Monday, May 19, 2008
So I re-watched "The Last Emperor" again. I've always been fascinated by Asian politics ever since I read John Toland's "The Rising Sun," a history of the World War II in the Pacific from the Japanese side. Toland's award-winning book (one of the best histories of the War in the Pacific you can ever read; its equivalent is William Shirer's "Rise and Fall of the Third Reich" or Barbara Tuchman's "The Guns of August") really made me aware of the amazing geopolitical fights that were going on in Asia in the 1920s and 1930s.
But it was a movie which set me on the path to learn more. The film was "55 Days at Peking," a 1963 historical potboiler by Nicholas Ray which starred Charlton Heston, Ava Gardner and David Niven. Set in China in 1900, the film is a fictionalized version of "The Boxer Rebellion," an attempt by the Dowager Empress Cixi to regain control of Chinese lands and from foreign powers. The film is pretty silly in a lot of ways. You have the handsome American cavalry officer (Heston), the Russian duchess (Gardner), the proud British diplomat (Niven) and the drag-queen-like Empress (Flora Robson) who hisses and has 5" long fingernails and writhes in the darkness of her Summer Palace when she cannot exterminate the "white devils."
Knowing only that the film was based on historical events, I started educating myself about Chinese history. I'd first seen the film my senior year in high school. About that time, a friend of mine was heavy into drug culture (oddly, he's now a trial lawyer). Every paper, every poem he had to memorize for English class, every art project -- everything had to relate to drugs. It was his way of being counterculture. He kept talking about the Opium Wars, in which the British government actively supported the drug trade. He loved the idea that governments once advocated drug use, and I was curious whether he was right or not.
Well, he was. And films like "The Last Emperor" and "55 Days at Peking" led me to do a lot of reading in Chinese and Asian history. And what you find is just fascinating................................................
My quickie history
European contact with China had been limited to the Silk Road ever since it had been reopened by Marco Polo in 1271. China had been unified as early as 2100 BCE, but had broken into as few as two and as many as 16 feudal states by 690 CE. Kublai Khan invaded China and unified the country in 1259 CE, just 12 years before Polo arrived in Mongolia. In 1368 CE, the Mongol rulers were thrown out by the ethnic Han Chinese (which form a majority in the country) and the Ming Dynasty established. In part, the Ming rulers succeeded because a wave of epidemics killed 30 percent of the population between 1300 and 1400 CE. The central government was significantly strengthened, colonization of the interior expanded extensively, the Great Wall built, trade with Japan begun, and the Forbidden City not only founded but brought to its current height of glory.
Portugese explorer Bartolmeu Dias rounded the Cape of Good Hope in 1488, but it wasn't until Vasco de Gama actually made it to India in 1498 (a decade later) that European trade really began to reach Indochina. In 1510, the Portugese defeated the local kings at Goa in India and set up a major trading settlement. This was followed by another Portugese post in Bombay in 1534 (they were given to England in 1611 as a dowry for the Portugese princess who wed Charles II), and in 1617 the Mughal emperor (the Mughals ruled 75 percent of India, controlling most of the center of the country) allowed the British to trade throughout their realm. In 1757, the quasi-private army of the British East India Company defeated the kingdom of Bengal. The British soon swept over most of India. The Portugese won permission to open a trading post at the small Chinese city of Macau in 1535. Canton (that's its English name; the Chinese name is Guanzhou) was opened to the British in 1690. American trading ships -- private, not governmental, in nature -- reached China in 1784 and trade with the U.S. expanded rapidly as the Chinese saw no colonial threat from the nascent American state.
During this period, China was convulsed by war again. The Ming Dynasty had never conquered Manchuria, a lush and populous country to the northeast. In 1582, a Jurchen tribal leader named Nurhaci defeated and unified most of the Manchu tribes into one nation-state. He married a Mongol princess to help smooth over relations with the declining Mongol central state (which was fragmenting into hundreds of tiny tribes), and defeated those Mongol tribes he could not placate. He invaded China in 1626, having declared independence from his nominal Ming Dynasty masters. His first foray into China led to defeat, and he died a few months later. His son, Hung Taiji, led a second invasion but was repulsed again. Taiji reorganized his forces, forming "Banners" (separate armies) and allowing conquered peoples to become full (if not first-class) citizens in the emerging Qing Dynasty. He also bought large numbers of cannon from the Europeans, and formed the first Chinese artillery corps. He easily defeated the Ming Dynasty.
The Ming Dynasty was in trouble for a variety of reasons. Japan had invaded the Korean peninsula in 1592, and China had invaded from the north to counter the Japanese thrust. China succeeded in 1598 in ejecting the Japanese (modern Korean language, writing and culture stems from the vassal state the Ming Dynasty established there), but the war severely drained the Ming Dynasty treasury. The aging Emperor Wanli increasingly withdrew from politics, leading the state leaderless. He relied less on the bureaucracy and more and more on eunuchs -- who established a parallel bureaucracy and began using state resources for their own glorification. Famine struck the country repeatedly as the Little Ice Age altered rain patterns across the country for 200 years. Finally, British and Dutch raids on Spanish and Portugese trading ports (essentially Protestant attacks on Catholic-run economic systems) led to a massive decrease in the flow of silver into China. Partly because of these attacks and partly to fund a counter-attack, Spain stopped shipping silver to China and began taking all of it to Spain. Silver was China's currency, and the sudden and dramatic drops in silver led to massive inflation.
In 1642, Hung Taiji and his Manchu warriors defeated the Ming Dynasty troops and began marching deep into China. In 1643, Taiji died without naming an heir. His five-year-old youngest son, Fulin, was named Emperor and given the new name Shunzhi. (Hooge, his oldest son, was deemed not fit. His half-brother, Dorgon, was named regent.) Luckily, the Ming Emperor Chongzhen was facing a peasant revolt. In April 1644, the peasant army sacked Beijing, and Emperor Chongzhen committed suicide. The last great Ming general, Wu Sangui, faced a peasant army twice his size in the rear and a Manchu army his size to the north. He threw his lot in with the Child Emperor Shunzhi, and the unified army defeated the peasant revolt in 1644.
The Qing Dynasty under Regent Dorgon kept the capital in Beijing rather than moving it to the Manchu capital, as had been the past practice whenever the central government had been overthrown. Dorgon died in a hunting accident in 1651. Emperor Shunzhi was just 14 years old. He died seven years later from smallpox. He was succeeded by Emperor Kangxi, who was just eight years old. His two older brothers had died, and Shungzhi appointed four ministers to as Regents until Kangxi came of age. In 1669, the 15-year-old Kangxi seized power from his Regents.
But as the Europeans pressed for economic power in China, Emperor Kangxi had to deal with revolt after revolt. He'd given three generals vast lands in reward for their support. Now all three wanted to break away from China. Kangxi put down the rebellions, and then went on a military rampage -- invading Taiwan to take it from the Portugese, invading Tibet to stop the British economic advance there, and invading Western Mongolia to stop attacks from a reinvigorated Mongol Empire. Kangxi died in 1723 at the age of 68 (at a time when many Chinese did not live past 45).
Kangxi's fourth son, Yongzheng, was 44 years old when he assumed the throne. Constantly under political attack by his seven younger brothers, he ruled with an iron hand. He developed the first cabinet to help him run the government, and instituted civil service reforms to end corruption and improve the quality of people working in the bureaucracy. He died in 1735 after just 13 years on the throne.
His eldest son, Qianlong, ascended the throne in 1735 when he was 24 and lived until he was 87. A number of rebellions broke out, including a peasant revolt in 1796 which lasted eight years. All were put down successfully, but the lengthy peasant revolt showed that the state was weakening militarily. Corruption began to flourish, but the aged Emperor relied too heavily on the most corrupt officials for advice, and remained largely unaware of how bad the economy and government was being warped by massive corruption. He sparked a second great silver crisis in 1793: The British had been bartering European goods for Chinese goods for years. But Emperor Qianlong announced that China had no need of European goods, and ordered all Chinese merchants to accept only silver as payment. It was a terrible policy which would destroy China 40 years later.
Emperor Jiaqing ascended the throne in 1796 when he was 36 years old. He finally put down the peasant rebellion, and executed a number of the most egregiously corrupt government ministers.
Jiaqing died in 1820, and his eldest son Daoguang ascended the throne. He was 38 years old. By now, the silver-only policy of his grandfather had led to a massive trade account debt, as European countries had to keep paying for low-cost Chinese goods in high-priced silver. Great Britain decided that the best way to deal with this was drugs: Send opium (heroin) into China, get the population addicted, and make the Chinese pay for opium in silver. This would reduce the balance-of-trade account debt. The British began massive production of opium in India, and sent it over the border into China. By 1838, despite numerous laws against opium consumption, opium trade had risen from 100 boxes a year to 100,000 boxes a year and rising. Emperor Daoguang banned all opium trade, and the British declared war on China. The British triumphed easily: Their ironclad sailing ships, modern cannon and rifle-armed sailors wiped out the slow-moving Chinese junks which had not changed in 400 years. The British invaded China, and in 1842 forced the Chinese to surrender.
The Treaty of Nanking ended the First Opium War. It forced China open to British trade, forced China to make billions of dollars in war reparations, and ceded Hong Kong to England for 99 years.
Outraged by the government's ineptness, many Han Chinese began to see the Manchus as foreign invaders and not native rulers. Rebellion after rebellion broke out. In 1850, a crazy Chinese Christian who thought he was the brother of Jesus began the "Taiping Rebellion" (of Peaceful Rebellion). It lasted for 21 years, and devastated the all-important southeastern Chinese coast and farmlands. Famine began sweeping the country. Simultaneously, in 1851 the Nian Rebellion broke out in northern China and lasted 17 years. It is estimated that nearly 30 million Chinese died during these rebellions, nearly 10 percent of the population. Worse, Emperor Daoguang died in 1850, which probably precipitated the rebellions. His 19-year-old son, Xianfeng, ascended the throne.
Xianfeng was barely able to keep the government from collapsing. The treasury was exhausted as the governmen raised armies, and no tax revenue flowed in from the rebellious provinces. In 1854, the British tried to help him by renegotiating the Treaty of Nanking. The terms they proposed were to give Great Britain unimpeded access to all Chinese rivers, streams and canals and forcing the government to recognize Great Britain diplomatically. Xianfeng refused. In 1856, Britain declared war on China a second time. Once more, China suffered a crushing defeat. In 1860, the Treaty of Tianjin was signed -- giving Britain, France, Russia and the U.S. permanent embassies in Peking and opening all Chinese waters (inland and at sea) to British warships. Peking itself was now open to foreign trade, and a "foreign sector" established in the city.
Xianfeng died in 1861, just 30 years of age. His Empress, Cian, had given birth to several children but the sons had all died. His concubine, Cixi, had a son -- and this son, Tongzhi, ascended the throne at the age of five. The Taiping and Nian Rebellions were still going strong. The first Regent was replaced for incompetence by Dowager Empress Cixi, but in fact this was merely a coup d'etat. A woman could not be Regent, but Cixi was not going to let this stop her. His uncle, First Prince Chun, was his grandfather's seventh son. Prince Chun and Dowager Empress Cixi ruled together (theirs was a political, not sexual, union). Tongzhi married. He died at the age of 18 in 1875, most likely from smallpox. Since he was fond of visiting brothels, however, some suggest he died from syphillis. His wife, Empress Xiao, died a few months later -- probably murdered (forced to commit suicide or starved to death) by Dowager Empress Cixi.
During Tongzhi's reign, the Nian Rebellion was put down by Prince Chun in 1868 and the Taiping Rebellion in 1875. He also instituted the Self-Strengthening Movement, designed to build domestic industry and improve engineering skills so that, if China should have to fight another war, it would have the infrastructure and scientific expertise necessary to do so. While China made significant progress, by 1900 it had barely achieved technological progress equal to the 1850s.
Tradition dictated that the next emperor should come from the generation below the dead ruler. Dowager Empress Cixi, looking to cement her political alliance with Prince Chun, suggested someone from the generation prior: Prince Chun's eldest surviving son, Guangxu. He ascended the throne at the age of four in 1875. Cixi adopted him as her own son.
Dowager Empress Cian died suddenly of a stroke in 1881, tipping the balance of power to Cixi and leaving Prince Chun without support. First Prince Chun died in 1891. He was succeeded by his second (and only surviving) son, Second Prince Chun.
During Cixi's regency, China fought the Sino-French War from 1883 to 1885. The French were in the process of conquering Vietnam, and had sent a large navy up the Red River. Cixi, seeing this as a threat, entered into combat against the French. The French handily defeated her forces. Cixi utilized the lessons learned from the war to upgrade the Chinese navy. In 1876, the Japanese had forced the vassal Korean state to open trade with Japan. In late summer 1894, the Japanese staged a coup against the pro-Chinese Korean government, and China invaded to keep its protectorate. The Japanese handily defeated the improved Chinese navy. Korea was fianlly independent.
Guangxu assumed the throne when he was 18 (three years later than he should have, thanks to Cixi), and saw that China was exhausted, morally and financially. In 1898, at the age of 23, he began a series of reforms known as the Hundred Days' Reforms. He instituted a series of legal reforms to institute the modern law of contract, removed trade barriers, updated and strengthen the civil service exams, dismissed corrupt officials, streamlined the bureaucracy, built the first modern university in Beijing, built numerous railroads (effectively building the first long-distance railroads in China), and instituted the country's first budget. But his grand-aunt Dowager Empress Cixi, instituted a coup d'etat against him. Sadly, Guangxu relied on a general named Yuan Shikai for support. Shikai promptly revealed all of Guangxu's plans to Cixi. While he conducted rituals in the Forbidden City, she sent her army to seize him. Having ruled without a regent for only two years, he was imprisoned on an island in the Forbidden City and died there in 1908 -- never having seen another living soul face-to-face ever again.
In 1900, the Boxers -- a group of Chinese martial arts fanatics (which is how they got their name) -- began demanding that Dowager Empress Cixi close the country to foreign trade and influence. Cixi eagerly egged them on, despite her public and diplomatic protests that they cease their activities. Beginning in June, the Boxers attacked foreigners, destroyed railroads being built by foreigners, and executed Christian missionaries. The Boxers laid seige to the foreign sector in Peking -- leading to the events dramatized in "55 Days at Peking." The diplomats held out for 55 days, while an eight-nation coalition of military forces marched from Tianjin to Peking to lift the seige. Cixi was forced to flee the Forbidden City for the outlying capital of Xian. The treaty which allowed her to return installed foreign troops in the city for 100 years.
Cixi ruled in the name of Emperor Guangxu for the remaining 10 years of his life. But by 1908, she was 72 years old and increasingly poor health. She had effectively ruled China now nearly 47 years. Worse, Emperor Guangxu was also in frail health after a decade of imprisonment, and close to death. But who should succeed Guangxu? Cixi was desperate that a conservative succeed her adopted son. She trusted that the Imperial Household would raise an infant in its most ultra-conservative way. Guangxu died on November 14, 1908. A day later, Dowager Empress Cixi named Second Prince Chun's oldest boy, Pu-Yi, as Emperor. She named Second Prince Chun regent.
Prince Chun wanted to execute Yuan Shikai, who had betrayed his nephew. But Dowager Empress Cixi had forced Second Prince Chun to marry the daughter of her own personal general, Rong Lu. Tied to the Lu family, he could not execute Shikai nor implement progressive reforms without risking a coup. Second Prince Chun compromised by exiling Shikai and implementing the Boxer Rebellion Treaty. Just 25 years old, Second Prince Chun was also too inexperienced to engage in the political maneuvering which Dowager Empress Cixi had left as his political inheritance.
In 1912, the Xinhai Revolution toppled the Qing Dynasty. Sun Yat-Sen was leading a coalition of democratic forces and communists to try to topple the Qing Dynasty and institute widespread civil reforms. Second Prince Chun was forced to recall Yuan Shikai from exile in November 1911, and appointed him prime minister and general of the armies. With his hated enemy in power, Second Prince Chun resigned as Regent in December 1911. Dowager Empress Consort Longyu -- Guangxu's chief mistress -- was named Regent. In February 1912, the Dowager Empress Consort was forced sign an act of abdication for the Child Emperor Pu-Yi. Shikai was named the first President of the Republic of China.
Dowager Empress Consort Longyu died in 1913. Emperor Pu-Yi was just seven years old. The act of abdication made Pu-Yi a prisoner within the Forbidden City -- with all his titles, income and househould staff intact, but unable to exercise any power or leave the palace. Second Prince Chun returned to Beijing to managed the Imperial household for his son.
Shikai ruled with a dictatorial hand until 1916. His death left China in the hands of competing provincial governors, each of whom led an army and each of whom vied for power. Rebellion after rebellion broke out, and the central government was barely in control of the capital city much less the country.
In 1924, 18-year-old Emperor Pu-Yi was expelled from the Forbidden City by warlord Feng Yuxiang. Unable to cope with his expulsion and sudden loss of home and thousands of servants, the Emperor sought help from the Japanese.
The Japanese were in a strong position to help him. As her power weakened, Dowager Empress Cixi had agreed in 1890 to permit Russia to build a railroad from the Russian city of Chita to Vladivostok -- cutting through the heart of Manchuria. The Russians wanted to expand their sphere of influence and seize southern Manchuria as well. This would give them Port Arthur (known by its Chinese name of Lushun), a warm-water port open all year round. The Japanese saw this as a major threat to their nascent Korean empire as well as to Japanese influence over trade in the region. Japan, too, had designs on Manchuria. Manchuria was rich in natural resources, and resource-poor Japan desperately needed them. Worse, Manchuria was lush farmland but relatively unpopulated. Japanese authorities believed that if they could annex Manchuria, they could send more than a million poor Japanese farmers into the region (along with their numerous kids) -- not only alleviating population pressures on the homeland but also building a new "rice bowl" for Japan and all of East Asia.
War broke out in 1904. Although Czarist Russia was expected to win, the rapidly modernized Japanese army and navy easily defeated the Czar's forces time and time again. Peace was signed in 1905. In Russia, the Czar was forced to implement major feudal land reforms, ease censorship and repression, and convene the Duma (parliament) for the first time in years in order to avoid a coup. The reforms led directly to the Russian Revolution of October 1917.
Japan, meanwhile, won control of Port Arthur. As the Qing Dynasty collapsed, Japan moved military forces and colonists into Manchuria. Japan backed warlord after warlord in the area, and used them to expand further into Manchuria.
Emperor Pu-Yi took up residence in the city of Tianjin in 1924.
In 1925, Sun Yat-Sen died of cancer. One of his warlords, Chiang Kai-Shek, took over Yat-Sen's armed forces, known as the Kuomintang, and pacificed most of south and central China. He broke with the communists (led by Mao Tse-Tung) in 1927, and defeated them in 1934. Mao led his troops in the "Long March" to the far northwestern high rocky plateau of China, where he established a base and began training a new army.
In 1931, the Japanese provoked an attack by Chinese peasants on some Japanese workers near Mukden. The Japanese press turned this into an organized "military attack" on Japanese civilians. Japan used this as a pretense to invade Manchuria. The Chinese government declared war on Japan, leading to the Second Sino-Japanese War. But with the government collapsing in Beijing, the war was in name only. Soon, Japan had established a vassal state known as "Manchukuo" in the area. More than 800,000 Japanese farmers flooded into the region, and the Japanese built heavy industry and railroads which function to this day.
The Japanese invasion of Manchuria led the United States to place an embargo on the sale of oil to Japan. At the time, the U.S. was a net exporter of oil. The Japanese high command believed they only had oil reserves for 10 more years. After that, Japan could not wage war nor even support its own basic industries. The Japanese military began pressing for war to begin no later than 1941: The goal would be to conquer most of East Asia, and begin securing oil reserves in coastal and south China, Indochina, the Philippines and Indonesia. Because oil reserves would be consumed at a much greater pace during wartime than peacetime, the military drew up plans for a lightning-like strike across all Asia which would secure the "Great Japanese Co-Prosperity Sphere" permanently. Since it would take two years to pacify the regions and begin oil production, Japanese military forces believed that any enemies would need to be taken out of the war for at least that long. The greatest threat was the U.S. aircraft carrier fleet at Pearl Harbor. Destroy that fleet, and it would take the Americans two years to recover. By that time, the Japanese would be pumping oil and mining iron, and be able to stop any American counter-attack. So plans were drawn up to do just that...
To help make the Manchukuo state appear legitimate, the Japanese asked deposed Emperor Pu-Yi to become prime minister of the vassal state. He did so in 1932. In 1934, Pu-Yi was crowned "Emperor Kangde" (the name means "tranquility and virtue") of Manchukuo. Although Manchurians led all the ministries, Japanese vice-ministers were underneath them and exercised all the power. Japan created the Kwantung Army to pacify Manchukuo. The Kwantung Army attempted to invade the Mongolian SSR of the Soviet Union in 1939, but was repulsed.
In August 1945, the Soviet Union declared war on Japan. The USSR invaded Manchukuo, and the Manchukuo army surrendered en masse to them. Emperor Pu-Yi/Kangde was arrested and imprisoned in a Soviet gulag for five years. He was let out only to testify at the Tokyo War Crimes Trials in 1946. He testified about Japanese involvement in Manchkuo, although no charges on any of Japan's actions in the region were ever brought. (The U.S. had agreed not to bring these charges, because they would open the U.S. to charges of counter-colonialism...which the United States desperately wanted to avoid.) He confessed to a wide range of crimes himself, but in 1964 in his autobiography said that he had committed perjury because he felt guilty for not resisting the Japanese.
As soon as Japan surrendered, the Communists under Mao Tse-Tung declared war on the Kuomintang dictatorship of Chiang Kai-Shek. They swept out of their mountain fortresses in June 1946 and easily pushed Chiang Kai-Shek out of the north. Chiang was able to hold on by asking the surrendered Japanese military for assistance, which they provided. Desperate to hold on to power, he also asked the former warlords for help. But both moves undercut his popularity with the public. By August 1948 he had lost all the northern provinces as well as Manchuria. Mao pushed along the coast, and captured the Kuomintang capital city of Nanjing in April 1949. Chiang Kai-Shek was soon locked into the southeastern corner of China. In June 1949 he fled to Taiwan. Mao declared the People's Republic of China in October 1949.
In 1950, Emperor Pu-Yi was returned to China. The Chinese tried and sentenced him to life in prison. He was placed in a labor camp, and served 10 years. He was released in 1959. He worked as a gardener until 1964, when he became an editor for a Chinese government publisher. When the Cultural Revolution came in 1966, the Red Guards severely harassed him, and he was placed under police protection. He died in 1967 from complications due to kidney cancer and heart disease.
Pu-Yi married four times. At age 16, he married Manchurian noblewoman Wan Rong. The same year, he named Wen Xiu his Imperial Consort. Pu-Yi had favored Wen Xiu has his wife, but the Dowager Empress Consorts believed she was too ugly to be Empress.
Pu-Yi never showed any sexual or emotional interest in any of his wives or concubines. Some historians believe he never had sexual relations with either of them. Instead, he showed open favoritism to prepubescent and pubescent boys, and most of them shared his bed. One historian, Edward Behr who wrote The Last Emperor, openly declared Pu-Yi to be homosexual. Pu-Yi's sister-in-law, a Japanese noblewoman, wrote in her memoirs that his sexual relationships with young boys was an open scandal in Manchuria, and that his homosexuality was one reason why the Japanese never treated him better or allowed him any power.
After Pu-Yi moved to Manchuria in 1932, Wan Rong rarely emerged from her room. She had begun taking opium, and this flared into full-fledged addiction in 1932. In 1940, she became pregnant by the Emperor's chauffeur. The Emperor had the man exiled. At least one report says the baby girl was born alive, but murdered by the attending Japanese doctor. Others say the child was stillborn. Wan Rong began taking massive amounts of opium each day afterward. Pu-Yi attempted to flee Manchuria for Japan in August 1945 but was arrested by the Soviets. He left Wan Rong behind. She was arrested by the Chinese Communists, and moved from prison to prison. She died in 1946 from malnutrition and complications due to opium withdrawal.
Wen Xiu divorced the Emperor in 1931. She became a commoner and was stripped of all titles. She never remarried, and died in China in 1950 or 1951.
In 1937, six years after Wen Xiu left him, Emperoro Pu-Yi took Tan Yuling as an Imperial Consort. The 17-year-old girl was the daughter of a minor court official. She died of typhoid fever in 1942 at the age of 22.
In 1943, Pu-Yi took Li Yuqin as an Imperial Consort. She was the daughter of a minor court official in Manchuria, and just 15 years old. Pu-Yi abandoned her in Manchuria in August 1945. She continued to live in the Manchurian capital city of Changchun. She became a librarian, divorced Pu-Yi in 1957, and married an electrical technician at the age of 30. She had two sons. She died in 2001.
In 1962, the 56-year-old Pu-Yi married Li Shuxian, a 36-year-old former hospital worker. She lived in poverty after his death. In the 1980s, the Chinese government permitted authors and their heirs to receive royalties from published works. As Pu-Yi's heir, she received the royalties from his autobiography -- which had been published in 1964. She herself wrote an autobiography, and she was relatively wealthy in her later years. She successfully campaigned to have Pu-Yi's ashes removed from a public cemetery and reinterred in the Qing Dynasty tombs. She died of lung cancer in 1997 at the age of 72. In her will, she asked that her ashes and those of Tan Yuling be interred alongside Pu-Yi's, but that wish has never been honored.
Pu-Yi had no children, and never adopted a child.
But it was a movie which set me on the path to learn more. The film was "55 Days at Peking," a 1963 historical potboiler by Nicholas Ray which starred Charlton Heston, Ava Gardner and David Niven. Set in China in 1900, the film is a fictionalized version of "The Boxer Rebellion," an attempt by the Dowager Empress Cixi to regain control of Chinese lands and from foreign powers. The film is pretty silly in a lot of ways. You have the handsome American cavalry officer (Heston), the Russian duchess (Gardner), the proud British diplomat (Niven) and the drag-queen-like Empress (Flora Robson) who hisses and has 5" long fingernails and writhes in the darkness of her Summer Palace when she cannot exterminate the "white devils."
Knowing only that the film was based on historical events, I started educating myself about Chinese history. I'd first seen the film my senior year in high school. About that time, a friend of mine was heavy into drug culture (oddly, he's now a trial lawyer). Every paper, every poem he had to memorize for English class, every art project -- everything had to relate to drugs. It was his way of being counterculture. He kept talking about the Opium Wars, in which the British government actively supported the drug trade. He loved the idea that governments once advocated drug use, and I was curious whether he was right or not.
Well, he was. And films like "The Last Emperor" and "55 Days at Peking" led me to do a lot of reading in Chinese and Asian history. And what you find is just fascinating................................................
My quickie history
European contact with China had been limited to the Silk Road ever since it had been reopened by Marco Polo in 1271. China had been unified as early as 2100 BCE, but had broken into as few as two and as many as 16 feudal states by 690 CE. Kublai Khan invaded China and unified the country in 1259 CE, just 12 years before Polo arrived in Mongolia. In 1368 CE, the Mongol rulers were thrown out by the ethnic Han Chinese (which form a majority in the country) and the Ming Dynasty established. In part, the Ming rulers succeeded because a wave of epidemics killed 30 percent of the population between 1300 and 1400 CE. The central government was significantly strengthened, colonization of the interior expanded extensively, the Great Wall built, trade with Japan begun, and the Forbidden City not only founded but brought to its current height of glory.
Portugese explorer Bartolmeu Dias rounded the Cape of Good Hope in 1488, but it wasn't until Vasco de Gama actually made it to India in 1498 (a decade later) that European trade really began to reach Indochina. In 1510, the Portugese defeated the local kings at Goa in India and set up a major trading settlement. This was followed by another Portugese post in Bombay in 1534 (they were given to England in 1611 as a dowry for the Portugese princess who wed Charles II), and in 1617 the Mughal emperor (the Mughals ruled 75 percent of India, controlling most of the center of the country) allowed the British to trade throughout their realm. In 1757, the quasi-private army of the British East India Company defeated the kingdom of Bengal. The British soon swept over most of India. The Portugese won permission to open a trading post at the small Chinese city of Macau in 1535. Canton (that's its English name; the Chinese name is Guanzhou) was opened to the British in 1690. American trading ships -- private, not governmental, in nature -- reached China in 1784 and trade with the U.S. expanded rapidly as the Chinese saw no colonial threat from the nascent American state.
During this period, China was convulsed by war again. The Ming Dynasty had never conquered Manchuria, a lush and populous country to the northeast. In 1582, a Jurchen tribal leader named Nurhaci defeated and unified most of the Manchu tribes into one nation-state. He married a Mongol princess to help smooth over relations with the declining Mongol central state (which was fragmenting into hundreds of tiny tribes), and defeated those Mongol tribes he could not placate. He invaded China in 1626, having declared independence from his nominal Ming Dynasty masters. His first foray into China led to defeat, and he died a few months later. His son, Hung Taiji, led a second invasion but was repulsed again. Taiji reorganized his forces, forming "Banners" (separate armies) and allowing conquered peoples to become full (if not first-class) citizens in the emerging Qing Dynasty. He also bought large numbers of cannon from the Europeans, and formed the first Chinese artillery corps. He easily defeated the Ming Dynasty.
The Ming Dynasty was in trouble for a variety of reasons. Japan had invaded the Korean peninsula in 1592, and China had invaded from the north to counter the Japanese thrust. China succeeded in 1598 in ejecting the Japanese (modern Korean language, writing and culture stems from the vassal state the Ming Dynasty established there), but the war severely drained the Ming Dynasty treasury. The aging Emperor Wanli increasingly withdrew from politics, leading the state leaderless. He relied less on the bureaucracy and more and more on eunuchs -- who established a parallel bureaucracy and began using state resources for their own glorification. Famine struck the country repeatedly as the Little Ice Age altered rain patterns across the country for 200 years. Finally, British and Dutch raids on Spanish and Portugese trading ports (essentially Protestant attacks on Catholic-run economic systems) led to a massive decrease in the flow of silver into China. Partly because of these attacks and partly to fund a counter-attack, Spain stopped shipping silver to China and began taking all of it to Spain. Silver was China's currency, and the sudden and dramatic drops in silver led to massive inflation.
In 1642, Hung Taiji and his Manchu warriors defeated the Ming Dynasty troops and began marching deep into China. In 1643, Taiji died without naming an heir. His five-year-old youngest son, Fulin, was named Emperor and given the new name Shunzhi. (Hooge, his oldest son, was deemed not fit. His half-brother, Dorgon, was named regent.) Luckily, the Ming Emperor Chongzhen was facing a peasant revolt. In April 1644, the peasant army sacked Beijing, and Emperor Chongzhen committed suicide. The last great Ming general, Wu Sangui, faced a peasant army twice his size in the rear and a Manchu army his size to the north. He threw his lot in with the Child Emperor Shunzhi, and the unified army defeated the peasant revolt in 1644.
The Qing Dynasty under Regent Dorgon kept the capital in Beijing rather than moving it to the Manchu capital, as had been the past practice whenever the central government had been overthrown. Dorgon died in a hunting accident in 1651. Emperor Shunzhi was just 14 years old. He died seven years later from smallpox. He was succeeded by Emperor Kangxi, who was just eight years old. His two older brothers had died, and Shungzhi appointed four ministers to as Regents until Kangxi came of age. In 1669, the 15-year-old Kangxi seized power from his Regents.
But as the Europeans pressed for economic power in China, Emperor Kangxi had to deal with revolt after revolt. He'd given three generals vast lands in reward for their support. Now all three wanted to break away from China. Kangxi put down the rebellions, and then went on a military rampage -- invading Taiwan to take it from the Portugese, invading Tibet to stop the British economic advance there, and invading Western Mongolia to stop attacks from a reinvigorated Mongol Empire. Kangxi died in 1723 at the age of 68 (at a time when many Chinese did not live past 45).
Kangxi's fourth son, Yongzheng, was 44 years old when he assumed the throne. Constantly under political attack by his seven younger brothers, he ruled with an iron hand. He developed the first cabinet to help him run the government, and instituted civil service reforms to end corruption and improve the quality of people working in the bureaucracy. He died in 1735 after just 13 years on the throne.
His eldest son, Qianlong, ascended the throne in 1735 when he was 24 and lived until he was 87. A number of rebellions broke out, including a peasant revolt in 1796 which lasted eight years. All were put down successfully, but the lengthy peasant revolt showed that the state was weakening militarily. Corruption began to flourish, but the aged Emperor relied too heavily on the most corrupt officials for advice, and remained largely unaware of how bad the economy and government was being warped by massive corruption. He sparked a second great silver crisis in 1793: The British had been bartering European goods for Chinese goods for years. But Emperor Qianlong announced that China had no need of European goods, and ordered all Chinese merchants to accept only silver as payment. It was a terrible policy which would destroy China 40 years later.
Emperor Jiaqing ascended the throne in 1796 when he was 36 years old. He finally put down the peasant rebellion, and executed a number of the most egregiously corrupt government ministers.
Jiaqing died in 1820, and his eldest son Daoguang ascended the throne. He was 38 years old. By now, the silver-only policy of his grandfather had led to a massive trade account debt, as European countries had to keep paying for low-cost Chinese goods in high-priced silver. Great Britain decided that the best way to deal with this was drugs: Send opium (heroin) into China, get the population addicted, and make the Chinese pay for opium in silver. This would reduce the balance-of-trade account debt. The British began massive production of opium in India, and sent it over the border into China. By 1838, despite numerous laws against opium consumption, opium trade had risen from 100 boxes a year to 100,000 boxes a year and rising. Emperor Daoguang banned all opium trade, and the British declared war on China. The British triumphed easily: Their ironclad sailing ships, modern cannon and rifle-armed sailors wiped out the slow-moving Chinese junks which had not changed in 400 years. The British invaded China, and in 1842 forced the Chinese to surrender.
The Treaty of Nanking ended the First Opium War. It forced China open to British trade, forced China to make billions of dollars in war reparations, and ceded Hong Kong to England for 99 years.
Outraged by the government's ineptness, many Han Chinese began to see the Manchus as foreign invaders and not native rulers. Rebellion after rebellion broke out. In 1850, a crazy Chinese Christian who thought he was the brother of Jesus began the "Taiping Rebellion" (of Peaceful Rebellion). It lasted for 21 years, and devastated the all-important southeastern Chinese coast and farmlands. Famine began sweeping the country. Simultaneously, in 1851 the Nian Rebellion broke out in northern China and lasted 17 years. It is estimated that nearly 30 million Chinese died during these rebellions, nearly 10 percent of the population. Worse, Emperor Daoguang died in 1850, which probably precipitated the rebellions. His 19-year-old son, Xianfeng, ascended the throne.
Xianfeng was barely able to keep the government from collapsing. The treasury was exhausted as the governmen raised armies, and no tax revenue flowed in from the rebellious provinces. In 1854, the British tried to help him by renegotiating the Treaty of Nanking. The terms they proposed were to give Great Britain unimpeded access to all Chinese rivers, streams and canals and forcing the government to recognize Great Britain diplomatically. Xianfeng refused. In 1856, Britain declared war on China a second time. Once more, China suffered a crushing defeat. In 1860, the Treaty of Tianjin was signed -- giving Britain, France, Russia and the U.S. permanent embassies in Peking and opening all Chinese waters (inland and at sea) to British warships. Peking itself was now open to foreign trade, and a "foreign sector" established in the city.
Xianfeng died in 1861, just 30 years of age. His Empress, Cian, had given birth to several children but the sons had all died. His concubine, Cixi, had a son -- and this son, Tongzhi, ascended the throne at the age of five. The Taiping and Nian Rebellions were still going strong. The first Regent was replaced for incompetence by Dowager Empress Cixi, but in fact this was merely a coup d'etat. A woman could not be Regent, but Cixi was not going to let this stop her. His uncle, First Prince Chun, was his grandfather's seventh son. Prince Chun and Dowager Empress Cixi ruled together (theirs was a political, not sexual, union). Tongzhi married. He died at the age of 18 in 1875, most likely from smallpox. Since he was fond of visiting brothels, however, some suggest he died from syphillis. His wife, Empress Xiao, died a few months later -- probably murdered (forced to commit suicide or starved to death) by Dowager Empress Cixi.
During Tongzhi's reign, the Nian Rebellion was put down by Prince Chun in 1868 and the Taiping Rebellion in 1875. He also instituted the Self-Strengthening Movement, designed to build domestic industry and improve engineering skills so that, if China should have to fight another war, it would have the infrastructure and scientific expertise necessary to do so. While China made significant progress, by 1900 it had barely achieved technological progress equal to the 1850s.
Tradition dictated that the next emperor should come from the generation below the dead ruler. Dowager Empress Cixi, looking to cement her political alliance with Prince Chun, suggested someone from the generation prior: Prince Chun's eldest surviving son, Guangxu. He ascended the throne at the age of four in 1875. Cixi adopted him as her own son.
Dowager Empress Cian died suddenly of a stroke in 1881, tipping the balance of power to Cixi and leaving Prince Chun without support. First Prince Chun died in 1891. He was succeeded by his second (and only surviving) son, Second Prince Chun.
During Cixi's regency, China fought the Sino-French War from 1883 to 1885. The French were in the process of conquering Vietnam, and had sent a large navy up the Red River. Cixi, seeing this as a threat, entered into combat against the French. The French handily defeated her forces. Cixi utilized the lessons learned from the war to upgrade the Chinese navy. In 1876, the Japanese had forced the vassal Korean state to open trade with Japan. In late summer 1894, the Japanese staged a coup against the pro-Chinese Korean government, and China invaded to keep its protectorate. The Japanese handily defeated the improved Chinese navy. Korea was fianlly independent.
Guangxu assumed the throne when he was 18 (three years later than he should have, thanks to Cixi), and saw that China was exhausted, morally and financially. In 1898, at the age of 23, he began a series of reforms known as the Hundred Days' Reforms. He instituted a series of legal reforms to institute the modern law of contract, removed trade barriers, updated and strengthen the civil service exams, dismissed corrupt officials, streamlined the bureaucracy, built the first modern university in Beijing, built numerous railroads (effectively building the first long-distance railroads in China), and instituted the country's first budget. But his grand-aunt Dowager Empress Cixi, instituted a coup d'etat against him. Sadly, Guangxu relied on a general named Yuan Shikai for support. Shikai promptly revealed all of Guangxu's plans to Cixi. While he conducted rituals in the Forbidden City, she sent her army to seize him. Having ruled without a regent for only two years, he was imprisoned on an island in the Forbidden City and died there in 1908 -- never having seen another living soul face-to-face ever again.
In 1900, the Boxers -- a group of Chinese martial arts fanatics (which is how they got their name) -- began demanding that Dowager Empress Cixi close the country to foreign trade and influence. Cixi eagerly egged them on, despite her public and diplomatic protests that they cease their activities. Beginning in June, the Boxers attacked foreigners, destroyed railroads being built by foreigners, and executed Christian missionaries. The Boxers laid seige to the foreign sector in Peking -- leading to the events dramatized in "55 Days at Peking." The diplomats held out for 55 days, while an eight-nation coalition of military forces marched from Tianjin to Peking to lift the seige. Cixi was forced to flee the Forbidden City for the outlying capital of Xian. The treaty which allowed her to return installed foreign troops in the city for 100 years.
Cixi ruled in the name of Emperor Guangxu for the remaining 10 years of his life. But by 1908, she was 72 years old and increasingly poor health. She had effectively ruled China now nearly 47 years. Worse, Emperor Guangxu was also in frail health after a decade of imprisonment, and close to death. But who should succeed Guangxu? Cixi was desperate that a conservative succeed her adopted son. She trusted that the Imperial Household would raise an infant in its most ultra-conservative way. Guangxu died on November 14, 1908. A day later, Dowager Empress Cixi named Second Prince Chun's oldest boy, Pu-Yi, as Emperor. She named Second Prince Chun regent.
Prince Chun wanted to execute Yuan Shikai, who had betrayed his nephew. But Dowager Empress Cixi had forced Second Prince Chun to marry the daughter of her own personal general, Rong Lu. Tied to the Lu family, he could not execute Shikai nor implement progressive reforms without risking a coup. Second Prince Chun compromised by exiling Shikai and implementing the Boxer Rebellion Treaty. Just 25 years old, Second Prince Chun was also too inexperienced to engage in the political maneuvering which Dowager Empress Cixi had left as his political inheritance.
In 1912, the Xinhai Revolution toppled the Qing Dynasty. Sun Yat-Sen was leading a coalition of democratic forces and communists to try to topple the Qing Dynasty and institute widespread civil reforms. Second Prince Chun was forced to recall Yuan Shikai from exile in November 1911, and appointed him prime minister and general of the armies. With his hated enemy in power, Second Prince Chun resigned as Regent in December 1911. Dowager Empress Consort Longyu -- Guangxu's chief mistress -- was named Regent. In February 1912, the Dowager Empress Consort was forced sign an act of abdication for the Child Emperor Pu-Yi. Shikai was named the first President of the Republic of China.
Dowager Empress Consort Longyu died in 1913. Emperor Pu-Yi was just seven years old. The act of abdication made Pu-Yi a prisoner within the Forbidden City -- with all his titles, income and househould staff intact, but unable to exercise any power or leave the palace. Second Prince Chun returned to Beijing to managed the Imperial household for his son.
Shikai ruled with a dictatorial hand until 1916. His death left China in the hands of competing provincial governors, each of whom led an army and each of whom vied for power. Rebellion after rebellion broke out, and the central government was barely in control of the capital city much less the country.
In 1924, 18-year-old Emperor Pu-Yi was expelled from the Forbidden City by warlord Feng Yuxiang. Unable to cope with his expulsion and sudden loss of home and thousands of servants, the Emperor sought help from the Japanese.
The Japanese were in a strong position to help him. As her power weakened, Dowager Empress Cixi had agreed in 1890 to permit Russia to build a railroad from the Russian city of Chita to Vladivostok -- cutting through the heart of Manchuria. The Russians wanted to expand their sphere of influence and seize southern Manchuria as well. This would give them Port Arthur (known by its Chinese name of Lushun), a warm-water port open all year round. The Japanese saw this as a major threat to their nascent Korean empire as well as to Japanese influence over trade in the region. Japan, too, had designs on Manchuria. Manchuria was rich in natural resources, and resource-poor Japan desperately needed them. Worse, Manchuria was lush farmland but relatively unpopulated. Japanese authorities believed that if they could annex Manchuria, they could send more than a million poor Japanese farmers into the region (along with their numerous kids) -- not only alleviating population pressures on the homeland but also building a new "rice bowl" for Japan and all of East Asia.
War broke out in 1904. Although Czarist Russia was expected to win, the rapidly modernized Japanese army and navy easily defeated the Czar's forces time and time again. Peace was signed in 1905. In Russia, the Czar was forced to implement major feudal land reforms, ease censorship and repression, and convene the Duma (parliament) for the first time in years in order to avoid a coup. The reforms led directly to the Russian Revolution of October 1917.
Japan, meanwhile, won control of Port Arthur. As the Qing Dynasty collapsed, Japan moved military forces and colonists into Manchuria. Japan backed warlord after warlord in the area, and used them to expand further into Manchuria.
Emperor Pu-Yi took up residence in the city of Tianjin in 1924.
In 1925, Sun Yat-Sen died of cancer. One of his warlords, Chiang Kai-Shek, took over Yat-Sen's armed forces, known as the Kuomintang, and pacificed most of south and central China. He broke with the communists (led by Mao Tse-Tung) in 1927, and defeated them in 1934. Mao led his troops in the "Long March" to the far northwestern high rocky plateau of China, where he established a base and began training a new army.
In 1931, the Japanese provoked an attack by Chinese peasants on some Japanese workers near Mukden. The Japanese press turned this into an organized "military attack" on Japanese civilians. Japan used this as a pretense to invade Manchuria. The Chinese government declared war on Japan, leading to the Second Sino-Japanese War. But with the government collapsing in Beijing, the war was in name only. Soon, Japan had established a vassal state known as "Manchukuo" in the area. More than 800,000 Japanese farmers flooded into the region, and the Japanese built heavy industry and railroads which function to this day.
The Japanese invasion of Manchuria led the United States to place an embargo on the sale of oil to Japan. At the time, the U.S. was a net exporter of oil. The Japanese high command believed they only had oil reserves for 10 more years. After that, Japan could not wage war nor even support its own basic industries. The Japanese military began pressing for war to begin no later than 1941: The goal would be to conquer most of East Asia, and begin securing oil reserves in coastal and south China, Indochina, the Philippines and Indonesia. Because oil reserves would be consumed at a much greater pace during wartime than peacetime, the military drew up plans for a lightning-like strike across all Asia which would secure the "Great Japanese Co-Prosperity Sphere" permanently. Since it would take two years to pacify the regions and begin oil production, Japanese military forces believed that any enemies would need to be taken out of the war for at least that long. The greatest threat was the U.S. aircraft carrier fleet at Pearl Harbor. Destroy that fleet, and it would take the Americans two years to recover. By that time, the Japanese would be pumping oil and mining iron, and be able to stop any American counter-attack. So plans were drawn up to do just that...
To help make the Manchukuo state appear legitimate, the Japanese asked deposed Emperor Pu-Yi to become prime minister of the vassal state. He did so in 1932. In 1934, Pu-Yi was crowned "Emperor Kangde" (the name means "tranquility and virtue") of Manchukuo. Although Manchurians led all the ministries, Japanese vice-ministers were underneath them and exercised all the power. Japan created the Kwantung Army to pacify Manchukuo. The Kwantung Army attempted to invade the Mongolian SSR of the Soviet Union in 1939, but was repulsed.
In August 1945, the Soviet Union declared war on Japan. The USSR invaded Manchukuo, and the Manchukuo army surrendered en masse to them. Emperor Pu-Yi/Kangde was arrested and imprisoned in a Soviet gulag for five years. He was let out only to testify at the Tokyo War Crimes Trials in 1946. He testified about Japanese involvement in Manchkuo, although no charges on any of Japan's actions in the region were ever brought. (The U.S. had agreed not to bring these charges, because they would open the U.S. to charges of counter-colonialism...which the United States desperately wanted to avoid.) He confessed to a wide range of crimes himself, but in 1964 in his autobiography said that he had committed perjury because he felt guilty for not resisting the Japanese.
As soon as Japan surrendered, the Communists under Mao Tse-Tung declared war on the Kuomintang dictatorship of Chiang Kai-Shek. They swept out of their mountain fortresses in June 1946 and easily pushed Chiang Kai-Shek out of the north. Chiang was able to hold on by asking the surrendered Japanese military for assistance, which they provided. Desperate to hold on to power, he also asked the former warlords for help. But both moves undercut his popularity with the public. By August 1948 he had lost all the northern provinces as well as Manchuria. Mao pushed along the coast, and captured the Kuomintang capital city of Nanjing in April 1949. Chiang Kai-Shek was soon locked into the southeastern corner of China. In June 1949 he fled to Taiwan. Mao declared the People's Republic of China in October 1949.
In 1950, Emperor Pu-Yi was returned to China. The Chinese tried and sentenced him to life in prison. He was placed in a labor camp, and served 10 years. He was released in 1959. He worked as a gardener until 1964, when he became an editor for a Chinese government publisher. When the Cultural Revolution came in 1966, the Red Guards severely harassed him, and he was placed under police protection. He died in 1967 from complications due to kidney cancer and heart disease.
Pu-Yi married four times. At age 16, he married Manchurian noblewoman Wan Rong. The same year, he named Wen Xiu his Imperial Consort. Pu-Yi had favored Wen Xiu has his wife, but the Dowager Empress Consorts believed she was too ugly to be Empress.
Pu-Yi never showed any sexual or emotional interest in any of his wives or concubines. Some historians believe he never had sexual relations with either of them. Instead, he showed open favoritism to prepubescent and pubescent boys, and most of them shared his bed. One historian, Edward Behr who wrote The Last Emperor, openly declared Pu-Yi to be homosexual. Pu-Yi's sister-in-law, a Japanese noblewoman, wrote in her memoirs that his sexual relationships with young boys was an open scandal in Manchuria, and that his homosexuality was one reason why the Japanese never treated him better or allowed him any power.
After Pu-Yi moved to Manchuria in 1932, Wan Rong rarely emerged from her room. She had begun taking opium, and this flared into full-fledged addiction in 1932. In 1940, she became pregnant by the Emperor's chauffeur. The Emperor had the man exiled. At least one report says the baby girl was born alive, but murdered by the attending Japanese doctor. Others say the child was stillborn. Wan Rong began taking massive amounts of opium each day afterward. Pu-Yi attempted to flee Manchuria for Japan in August 1945 but was arrested by the Soviets. He left Wan Rong behind. She was arrested by the Chinese Communists, and moved from prison to prison. She died in 1946 from malnutrition and complications due to opium withdrawal.
Wen Xiu divorced the Emperor in 1931. She became a commoner and was stripped of all titles. She never remarried, and died in China in 1950 or 1951.
In 1937, six years after Wen Xiu left him, Emperoro Pu-Yi took Tan Yuling as an Imperial Consort. The 17-year-old girl was the daughter of a minor court official. She died of typhoid fever in 1942 at the age of 22.
In 1943, Pu-Yi took Li Yuqin as an Imperial Consort. She was the daughter of a minor court official in Manchuria, and just 15 years old. Pu-Yi abandoned her in Manchuria in August 1945. She continued to live in the Manchurian capital city of Changchun. She became a librarian, divorced Pu-Yi in 1957, and married an electrical technician at the age of 30. She had two sons. She died in 2001.
In 1962, the 56-year-old Pu-Yi married Li Shuxian, a 36-year-old former hospital worker. She lived in poverty after his death. In the 1980s, the Chinese government permitted authors and their heirs to receive royalties from published works. As Pu-Yi's heir, she received the royalties from his autobiography -- which had been published in 1964. She herself wrote an autobiography, and she was relatively wealthy in her later years. She successfully campaigned to have Pu-Yi's ashes removed from a public cemetery and reinterred in the Qing Dynasty tombs. She died of lung cancer in 1997 at the age of 72. In her will, she asked that her ashes and those of Tan Yuling be interred alongside Pu-Yi's, but that wish has never been honored.
Pu-Yi had no children, and never adopted a child.
Labels: history
# posted by Tim : 5/19/2008 09:09:00 PM
