Pu Yi, born as Aisin Gioro, was the last emperor of China. He was a member of the Ch'ing dynasty and therefore a Chinese Manchu. The Manchus were originally nomads from Manchuria, North East of China. They conquered China in 1634 but kept themselves apart from the rest of the population.
China was ruled by the Dowager Empress Cixi, who had forced the emperor from his throne, imprisoned him and later poisoned him for conspiring against her. On her deathbed, in 1908, Cixi nominated Pu Yi, the emperor's nephew, as successor to the throne.
Pu Yi, who assumed the throne under the reign name Hsuan T'ung, was three years old. His father, Prince Ch'un served as a regent. In 1911 there was an uprising in China and a democracy was declared. Pu Yi was forced to abdicate. After his abdication, the new republican government granted him a large government pension and permitted him to live in the Forbidden City of Beijing until 1924.
Pu Yi studied History and Poetry but did not study Science, Maths and other basic subjects. At the age of thirteen he started to study English. Some still hoped to return him to power and to do this he needed to have contacts with the West, so an officer from the English Colonial Office was asked to become Pu Yi's English tutor. His name was Reginald Johnson, and he had a great influence on the young emperor, with whom he became good friends, calling him Henry, a name that was to stick for the rest of his life.
When Pu Yi was fifteen he tried to escape by bribing the guards, who accepted his money but betrayed him, and he never made it out of the gates. In 1922, at 16, following the imperial tradition, Pu Yi married two women, but one divorced him nine years later and the other died of illness.
In 1924 another warlord surrounded the Forbidden City. He was Feng Yu Hsiu, and was a communist, and therefore against the imperial power. He forced Pu Yi to leave the Forbidden City and go and live in his father's mansion, although soon Reginald Johnson, his English tutor, helped him escape to the Japanese embassy. The British hoped that the Japanese would nominate Pu Yi the emperor of Manchuria.
After 1925, Pu Yi, his staff, and his wives were moved to Tien Tsin (Tianjin) on the coast of China where Japan had a concession. He lived in a mansion called Chang Garden and he set up his court there. He spent four years there plotting with the Japanese to become emperor of Manchuria.
In 1931 the Japanese army invaded Manchuria and in 1934 Pu Yi was proclaimed emperor, reigning under the name K'ang Te. The Japanese set up a new country in Manchuria called Manchukuo. The Chinese government protested, calling Manchukuo a puppet regime, and Pu Yi a traitor. The country truly was a puppet regime.
At the end of WWII, in 1945 the Soviet Army invaded Manchukuo. He was told that he could pick three companions and that he would be sent to live in Japan. He picked his brother and two servants. The Russians did not keep their promise and took him back to Russia with them. There he was placed under house arrest in a dacha and was treated very well.
In 1946, Pu Yi testified at the Tokyo war crimes trial that he had been the unwilling tool of the Japanese militarists and not, as they claimed, the instrument of Manchurian self-determination.
In 1950 he was handed over to the Chinese Communists, and he was imprisoned at the "reforming through labor" camp in Fushun War Criminal Supervisory Station, in Shenyang. He was 51, and alone in the world. He went along very meekly with all the brain washing of the Cultural Revolution and was pardoned by Mao Zedong in 1959.
The Communist Government forced him to become a gardener, and he was made to appear at public gatherings on the government's behalf. In 1965 Mao Zedong decided to purge all the intellectuals that opposed him, and when Pu Yi died in 1967 it was rumoured that he had been murdered by the revolutionaries, although it is more probable that he died of cancer.
A Hong Kong businessman offered to bury Pu Yi's ashes in the cemetery he had just opened on a hillside. The modest gravesite, marked only by a marble tablet inscribed with his name, lies 300 metres away from the gigantic palace-like mausoleum of his adoptive father and predecessor, Emperor Guang Xu of the Qing dynasty.
