"a relic before his
time had come"
He was consigned to be a relic before his
time had come. Henry Pu Yi started out life as an anachronism, a boy
emperor of a fading dynasty. He died as a forgotten footnote, a stooped
gardener assigned to the Beijing Botanical Gardens where he tilled the
earth that had supported his Qing Dynasty predecessors for nearly 300
years. Aisin-Gioro Pu Yi, the 10th ruler of the Manchu Dynasty, was born
to the gilded splendor of the Forbidden City and ascended to the throne
in 1908. Just three years later, a nationalist putsch ended the
infant's reign. At the tender age of six, the Son of Heaven was out of a
job. Twelve years later, in 1924, Pu Yi was ejected from his prison
palace by an ambitious warlord. He fled to Tianjin, where he cavorted as
an exiled and extravagant playboy, full of imperious airs but no
imperial mandate. That mandate, however forced, was reinstated in 1932,
when invading Japan set up the puppet regime of Manchukuo in
northeastern China. Tapping the disgruntled ex-Emperor as figurehead
ruler, the Japanese promised him a kingdom to match his royal breeding.
In 1934, Pu Yi slipped into silken robes emblazoned with dragons and
formally ascended to the throne of Japanese-occupied Manchukuo, fueled
by hopes of a revived Qing Dynasty. Pu Yi proved a brittle ruler who
lashed out at cowering servants to compensate for his sense of
powerlessness. With the Japanese surrender in 1945, his dreams of empire
were dashed, and the chastened Emperor was trundled off by advancing
Soviet troops to the Russian Far East, where he spent five years
dreading his return to the country he had betrayed. On releasing him
into Chinese hands in July 1950, the Soviets heightened the ex-monarch's
fears, assuring him that he would be executed by a wrathful populace.
Moscow was wrong. By not killing Pu Yi, the Chinese communists avoided
making him into a martyr like Nicholas II in Russia or Louis XVI in
France. Instead, he was to be fashioned into a Maoist role model, proof
that even the most pampered royal could be reformed. Pu Yi spent a
decade in jail, where he underwent relentless thought reform. In
addition to admitting his complicity in Japanese barbarity in Manchuria
and professing communist zealotry, Pu Yi also learned more practical
things like how to brush his teeth, wash his feet and tie his shoelaces.
On Dec. 4, 1959, Comrade Pu Yi, a 54-year-old who could now dress and
groom himself, was issued a special pardon and entered life as a private
citizen.In 1960, Pu Yi was sent to the Beijing Botanical Gardens to
begin work as a gardener and handyman. The preserve was not far from Pu
Yi's old Forbidden City haunts, but it was worlds away from the splendor
of imperial China. He lived with his fifth wife in a dilapidated
courtyard house, shuffling occasionally to the library to conduct
historical research on his defanged and unloved dynasty. Just hours
before he died, unmourned, of cancer at a Beijing hospital in 1967, the
medical staff reportedly had to link arms to keep the Red Guards from
storming the ailing Manchu's ward. Nearly three decades later Pu Yi and
his clan finally enjoyed a reprieve. In 1995, his widow was allowed to
transfer his ashes from a public columbarium to the Western Qing Tombs,
where five of the 10 Manchu rulers are interred. Just a few years
before, a sanitized Qing revival had begun. Manchu-style banquets became
the rage in Beijing, and state-published recipe books illustrated the
proper ways of preparing, for example, a tasty sheep's ear. Cashing in
on the hype surrounding Bernardo Bertolucci's 1988 film The Last
Emperor, the Chinese tourist bureau even began offering tours of
landmark places in Pu Yi's life, including his spartan prison cell in
Fushun. The Botanical Gardens, where the deposed Emperor spent many of
his final days, were not part of the itinerary. Curious tourists had to
make do with official photographs of Pu Yi tending his plants. Those
graying portraits evoke a bittersweet Chinese Gothic, a diminutive,
bespectacled man standing solemnly with his gardening tools. The
one-time Emperor nurtured the earth lovingly, professing himself content
with watering his patch of the motherland. In 1960, armed with his
first voter's card, Pu Yi voiced the hopes of the great Chinese agrarian
revolution: I, along with my 650 million compatriots, was now the owner
of our 9,600,000 sq km of land. Perhaps he had forgotten that he had
once been responsible for more than just a little plot of flowers.
Indeed, as a very little boy, Henry Pu Yi had once owned it all.
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