The Rise And Fall Of China’s LAST Emperor: 1908-1912

Added: 2026-05-12

[00:00:00]I want to tell you about one of the craziest, riches to rags [music] stories in history.

[00:00:08]This is one of the strangest [music] lives of the 20th century. So, let me tell you about Puyi, the last emperor of China.

[00:00:19]So, as a toddler, he sat on the dragon throne, which is the throne of the Chinese emperor because the dragon is the symbol of divine imperial power.

[00:00:27]And he lived in more luxury than probably any other child on the entire planet. Plus, at least in theory, he ruled over about a quarter of the world's population. He was treated as divine, grown men bowed to him, eunuchs opened doors, dressed him, cooled his soup. There were endless banquets laid out for him. So, he was raised as if he were the center [music] of the universe.

[00:00:51]And all this is happening, of course, inside the Forbidden City, that stunning palace complex from the 1400s in China, just north of Tiananmen Square.

[00:01:00]This child emperor of one of the world's biggest countries would end up earning about 100 yuan a month working as a gardener in Beijing. Puyi was born in Beijing in 1906 into the Aisin-Gioro family, the imperial house of the Qing dynasty.

[00:01:20]Then, when the Guangxu Emperor died with no heir, the Empress Dowager, Cixi Cixi I've just started learning Mandarin. So, if you speak Mandarin, apologies for these pronunciations. And if you don't speak Mandarin, well, then they're flawless. So, anyway, the Empress Dowager chose Puyi, who was not yet three, to succeed this emperor that died without an heir.

[00:01:43]Palace officials arrived at his home without warning. And this little boy screamed, he cried, he wanted his parents, but he was taken away, carried into the Forbidden City to become emperor. And his wet nurse was the only person that he was familiar with that was allowed to go with him. And then she reportedly breastfed him until he was about nine. He would seek her out later in his life as well during upheavals to come.

[00:02:09]So, Puyi later wrote that one of his earliest memories after being dragged into the palace was being brought before the Empress Dowager and seeing through a curtain what he remembered as this emaciated, terrifying face. He cried, she offered him sweets. He threw them on the floor and shouted that he wanted his nanny.

[00:02:29]And this is like a Chinese drama. I will see dramas. I'm obsessed with them if you've ever watched them. So, within two days, the Empress Dowager was dead.

[00:02:38]>> [music] >> A sudden collapse in health. There's a lot of suspicious deaths at this time.

[00:02:42]And on the 2nd of December, 1908, Puyi was enthroned. And he cried throughout the ceremony as well. And no one disciplined him, obviously, because he was emperor. And he later admitted that as a boy, he became really cruel and spoiled, addicted to commanding people. And he'd beat his eunuchs for small offenses. Flogging was part of the daily routine.

[00:03:05]And then, as suddenly as his meteoric rise to emperor happened, it all collapsed.

[00:03:14]So, in 1911, the Xinhai Revolution broke out and toppled the Qing dynasty, which had ruled China since the 1600s. [music] And plus, that revolution also ended more than 2,000 years of imperial rule in China. In February 1912, the imperial court signed the abdication edict on Puyi's behalf. And that really should have been the end of Puyi as an emperor, but not quite.

[00:03:39]So, under the terms of abdication, Puyi was allowed to keep his imperial title and remain inside the Forbidden City. So, this is really bizarre. He goes on to live this like ghostly afterlife. He's not a ruler of China, but he's still treated inside the palace as if he were, like a relic. So, outside the walls, China is becoming a republic, lots and lots of change. Inside them, Puyi is still treated as the son of heaven. In 1917, there was a brief attempt to restore him to the throne, but that lasted less than two weeks. And by then, modern China was being fought over by revolutionaries, warlords, monarchists, republicans, foreign powers. And Puyi was basically this artifact from another time. So, he's not fit for these circumstances.

[00:04:28]And one of the most important people in his life in this moment was a Scottish tutor called Reginald Johnston, who arrived in 1919. And Johnston taught Puyi English, history, world affairs, maths, and introduced him to all of these modern inventions like telephones and books, bicycles, cinema, glasses.

[00:04:50]And under Johnston's influence, Puyi actually wanted to leave China and study at Oxford, but he never escaped. In fact, he just moved from one gilded enclosure to another.

[00:05:02]In 1924, after a coup in Beijing, Puyi was expelled from the Forbidden City altogether. No longer was he allowed to live there in this old palace as a kind of ceremonial ghost.

[00:05:13]So, what would happen to him next?

[00:05:16]He ended up in Tianjin in a Japanese concession. So, a concession was like a pocket of foreign controlled territory inside a Chinese city. And inside that concession, Chinese laws didn't apply.

[00:05:30]So, for Puyi, this was a really great hiding place. And there he was surrounded by advisers, like hangers-on, opportunists, old loyalists, foreign powers. And he had these fantasies of restoration.

[00:05:46]People would come and go, come and promise to restore him.

[00:05:49]And then this is where the Japanese involvement in the story ramps up. So, to understand the next bit, I'm going to give you a small piece of context about the region of Manchuria.

[00:06:00]So, Manchuria in China's northeast was a hugely valuable.

[00:06:06]It had coal, iron, lots of farmland, railways. And it sat between China, Korea, Russia, and the Pacific. So, for Imperial Japan, especially during the depression, this territory looked essential. Japan wanted Manchuria because it offered almost everything that an expansionist empire would be after. Land, raw materials, railway lines, and a launchpad into the rest of China.

[00:06:35]In 1931, Japanese officers blew up their own railway near Mukden in South Manchuria. They blamed Chinese dissidents. So, this was a pretext for invasion, a false flag op. And they invaded Manchuria. Then, they invented a country almost overnight. They created Manchukuo, which was a state the size of South Africa sitting at this strategic crossroads. Officially, it was independent, but in reality, Japan was always going to control it. But occupation always looks better with some some costume and regalia. So, for that, they needed a ruler. And they basically said, "Are there any rulers knocking about? Who can we use?" And obviously, there is one. So, they went to Puyi. And for the Japanese, he was really useful because he symbolized the old Qing connection to Manchuria because the Qing dynasty had been founded by the Manchus, whose homeland was Manchuria. So, by placing Puyi there, it kind of made the Japanese occupation look like a historical restoration.

[00:07:41]And for Puyi himself, this must have looked like a road back.

[00:07:45]How often do you get an opening to be an emperor again? And he was probably feeling a little lost. So, he accepted.

[00:07:50]And in 1932, he became the chief executive of Manchukuo. In 1934, he was declared emperor of it under the title Kangde. That was his reign title. And he lived in Changchun, the capital that the Japanese chose in what had been a tax office, I think. He was closely watched.

[00:08:10]Obviously, Japanese officials were making the real decisions. Laws were brought to him to sign, but Puyi couldn't move freely or do what he wanted. He was a puppet emperor.

[00:08:21]In fact, I have a little video of Puyi testifying to that very point.

[00:09:02]It was true, but the puppet emperor moniker was also an important way to cover himself because Manchukuo had become notorious. It was the site of some of the worst atrocities of the Second World War, including something called Unit 731.

[00:09:21]You should look it up if you're not already familiar. It was a secret Japanese military program that carried out biological and chemical weapons research on prisoners. Thousands of civilians and prisoners were infected with diseases like plague, anthrax, and typhus. Many were vivisected to study the effects. It was really awful.

[00:09:40]When the Soviet Union invaded in August 1945, Manchukuo collapsed. Japanese power in the region disintegrated.

[00:09:50]Soviet forces seized all of the Japanese weapons stockpiles in Manchuria. And then many of those arms were funneled to Chinese communist forces that ultimately helped Mao Zedong in the Chinese Civil War.

[00:10:02]So this strange puppet empire, which had lasted only 13 years, fed directly in that way into the making of communist China in a sense.

[00:10:13]So as Japan surrendered, Puyi tried to flee, but it was too late. He was captured by the Soviets, and then he spent years in Soviet custody. Then, after the Chinese Communist Party came to power, he was returned to China. Given his role in Manchukuo, most former rulers in his position would have been expecting execution, exile, perhaps permanent disappearance.

[00:10:37]But communists never miss an opportunity, or communist leaders certainly, never miss an opportunity to make an ideological point. So instead of giving him the most severe kind of sentence that they could, they sent him to a re-education camp. Puyi spent almost 10 years in prison at Fushun. He learned to do all these things for himself that he'd never had to do before. Basic things like tying his shoelaces or even brushing his teeth.

[00:11:05]He was lectured, interrogated, and then confronted with the crimes that were committed in his name. So he was shown evidence of these atrocities carried out under Japanese rule in Manchukuo.

[00:11:16]Although in the end he wasn't tried as one, Puyi was considered to be a war criminal by the Soviet Union and communist China.

[00:11:22]And historians debate his level of culpability and agency. You know, how much power did he really have to change things, but how much did he know?

[00:11:32]One thing's for sure though, he definitely wasn't winning any Mr. Congeniality awards here, and he'd admitted to sadistic behaviors as a child.

[00:11:40]He was remade though, or at least performed being remade into an ordinary Chinese citizen. So in 1959, he was released, and his rehabilitation was politically useful to Chairman Mao's regime because it showed that even a former emperor could be remade by new China.

[00:11:58]And there are reports that Puyi and Mao even had a friendly chat at Chairman Mao's house and joked around, but the sourcing on that is quite thin.

[00:12:07]Puyi then went to work as a gardener in the Beijing Botanical Gardens, and later he became a researcher and an editor.

[00:12:14]So he lived on a modest salary of 60 to 100 yuan a month, and he even visited the Forbidden City as a paying tourist, which is wild. The former son from the dragon throne walking through the palace where men once kowtowed to him, now he was a visitor among other visitors.

[00:12:34]Puyi died of kidney cancer in 1967. He was 61 at the time, and his ashes were placed in Baoshan Revolutionary Cemetery. And then 28 years later, his ashes were moved to Hualong Imperial Cemetery, which is located near the Western Qing tombs where four other emperors were interred.

[00:12:54]He married five times and had no children. Later accounts also describe his sexual life and marriages as very troubled and unhappy.

[00:13:04]Puyi wrote that his last marriage to a commoner, as is written, was better, with his last wife saying that he was a changed man who was kind to her.

[00:13:16]So do you think this is one of history's greatest riches to rags stories? I think so. Tell me what you think, and I will see you in a few days.

[00:13:28]>> [music]