I thought that the talks with the Kwantung Army would present no problem and that soon the secrecy would be over and it would be announced that I, the Great Ching Emperor, had returned to the throne in the palace of my ancestors in Shenyang. The thought made me so excited that I paid no attention to the worried expressions of Cheng Hsiao-hsu and Cheng Chui. I happily ate an exotic Japanese supper and gazed out of the window at the beautiful sunset then went to bed, at peace with the world.
—PUYI
Yoshiko’s first major assignment for the Japanese army involved the marital problems of her distant relative, the deposed Qing emperor Puyi, whose dislike for her throughout his life was one of his few consistent positions. Yet Puyi could not argue when Yoshiko was called in to do him a favor: his situation had deteriorated, drastically, due to his own miscalculations, and he could not be picky about his saviors.
After his 1912 abdication, Puyi had been allowed to stay in the Forbidden City under conditions very favorable to an unemployed emperor. At last one warlord tired of this generosity, and in 1924 Puyi was evicted from his palace. Immediately the Japanese came to his aid, first taking him into the Japanese legation in Beijing and then affording him refuge in Tianjin, where he lived in the Japanese concession.
All along Puyi wanted his throne back wherever he could get it, and the Kwantung Army obliged by coming up with a new spot for him. Puyi understood that the place on offer in Changchun, Manchuria, was no patch on the Forbidden City, Beijing, but he was willing to settle.
What had happened was that the “rampageous” Kwantung Army, having taken over Manchuria, had to tone down its ambitions because of opposition from the central government in Tokyo. Instead of an outright occupation of the area, the army told the world that they were going to establish an independent state. Chinese would, in fact, take up important posts in the new regime, but they would serve in what would become a Japanese puppet state and be trotted out only to give the enterprise the appearance of authenticity. Behind the curtains would be the Japanese ordering those locals around. Bureaucrats were one matter, but the Japanese were also eager for a royal figurehead, to decorate the tableau and unify the population. This is where Yoshiko and, more important, Puyi came in.
Yoshiko and Puyi would later state that they had been deceived and mistakenly believed that the Japanese were truly doing their people a favor by creating a Manchu state and restoring the Qing dynasty. Their realization that the Japanese had other motives, unrelated to improving the fortunes of the Qing, was slow in coming. Puyi would later say that he had, innocently, stuck his head into “the tiger’s mouth.”
In his autobiography, Puyi wrote about how he and his whole court in Tianjin were greatly stirred by the news of the Japanese attack in Shenyang during the Manchurian Incident and the rout of Chinese troops. “As soon as I heard the news, I longed to go to the Northeast, but I knew that this was impossible without the consent of the Japanese.” The former emperor was then languishing in what was for him toned-down splendor, occupying a Spanish-style mansion on Tianjin’s Anshan Road.
Serenity, however, only blessed the exterior of the estate, with its soothing Moorish arches, fountain, and red-tiled roof. Inside, Puyi found it hard to relax. A former emperor without a genuine palace to call his own, Puyi was being pummeled by domestic strife. His wife had become an opium addict, his consort had taken off in a fury, and he felt himself too old to uproot himself and start again. Political unrest took startling turns by the day and threatened Puyi’s physical safety. His enemies had reasons to wish him eliminated, and in addition, Chiang Kai-shek, his power on the rise at the time, was no friend of the Qing dynasty. By that time Chiang’s troops had fought their way past Communists and warlords, enabling him to emerge as China’s strongest leader. A monarch in exile with his own band of supporters, Puyi posed a threat to Chiang, and there were reports among the exiled courtiers about murder plots and attempted poisonings.
While Bertolucci’s film The Last Emperor has fixed Puyi’s character in the public’s mind, Puyi’s 1964 autobiography, From Emperor to Citizen, goes further, deepening the impression of a vain and thick exile, unequipped to face the challenges of life outside the palace and not inclined to change. Puyi’s autobiography takes him beyond the film’s broad strokes, the Western clothing, and Chinese-flapper milieu to show exactly how he won himself a second turn as emperor in Japanese-controlled Manchuria, a second try that brought so much agony to his people.
From Emperor to Citizen began as Puyi’s postwar confessions to his Chinese Communist jailers. Apparently in that first draft, he had flogged himself so thoroughly for his defects that it was deemed unsuitable for a mass readership. Revisions toned down Puyi’s self-criticisms, and he did not seem so much the eager penitent, doing everything he could to avoid execution by the new Chinese state. In the 1964 version, there emerges instead a hedonist down on his luck in prison and scrambling to adapt. Puyi endeavors to flail himself for his flaws, but at the same time he caresses the memory of his luxurious former life, which had been so blessedly distant from the suffering masses.
About the Jingyuan Garden, his quarters in Tianjin’s Japanese concession in 1925, Puyi recalls the positive features of the new place: “I found a foreign-style house with flush lavatories and central heating far more comfortable than the Mind Nurture Palace [in the Forbidden City]. … I was still addressed in exactly the same way as before. … All this seemed to me both natural and essential.” He remembers how he had made provisions for his cash needs: “The economics of the Jingyuan Garden were naturally on a far smaller scale than those of the Forbidden City, but I still had a considerable fortune. Of the large quantities of valuables I had brought with me from the Forbidden City, some had been converted into money which was now earning interest in foreign banks and some had been turned into real estate to bring in rent.”
Nonetheless, Puyi confesses that he was strapped: “After I moved to Tianjin there were many places to which money had to be sent every month and a number of offices were set up for this purpose. … There were also officials appointed to look after the imperial tombs of the Qing house. … The biggest item on the budget was the money spent on trying to buy over or influence warlords. … Purchases, excluding such items as cars or diamonds, probably accounted for two-thirds of an average month’s expenses. I spent far more money on buying things when in Tianjin than I had done in Beijing, and the amount increased every month. I never tired of buying pianos, watches, clocks, radios, Western clothes, leather shoes and spectacles.” His shopping tours convinced him that foreign goods were superior to Chinese products. “A stick of Spearmint chewing-gum or a Bayer aspirin would be enough to make me sigh at the utter doltishness of the Chinese, though I did not include myself as I saw myself superior of all my subjects. … My body would be fragrant with the combined odors of Max Factor lotions, eau-de-Cologne and mothballs, and I would be accompanied by two or three Alsatian dogs and a strangely dressed wife and consort.” Though Puyi was trying to prove his remorse after the fact, the brand-name precision shows him warming to these memories.
Enjoyment of Spearmint and Max Factor products was imperiled by the threats to Puyi’s safety, some real and others cooked up by the Japanese, who were eager to transport him out of Tianjin and up north to Manchuria. Impatient with their vacillating would-be emperor, the Japanese army sought to propel him toward a speedy departure. A gift of fruit arrived at the former emperor’s residence, and bombs were discovered hidden in the basket; the Japanese orchestrated a riot by Chinese in Tianjin that also threatened Puyi’s personal safety. Next a waiter from the Victoria Café called to say that it was dangerous for him to eat there, since armed and suspicious characters had been seen lurking around the premises. “I do not know who that waiter was, if he ever existed,” Puyi later recalled with bitterness.
Puyi at last agreed to leave at once for Manchuria, where, the Japanese assured him, he would be safe and restored to power. Some of his advisers objected to this plan, fearing that he would have no recourse once under the control of the Japanese. Family members also were opposed to his alliance with the Japanese, and, fearing that he might submit to the enemy, urged him not to “acknowledge a bandit as my father.” Yet Puyi, already airing out his regal dragon robes, allowed himself to be won over by Japanese promises. “I was too far carried away by my dream of restoration to heed any warnings.”
With his Japanese handlers on board, Puyi left by boat for Manchuria in November 1931, answering a fellow Manchu’s plea for his presence in the “land where our ancestors arose.” He believed that one day he would be proclaimed emperor there and rule a unified China again. Instead, as had been predicted, he found himself sequestered in Lushun—in the same red hilltop house where Prince Su and his family had lived after fleeing Beijing—and immediately diminished, subject to Japanese orders. Puyi describes himself as both dumbfounded by Japanese lies and helpless before their demands. He would allow the humiliations to continue, participating in court ceremonies aimed at giving legitimacy to a murderous regime that lasted until 1945.
“Thus it was that both trembling with fear and dreaming of my future restoration,” he writes, turning on the contrition, “I shamelessly became a leading traitor, and the cover for a sanguinary regime which turned a large part of my country into a colony and inflicted great sufferings on thirty million of my compatriots.”