The Last Manchu

by Henry Pu Yi

  We never tired of buying pianos, watches, clocks, radios, Western-style clothes, leather shoes and spectacles. Wan Jung had been a young lady of Tientsin, and so she knew even more ways of spending money on useless objects than I did. Whenever she bought for herself, Wen Hsiu would follow suit, and, when I bought something for Wen Hsiu, Wan Jung would want something too, as if a failure to receive something would detract from her status as Empress. This, in turn, would make Wen Hsiu complain and ask for more. This competitive buying eventually compelled me to set a quota on their monthly expenditures. Naturally, Wag Jung’s allowance was somewhat higher. At first it was a thousand dollars, with Wen Hsiu’s about eight hundred, but when we ran into financial difficulties the allowances were cut to $300 and $200 respectively. There was, of course, no limit to my personal spending.

  As a result of this extravagance, the Chang Garden was reduced to desperate financial straits just as the Forbidden City had been, and sometimes we were unable to pay our bills, our rent, and even the salaries of the privy counselors and advisers.

  While spending incalculable sums of money on quantities of useless objects, I also became far more convinced than I had ever been in the days when Johnston was with me that everything foreign was good and everything Chinese, except the Imperial System, was bad. A stick of Spearmint chewing gum or a Bayer aspirin, the cost of which was just a few cents, would be enough to make me sigh over the utter foolishness of the Chinese.

  The treatment I received in the foreign concessions was quite unlike that accorded to other Chinese. In addition to the Japanese, the consuls general and senior military officers of the United States, Britain, France and Italy and the heads of foreign firms were all extremely respectful to me and addressed me as “Your Imperial Majesty.” On their national days they would invite me to review their troops, visit their barracks and see their newly arrived aircraft and warships; and they would all come to congratulate me at New Year and on my birthday.

  Before Johnston left me, which was not long after my arrival in Tientsin, he introduced me to the British Consul General and the Commander of the British garrison. They introduced me to their successors, who in turn introduced me to theirs, so that my social contacts with the British military commanders continued unbroken. When the Duke of Gloucester, the third son of King George V of England, passed through Tientsin, he visited me and accepted a photograph of me to take to his father. George V later wrote a letter thanking me for it, and asked the British consul to present his picture to me. I also exchanged photos with the King of Italy through the Italian Consul General.

  I visited a number of barracks and attended many reviews of foreign troops. When these soldiers—whose presence in China had been conceded by my ancestress Tzu Hsi in the 1901 treaties—marched before me in their martial splendor, I was very pleased and felt that the way the foreigners were treating me proved that they still regarded me as Emperor.

  There was a country club in Tientsin run by the English, a very grand establishment where Chinese were forbidden to pass through the main entrance. I was the only exception to this rule. I was allowed to enter freely and even bring along family members, and we all enjoyed the delights of being “special Chinese.”

  I made the most of the clothes and diamonds of the foreign stores such as Whiteway, Laidlaw and Co. to dress myself up like foreign nobility. Whenever I went out I used to wear the very latest in Western clothes tailored from British cloth. I would have a diamond pin in my tie, diamond cuff links on my sleeve, a diamond ring on my finger, a “civilization stick” in my hand, and German Zeiss spectacles on my nose. My body would emit the combined odors of Max Factor, eau de cologne and camphor and I would be accompanied by two or three Alsatian dogs and a strangely dressed wife and consort.

  This mode of living drew much criticism from my former tutors and advisers Chen Pao-shen and Hu Sze-yuan. They never opposed my excessive spending or my relations with foreigners, but when I attended the theatre or the movies, or wore Western clothes on an official visit, they would always remonstrate about this loss of imperial dignity. When repeated protests had no effect, Hu Sze-yuan submitted a memorial in which he took the blame on himself and asked my permission to retire.

  He had previously asked leave to retire when he had run into me at the theatre with my wife Wan Jung who had accompanied me to see the famous Peking opera actor Mei Lan-fang. After I repeatedly begged him to stay, rewarded him with two fox-fur coat linings, and stressed my determination to accept his criticisms, his sorrow had turned to joy. He had then praised me as an “illustrious ruler” because I accepted the remonstration. I dealt with his new resignation in much the same way.

  Wan Jung’s twentieth birthday28 occurred in our first year in Tientsin and my father-in-law wished to arrange for a foreign orchestra to come and play for the occasion. Some of the former Ch’ing officials heard about this, and hastened to remonstrate, protesting that “foreign music had a mournful sound’ and could not possibly be played on an empress’s “thousand year” day. As a result, we had no orchestra, and the old official who had protested was given $200. This must have been the time when I started to bestow rewards on ministers who criticized me.

  From this time until my imprisonment in the Soviet Union I never went out to a theatre or a barbershop. The reason I followed Hu’s advice was not because I was worried that he might go on complaining but because I thought he was right in saying that it was undignified for me to attend the theatre. One example of the “progress” I made occurred when a Swedish prince visited Tientsin and asked to meet me. I refused because I had seen a picture of him in the press with the actor Mei Lan-fang and thought that I should show my disapproval of his loss of dignity.

  Hu Sze-yuan and other members of Chen Pao-shen’s group differed from Cheng Hsiao-hsu, Lo Chen-yu and their associates in that they seemed to have despaired of a restoration and were opposed to trying anything desperate. They attached more importance than Cheng and the others to my imperial dignity, which was another reason I obediently did as they told me. Although I found many of their suggestions bigoted, I always accepted those which reflected their loyalty. True, I was living a strange life in a foreign settlement, but I never forgot my position and always remembered that an emperor had to abide by precedent.

  When my consort Wen Hsiu suddenly asked for a divorce in 1931, the old officials, before the final settlement, asked me to issue an edict demoting her from the rank of consort to that of commoner, and I naturally complied.

  The divorce from Wen Hsiu is evidence of my irregular family life. Instead of attributing the cause of divorce to emotions, it would be better to attribute it to the emptiness of our life in the Chang Garden. Even if I had had only one wife she would not have found life with me interesting since my one preoccupation was my restoration. Frankly, I did not know anything about love. In other marriages husband and wife were equal, but to me wife and consort were both the slaves and tools of their master.

  Even in the Forbidden city, Wen Hsiu had written a short essay that reflected her sentiments about her sterile life.

  She had been brought up from her earliest years to accept the old-fashioned three obediences and four virtues, and since she began the life of a palace consort before she reached the age of fourteen, her ideas of her duty to her sovereign husband were very deeply embedded in her. That she dared to ask for a divorce in spite of this upbringing was a sign of extraordinary courage. She overcame all kinds of obstacles to obtain it, and was badly treated afterward. It has been said that she was egged on to ask for the divorce by her family in order to obtain a considerable alimony, but in fact the difficulties her family created for her caused the greatest distress to someone of her mentality. After she had paid her lawyers and the middlemen, and after her family had taken what they wanted, she had very little left of the $50,000 alimony, and her psychological losses were even greater. A brother of hers actually published an open letter to her in a Tientsin paper in which he accused her of ingratitu
de to the Ch’ing House.

  I do not know much about what happened to Wen Hsiu after the divorce, except that she became a primary-school teacher and died in 1950. She did not remarry.

  In July, 1929, I moved from the Chang Garden to the Quiet Garden, which was also in the Japanese concession. This house previously had a different name, and the change to “Quiet Garden” was not without significance.

  After the Northern Expedition the power of Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang extended to the north of China. The war lords with whom I was on good terms had collapsed, and the three provinces of the Northeast, in which I had placed such high hopes, had proclaimed allegiance to Chiang’s Nanking Government. Everyone in the Chang Garden had relapsed into pessimism. Some of the Ch’ing veterans in my entourage had scattered and of the ministers who stayed with me only Cheng Hsiao-hsu and Lo Chen-yu still talked about restoration. The only question that the others considered was how the new “dynasty” of Chiang Kai-shek which had just conquered the country was going to treat me, the last Manchu. I too was very worried about this.

  But this situation did not last long. We soon saw that under the Nanking Kuomintang Government, civil wars continued just as they had under the Peking war lord regime. The “unification” achieved by Chiang Kai-shek became more and more illusory and hopes revived in the Chang Garden when all had seemed lost. It seemed to us that the great enterprise of “unification” could be accomplished only by me, a view that was expressed not only by retired Ch’ing officials in my service but also by the Japanese staff officers who advised me on developments every week. Thus, the name I chose for my new residence—Quiet Garden—did not mean that I was looking for peace and quiet. It meant that I intended to wait, quietly, for my opportunity. And in the Quiet Garden I waited day after day, and month after month.

  17

  The Unquiet “Quiet” Garden

  IN THE SUMMER OF 1931, AFTER TWO YEARS OF WAITING IN the Quiet Garden, we received some news.29 A letter finally came from one of my advisers Tung Chi-hsu, who had gone to the Northeast, in which he said that he had uncovered the real feelings of General Honjo, the Commander of the Japanese Kwantung Army. Honjo felt that since the three Northeast provinces were not yet entirely under his control, it would be better for me not to come to Mukden until they were unified and stable. Since this was the opinion of the supreme arbiter of my destiny and the highest authority in Manchuria, I had no alternative but to obey and wait.

  The days dragged by like years. Meanwhile I issued numbers of imperial edicts and sent my two nephews Hsien Yuan and Hsien Chi, who had just graduated from the Japanese Staff Officers’ College, to the Northeast to win over some Mongol princes. I also gave beautiful jade pieces to some of the Manchurian leaders who had been among the first to submit to the Japanese occupation forces and, at the request of a Japanese officer, I wrote letters to the resistance fighter Ma Chen-shan and some Mongol princes advising them to surrender. I made a number of official appointments and prepared a plentiful reserve of edicts of appointment to official posts with blank spaces for names.

  At this time I acted on a suggestion from Cheng Hsiao-hsu, who was becoming less cautious, and sent my brother’s Japanese teacher to Japan to make contact with the new Army Minister and the leader of the Black Dragon Society. I wrote each of them letters in my own hand on yellow silk, copied from drafts by Cheng Hsiao-hsu. About three weeks after the dispatch of these letters, I met the Kwantung Army Staff Officer and representative, Doihara,30 who conveyed a message to me from his superiors advising that I should now leave Tientsin and go to the Northeast.

  Doihara, who built his military career out of aggression against China, first came to China in 1913 and was adjutant to a Kwantung Army major general. In 1924 he was closely associated with Chang Tso-lin, but in 1928, when the Kwantung Army decided to eliminate Chang, Doihara took part in the plot to blow up his train at Huang Ku Tun. Soon after this he was promoted to the rank of colonel and was placed in charge of a secret service organization headquartered at Mukden. From 1931 to 1937 he was involved in many secret Japanese plots against China, including riots, the setting up of local puppet authorities, and the engineering of outbreaks of fighting, as well as other subversive activities. In 1937, he gave up covert work for overt activities and became a full general.

  Because of the mysterious stories that were told about him, the Western press at that time described him as the “Lawrence of the East” and the Chinese papers said that he usually wore Chinese clothes and was fluent in several Chinese dialects. But when I met him he was dressed in Japanese-style Western clothes, and his spoken Chinese was not much. He used the services of the Tientsin garrison interpreter Yoshida to be sure that there would be no misunderstandings.

  He was forty-eight at the time and the flesh around his eyes was flabby. He had a little moustache under his nose, and throughout our interview his face wore a bland and kindly smile, which made one feel that every word he spoke was completely reliable.

  After politely inquiring about my health he turned to business. First he explained the Japanese action to me. He said it was aimed at dealing with the “Young Marshal” Chang Hsueh-liang, under whose rule “the people of Manchuria were reduced to destitution and the Japanese had no alternative but to use force.” He claimed that the Kwantung Army had absolutely no territorial ambitions in Manchuria and “sincerely wants to protect the Manchurian people and enable them to set up their own independent state.” He hoped that I would not miss this good opportunity and would soon return to the land from which my ancestors had arisen to undertake the leadership of the new state. Japan would sign a treaty of alliance with this country and its sovereignty and territorial integrity would be protected by Japan. As sovereign of this new state I would take charge of everything.

  But there was still one big problem that worried me, and I asked Doihara what form the new state would take.

  “As I have already mentioned, it will be independent and autonomous, and it will be headed by you.”

  “That is not what I asked. I wish to know whether it will be a republic or a monarchy? Will it, or will it not, be a monarchy?”

  “This problem will be solved after you come to Mukden.” “No,” I insisted. “I will only go if there is to be a restoration.”

  He smiled slightly and without changing the tone of his voice replied: “Of course it will be a monarchy; there’s no question of that.”

  “Very well. If it is to be a monarchy, I will go.”

  “In that case I must ask Your Majesty to leave as soon as possible and to be in Manchuria by the sixteenth without fail. We can discuss the details in Mukden. Yoshida, the interpreter can arrange your journey.”

  After Doihara’s departure, Yoshida told me that I should say nothing to the Consulate General about the meeting and that he would arrange my journey as far as Dairen. I decided that I would discuss the matter with no one but Cheng Hsiao-hsu, but since the news of my interview with Doihara was in the press the next day and its purpose was explained I had to answer advice and criticism from many quarters. Meanwhile, however, I did not reveal my own intentions.

  Chen Pao-shen was horrified by this affair as were several of my other close advisers. Three days or so after Doihara’s visit an emissary arrived from the Chiang Kai-shek Government in Nanking and unexpectedly offered to revive the Articles of Favorable Treatment and pay me either a yearly grant or perhaps a single lump sum provided that I lived anywhere except in Japan or the Northeast. I gave the emissary a noncommittal answer and by the time he tried to see me again I had already left Tientsin. I also received warning letters. One from a member of my own family implored me not to “acknowledge the enemy as my father” and advised me to treasure the dignity of the Chinese people. Two days before I left I was sent a basket of fruit which contained two bombs. Fortunately, the basket was intercepted and turned over to the Japanese police. The interpreter Yoshida informed me that the bombs had been produced in the arsenal of the “Young Mars
hal” Chang Hsueh-liang. A trusted young manservant, whom I later sent to military school in Japan, received a phone call from a waiter in the Victoria Café telling him that “suspicious people” who looked as if they had weapons concealed in their clothing had been making inquiries about me and that he was certain they were agents of the “Young Marshal.”

  After the bombs, the threatening letters, and the telephone call came the “Tientsin Incident.” This was one of Doihara’s masterpieces. The Japanese arranged for a crowd of Chinese in their pay to make trouble in the Chinese-administered part of the city. A state of emergency and martial law was then announced in the Japanese concession and communications with the Chinese city were cut. Armored cars drove up to “protect” the Quiet Garden, which was now isolated from the outside world. The only people allowed in and out were Cheng Hsiao-hsu and his son, Cheng Chui.

  18

  Crossing the White River

  THE DAY OF MY DEPARTURE WAS SET FOR NOVEMBER 10, 1931. I used lots of ingenuity in developing what I hoped would be a safe plan and scheduled my departure for after dark so that I could slip out, unseen, through the main gate of the Quiet Garden. Originally, I had hoped to avoid the main gate and leave through the garage door which opened directly on the street. Thus I told my servant, Big Li, to see whether it could be opened, but he reported that it had not been used for so long that the posters which had been plastered over it on the street side had sealed the door fast. It was therefore decided that I was to hide in the rumble seat of a roadster. One of my aides would serve as chauffeur while another would sit beside him.