{"id":49692,"date":"2026-08-11T16:46:33","date_gmt":"2026-08-11T16:46:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/tennis\/49692\/"},"modified":"2026-08-11T16:46:33","modified_gmt":"2026-08-11T16:46:33","slug":"the-last-emperor-of-china-by-paul-french-4-star-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/tennis\/49692\/","title":{"rendered":"The Last Emperor of China by Paul French: 4-star review"},"content":{"rendered":"

Following the war, Puyi was captured by the Soviet army<\/a> 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<\/a>, From Emperor to Citizen (1961), which was larded with Communist self-flagellation. He died in 1967, aged just 61.<\/p>\n

Paul French\u2019s new history<\/a>, The Last Emperor of China, focuses on the years 1922-1924, that brief period of optimism between the emperor\u2019s marriages and his expulsion from the Forbidden City. French tells the story of Puyi\u2019s \u201csalad days\u201d through a group of four: Puyi himself, his empress \u201cElizabeth\u201d Wanrong, Reginald Johnston, and Wanrong\u2019s American tutor Isabel Ingram. In French\u2019s account, the Forbidden Palace in these years was a place of largely Anglophile fun, the deposed monarchs \u2013 nicknamed after English monarchs by their tutors \u2013 indulging their fondness for tennis, photography, cycling and, that very British passion, spoilt dogs.<\/p>\n

Puyi, for one, seemed to be \u201ccultivating the air of an Oxford dandy\u201d. 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\u2019s party playing tennis in sparkling whites. (It\u2019s a scene captured beautifully in Bernardo Bertolucci\u2019s lavish 1987 film The Last Emperor.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Following the war, Puyi was captured by the Soviet army on the runway tarmac as he attempted to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":49693,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[9808,12116,2352,142,18545,18546,12115,18547,239,28],"class_list":["post-49692","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-news","tag-book-review","tag-books","tag-china","tag-culture","tag-culture-editors-choice","tag-history-books","tag-non-fiction","tag-soviet-union","tag-standard","tag-tennis"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49692","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=49692"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49692\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/49693"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=49692"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=49692"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=49692"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}