Puyi, the Last Emperor — a child abdicated two thousand years of empire

Puyi, enthroned as the Xuantong Emperor of the Qing dynasty in 1908 at the age of two, was the last emperor of China. His reign as a true sovereign lasted barely three years and ended on 12 February 1912, when, in the wake of the Xinhai Revolution, the regent Empress Dowager Longyu signed the abdication edict on his behalf. With that document the Qing dynasty ended and so did more than two thousand years of imperial rule in China, replaced by a republic. Puyi was six years old and understood almost none of it.

The fall of the empire did not end Puyi’s strange career as a figurehead. Under the Articles of Favorable Treatment he kept his title and lived on inside the Forbidden City as a pensioned ex-emperor until a warlord expelled him in 1924. From there he drifted into the orbit of Imperial Japan, which exploited him as the centerpiece of its conquest of Manchuria: installed as chief executive of the puppet state of Manchukuo in 1932 and crowned its “Kangde Emperor” in 1934, he was a sovereign in name and a prisoner of his sponsors in fact, signing whatever Tokyo placed before him.

When Japan surrendered in 1945, Puyi was captured by Soviet forces, held in the USSR, produced as a witness at the Tokyo war-crimes tribunal, and in 1950 handed to the new People’s Republic of China. There he underwent nearly a decade of imprisonment and political “reeducation” at a war-criminals’ facility before being pardoned in 1959 and recast by the Communist state as living proof of redemption: an emperor remade into an ordinary citizen.

He spent his final years in Beijing as a gardener and then a literary archivist, and as the author of an officially shaped memoir, From Emperor to Citizen. During the Cultural Revolution he was reportedly shielded from the worst of the Red Guards by Premier Zhou Enlai. He died of cancer and related illness on 17 October 1967, leaving no heir — the last occupant of a throne that had not truly existed for fifty-five years.