The Last Emperor

Winter, 1908. Soldiers come at night for a child of two. His mother is not allowed to go with him. He is carried through gate after gate into the Forbidden City, the vast walled palace at the centre of Beijing, and set on a throne in a hall so large he cannot see the end of it. Thousands of officials kneel. The boy, Puyi, climbs down and runs towards a curtain moving in the wind. He is now the Son of Heaven, and he is frightened.

Four years later the empire ends. Outside, China becomes a republic; inside, almost nothing changes. Puyi keeps his title, his eunuchs, his court, his protocol — but only within the walls. He grows up ruler of a country that consists of a few courtyards, waited on by hundreds of people who must obey him in everything except the one thing he wants, which is to go out. His little brother tells him, cheerfully, that he is not emperor of anything any more.

In 1919 a Scottish tutor arrives: Reginald Johnston, who brings spectacles, a bicycle, the English name Henry, and news of a world with taxis and telephones in it. Puyi cycles round the courtyards, expels the eunuchs after a fire, marries a bride chosen from photographs, and dreams of studying at Oxford. Then, in 1924, soldiers arrive at the gate and give the household a few hours. The doors close behind him. He is eighteen, and he has never chosen anything.

Expelled, Puyi lands in the foreign quarter of Tianjin and reinvents himself: dinner jackets, jazz, tennis, a wife and a secondary consort, photographs in the newspapers. But he wants his throne back, and the only people who take that ambition seriously are Japanese officers, who visit, flatter him and wait. His wife Wanrong begs him to see what they are. He does not listen.

Japan seizes Manchuria in the north, and in the early 1930s Puyi goes to them. He is installed as head of a new state called Manchukuo, and in 1934 he is crowned emperor again in a ceremony that copies the old rituals and means nothing. Very quickly he discovers the shape of his new job: documents arrive already decided; his ministers answer to Japanese officials; his own guards report on him. He signs. Outside his palace, the occupation does what occupations do.

Wanrong collapses into opium. When she bears a child that is not his, the baby is taken away and she is taken away too, and the last he sees of her is a car pulling out of a courtyard. In 1945 Japan surrenders. Puyi, in a small airport waiting room, is about to fly to safety when Soviet soldiers walk in. The film handles all of this quietly: no battles, just doors opening and closing on a man who has never once been in the room where things are decided.

The film's frame is a prison. In 1950 Puyi is handed back to China and taken to a re-education centre, where he is one number among many. He cannot dress himself; he has never tied his own shoes. Over ten years, in interrogations and in the confession he is required to write, his whole life is taken apart and read back to him by a patient, unyielding governor who wants him to say plainly what he was part of.

The confession is the heart of the film. Puyi wants to be a victim — a child put on a throne, a man moved by others — and much of that is true. But he is also asked about the years when his signature sat on the papers of an occupation, and about the people who suffered under a state that carried his name. What the film is really examining is whether contrition is possible for someone who was never taught that his choices had weight.

He is released in 1959. The last emperor of China becomes a gardener in Beijing, in a cotton jacket, buying his own tram tickets, tending flowerbeds. Years later, an old man pays to enter the Forbidden City as an ordinary visitor, steps over the rope, and reaches behind the throne where he once sat. It is Bertolucci's most beautiful invention, and it says the thing the whole film has been circling: the palace is now a museum, and the god is a man like anyone else.

Sir Reginald Fleming Johnston was born in Edinburgh and arrived in March 1919 as tutor to the thirteen-year-old Puyi, brought in for his knowledge of Chinese history and culture. He introduced Western subjects and, by most accounts, encouraged both his pupil's monarchism and his interest in Japan. He left in 1924, later became Professor of Chinese at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, retired to a Scottish island, and died in Edinburgh in 1938. His memoir Twilight in the Forbidden City was published in 1934 and remains one of the very few eyewitness accounts of the court's last years — written, of course, by a man who loved his pupil. In the film he is played by Peter O'Toole.

Japan's Kwantung Army seized Manchuria after the Mukden Incident of September 1931. On 1 March 1932 the puppet state of Manchukuo was proclaimed with Puyi as Chief Executive; on 1 March 1934 he was crowned its emperor under the reign name Kangde. Real power never came near him: the Kwantung Army commander could veto his decisions, and each Manchukuo minister worked under a Japanese vice-minister who set the actual policy. The League of Nations found that Japan had acted in breach of international law, and only a handful of states ever recognised the regime.

And that regime's record is not a background detail. Millions of Chinese civilians were put to forced labour in its mines and factories; farmland was confiscated; the state ran an opium monopoly; and it was on Manchukuo territory that Japan's Unit 731 carried out lethal human experimentation. Puyi did not order these things and could not have stopped them. But he was not dragged north in chains either: he wanted his throne back, the Japanese were the only people offering one, and he put his name and the prestige of the Qing house at the service of an occupation for thirteen years. That makes him a collaborator as well as a victim, and the film is gentler about this than the record is.

Soviet forces took Puyi prisoner in August 1945. In 1946 he appeared as a witness at the International Military Tribunal for the Far East in Tokyo, testifying across eight days — the longest appearance by any witness there. Observers found him evasive: he presented himself as a wholly controlled front for the Japanese, was vague about dates and documents, and at one point asked not to be questioned about dates at all. His own later autobiography concedes more knowledge, and more willingness, than he admitted on the stand.

He was handed to China in 1950 and held at the Fushun War Criminals Management Centre, where Manchukuo, Kuomintang and Japanese prisoners underwent years of intensive "thought reform". He received a special pardon on 4 December 1959, among the first group of thirty-one prisoners released. He then worked at the Beijing Botanical Garden — first in the mechanical repair shop, then as an assistant gardener — married a nurse, Li Shuxian, in 1962, and later worked as a researcher on historical texts. He died in Beijing on 17 October 1967, aged 61. His wife the empress Wanrong, who is in the film, did not survive the fall: she died on 20 June 1946 at Yanji in Jilin, aged 39, of malnutrition and opium withdrawal, and her burial place is unknown.

The screenplay is adapted from From Emperor to Citizen, the autobiography published under Puyi's name in 1964 and worked into shape by the editor Li Wenda. That is exactly why historians handle it carefully: it was produced by a pardoned prisoner, inside the political conditions of the state that had re-educated him, and roughly 160,000 words were cut from the manuscript before publication — a fuller version only appeared in 2007. A confession is not a neutral source, and this film's foundations are a confession.

Specific departures worth naming: the film considerably softens Puyi's cruelty as a young man in the palace; it moves his real interrogation, which took place before the Tokyo tribunal, into the hands of Chinese questioners; and its final image — an old man buying a ticket into his own former palace and finding a cricket still alive beneath the throne — is invention, and lovely, and not something that happened. What is entirely true is the film's own place in history: The Last Emperor was the first Western feature permitted by the People's Republic of China to shoot inside the Forbidden City, and it won all nine Academy Awards for which it was nominated at the 1988 ceremony, including Best Picture and Best Director.