Zhao Jemin, deputy director of the Museum of the Imperial Palace of the Manchu State, shows Under Secretary for Home Affairs Florence Hui Hiu-fai around the exhibition.

A new exhibition attempts to trace the tremendous and radical changes in 20th-century China through a study of the life of its last emperor, Henry Puyi. A report by Chitralekha Basu.

The life of the last emperor of China, Aisin-Gioro Puyi (1906-67) - better known internationally as Henry Puyi - is remembered mostly for the extraordinary dramatic reversals it went through. Puyi was cherry-picked by the Empress Dowager Cixi and foisted on the imperial throne when he was less than 3 years old. And then, several plot twists later, Puyi's last years were spent in a modest accommodation in Dong Guanyin Temple Hutong, in Beijing's Xizhimen area, not too far away from the Forbidden City, where Puyi had spent his childhood and youth, exposed to the most ostentatious display of wealth and luxury imaginable. With five marriages, three abdications from the regent's post and two long-term imprisonments in between, it is scarcely a surprise that Puyi's life has captured the imagination of writers and filmmakers in China and elsewhere.

Giving Puyi's story a fresh spin may not be the easiest of tasks, especially since it is so well-documented and has already been used several times over as material for fictional retellings in books, films and TV drama. However, the curators of a new exposition based on Puyi's life, launched at the Hong Kong Museum of Coastal Defence last week, have pulled it off, admirably. It is their attempt to humanize Puyi's journey from being a monarch to an ordinary citizen that wins the day.

What viewers might take back home from this exhibition goes beyond being struck by imperial grandeur or shocked by the humiliation and hardships Puyi was made to go through during the 10 years (1950-59) spent at Fushun War Criminal Management Center in Liaoning province. Rather, the show brings into focus the fact that Puyi, irrespective of whether he was assigned to play king or commoner, never stopped being interested in the finer things of life.

He was still buying vinyl records and a US-made Victor brand gramophone when he lived in exile in Tianjin after being thrown out of the Forbidden City in 1924 by the warlord Feng Yuxiang. He produced some very fine sketches and cheerfully smart calligraphy and cartoons while in Khabarovsk, where he was held captive by the Russians after World War II.

These items, part of the memorabilia on show, indicate the deposed emperor was an aware, artistically inclined man with good tastes. Tutored by his Scottish tutor, Reginald Johnston, since his early teens, Puyi had evolved into a 20th-century dilettante with an international outlook, although he spent a substantial part of his life not being allowed to step out of the compound where he was living, incarcerated in some form or the other.

Milestones of history

From late Qing Empire (1644-1911) to the heyday of "cultural revolution" (1966-76), Puyi experienced the most tumultuous upheavals in the history of modern China. From general Yuan Shikai who engineered Puyi's first forced abdication in 1912 to Mao Zedong who eventually validated that Puyi had atoned enough for his crime of having colluded with the Japanese to reinstate the Qing dynasty in China - Puyi had met leaders of all kinds.

As K.L. Lee, assistant curator at the Hong Kong Museum of Coastal Defence, puts it: "The exhibition is attempted to showcase the whole life of Puyi which covers the late Qing period, the birth of Republic China (1912-1949), the "Manchukuo" and the establishment of People's Republic of China. In addition, we wish to reflect the radical and great social changes that China underwent in these periods through the life of Puyi."

Apart from being witness to these milestones in history, Puyi also encountered the most unusual cast of characters in his eventful life. A photographed page of Nuli Weekly published in 1922 shows a record of his meeting with the writer and public intellectual Hu Shih who was one of the leaders of the early 20th-century New Culture Movement in China. In another image he is seen with the Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore in Forbidden City in 1924, just a few months before he would be forced to leave the imperial palace by the warlord Feng Yuxiang. He appears dressed in a coal miner's overall and helmet, touring a mine in 1956, during his re-education years in Fushun. In a video footage shot in a park close to Beijing's Zhongnanhai in the 1960s, Puyi appears relaxed, cracking jokes it seems, enjoying the sunshine by the lake in the company of his fifth wife, Li Shuxian. Their marriage, in 1962, had the blessings of Chairman Mao and former Chinese premier Zhou Enlai. Li would later publish a memoir about her life with the former emperor of China.

For a long time, even when he was detained in Russia, Puyi cherished the idea of reviving the Qing Empire. He had bestowed the title of a prince on a favorite nephew who was part of his entourage in captivity, singling him out as his heir apparent. In 1965 when he made a public broadcast (the script of which is among the exhibits), hailing the emergence of a new, forward-looking, prosperous China, that speech may not have been totally at odds with his original vision, except that it could no longer be realized within the framework of dynastic rule.

Contact the writer at basu@chinadailyhk.com

(HK Edition 09/02/2016 page10)