparkling whites. (It’s a scene captured beautifully in Bernardo Bertolucci’s lavish 1987 film The Last Emperor.)