Once Emperor of China, Master of the Imperial City, and then a member of the Red Chinese Congress!
If you have seen the movie, The Last Emperor, the 1987 movie by Bernardo Bertolucci starring John Lone, you probably thought of course none of those things could really happen.
But they did happen. All of the main events in the movie occurred. Pujie, the younger brother of Pu Yi, was technical advisor to the movie, so you can be sure the events in the movie are accurate. Pujie had a daughter who is still alive in China.
No prince, no rules in fiction, has lived a life of more excitement, despair, drama, and tragedy than Henry Pu Yi, the last emperor of China and later a member of Red China's National People's Congress.
The grandnephew of the Dowager Tzu Hsi, Henry Pu Yi was born in Beijing in 1906, elevated to the Dragon Throne in 1908, expelled from the forbidden city in 1924, Emperor of Manchuria from 1934 to 1945, and subsequently a prisoner of the Soviets and Red Chinese for fourteen years when he received a more complete and protracted brainwashing than any other living man. Later, he formed the inglorious link between China's inglorious past and its enigmatic future for every calamity that has overwhelmed China and has overwhelmed Pu Yi and, he like China, survived.
In our ignorance of the true character and purpose of the Chinese leaders today, this autobiography alone provides an unprecedented path of understanding China's past, present and future from a Chinese point of view.
Although Henry Pu Yi lived precariously close to the abyss of intrigue, civil war, massacre, and revolution, he survived - only because by his own admission, he is "a liar, suspicious, tricky, and a hypocrite." Yet the many faces of his fascinating live - his schooling by a collection of imperial tutors, his several unconsummated marriages; his complex dealings with warlords, foreign diplomats and military men are described with such vividness and candor that they could not stand alone an important, illuminating the vignettes of Chinese history.
The utter fascination of this book is that it demonstrates the shocking extent to which the modern Chinese state has employed the techniques and ideas of Marx and Freud to take guile, hypocrisy, tradition, and dynastic heritage to recreate the modern man: Pu Yi.
