The Last Emperor

China, 1908. It is night. Soldiers come to a house and take a little boy. He is only two years old. His mother cannot go with him. The soldiers take him to the Forbidden City — a huge palace in the middle of Beijing with high red walls. They put him on a big golden throne. Thousands of men go down on their knees in front of him. His name is Puyi, and now he is the emperor of China. He is frightened, and he wants to go home.

Four years later, China stops having emperors. But nobody really changes anything inside the palace. Puyi keeps his title. He keeps his servants. He keeps his throne. But he can never, ever go outside the walls. He is a boy who can ask for anything — food, animals, games — except the one thing he wants.

When he is thirteen, a teacher comes from Scotland. His name is Reginald Johnston. He gives Puyi glasses, a bicycle and an English name: Henry. He tells him about cars, telephones and universities in England. Puyi wants to go and study there. Then, in 1924, more soldiers come to the gate. They tell everybody to leave. Puyi is eighteen years old, and he must go.

Puyi goes to live in the city of Tianjin. He wears Western suits, he dances, he plays tennis. He is famous, but he is not an emperor any more, and he wants to be one again. Some Japanese officers visit him. They are very polite. They promise him a throne. His wife tells him: "Do not believe them." He does not listen to her.

The Japanese army takes the north of China. In 1934 they make Puyi the emperor of a new country there. It is called Manchukuo. There is a big ceremony, with old clothes and old music. But it is not real. Every day, men bring him papers and tell him to sign them. He cannot say no. His guards watch him. He is an emperor with a beautiful palace, and no power at all.

His wife Wanrong becomes very ill. She takes opium — a strong, dangerous drug. In the end, the Japanese take her away in a car, and Puyi never sees her again. In 1945 Japan loses the war. Puyi is at a small airport, waiting for a plane. Soviet soldiers walk in and take him. He is a prisoner again.

In 1950 Puyi comes back to China as a prisoner. He goes to a special prison for war criminals. He is fifty years old and he cannot do anything for himself: he cannot dress himself, and he has never tied his own shoes. Other prisoners help him. Every day he must work, study and answer questions about his life.

The prison governor asks him the hardest question of all: "What did you do?" Puyi says he was only a child, then a prisoner, then a puppet. Much of that is true. But he also signed those papers, and terrible things happened in that country with his name on them. He must write it all down.

In 1959 they open the door and he walks out. The last emperor of China becomes a gardener in Beijing. He wears a simple cotton jacket. He buys his own bus tickets. He grows flowers. At the end of the film, an old man pays for a ticket and walks into the Forbidden City with the other visitors — his old home is now a museum. He goes to the throne and touches it, and then he is gone.

The Japanese army took the north of China in 1931. In 1932 they made a new country there called Manchukuo, and they put Puyi at the top of it. In 1934 he became its emperor. He had no real power: Japanese officers decided everything.

But this is important. That country was terrible for the people who lived in it. Millions of Chinese people were forced to work in its mines and factories. Japanese doctors did cruel experiments on prisoners there. Puyi did not do these things, and he could not stop them. But he went to the Japanese because he wanted a throne, and he stayed for thirteen years. He was not only a victim. The film is kinder to him than the true story is.

Soviet soldiers took Puyi in August 1945. In 1946 he spoke at the big war crimes trial in Tokyo, for eight days. He said he was only a puppet and knew nothing. People at the trial did not really believe him. In 1950 he went to a Chinese prison for war criminals, and he stayed there for nine years. He was let out on 4 December 1959.

Then he really did work at a garden in Beijing — first in the repair shop, then as a gardener. He married again in 1962, and he died in Beijing on 17 October 1967. The film comes from a book with his name on it, From Emperor to Citizen. But he wrote it after prison, with an editor and with the government watching, so we must read it carefully. One more true thing: this was the first Western film that China allowed to shoot inside the real Forbidden City.