The Last Emperor and Empress at Home in the Forbidden City (with Paul French)

When Puyi was a child, he became Emperor of China. But when China became a republic, he and his court remained in the Forbidden Kingdom, a tiny world of ritual with no power, Dana is joined by historian Paul French to discuss his new book. Support Noble Blood: —ORDER 'THE ARCANE ARTS' https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/771398/the-arcane-arts-by-s-d-coverly/ — Bonus episodes, stickers, and scripts on Patreon https://www.patreon.com/noblebloodtales — Order Dana's book, 'Anatomy: A Love Story https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250840578/anatomyalovestory' and its sequel 'Immortality: A Love Story https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250861016/immortalityalovestory' See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Dana Schwartz?

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• 2:04Dana Schwartz?

  Welcome to Noble Blood, a production of iHeart Radio and Grim and Mild from Aaron Mankey. Listener discretion advised.

• 2:16Dana Schwartz?

  I'm Dana Schwartz. This is Noble Blood, and I am so excited to be joined today by the author, historian Paul French. His new book, The Last Emperor of China: Twilight in the Forbidden City, comes out in the States November 17. Paul, thank you so much for joining us.

• 2:34Speaker 05

  Well, thank you for inviting me, and thank you for having Chinese history on your podcast as well.

• 2:39Dana Schwartz?

  You know, I am so thrilled that we could have this opportunity because I admit I'm a little biased towards the Tudors and French history. Chinese history is something I just don't know a lot about. Your book takes place in the 1920s with the last emperor of China, but for laypeople like me, can you give a context to what the Chinese Empire? I mean, I don't want to make you do a millennia-long history, but just a bird's eye view of where the Chinese Empire was leading up to the 1920s?

• 3:12Speaker 05

  Let's try not to confuse everyone with names and too many dates that they're going to find difficult. But basically, Pu Yi, the last emperor of China, became emperor when he was two years old in 1908. And he was appointed emperor by the Empress Dowager Cixi, who people may have heard of, who was always known as a dragon lady and was a very fierce sort of woman. Interestingly, the penultimate emperor of China, a man called Zai Tian, or the Guangxu Emperor as he's mostly known, died one day in November without, it was, the job fell to Cixi to name a new emperor. She named Pu Yi, and then the next day she died. So Pu Yi was there.

• 3:55Speaker 05

  It then later transpired, as was suspected at the time, but later on, in the People's Republic of China period, when they looked inside, he was, the Guangxu Emperor was indeed poisoned with massive doses of arsenic.

• 4:07Dana Schwartz?

  Oh, of course.

• 4:08Speaker 05

  So this is the very last years of the Qing Dynasty. He was looking to reform it to make it more like kind of Meiji Japan, stronger, more Western, more modern. And Cixi wasn't really into that, so she bumped him off. And then she died the next day of natural causes. So it's one of the best cases of karma in history I can think of. That leaves two-year-old Pu Yi as an emperor of a dynasty that is falling apart.

• 4:34Dana Schwartz?

  Why did she choose Pu Yi? Was he part of the family, or were there other qualifications?

• 4:39Speaker 05

  Yeah, she felt that he was a safe bet. There was a tradition of child emperors that had gone on before. And of course, he had a regent who was his father, who was Prince Chen or Zaifeng. And he was a very weak and easy to control man. Cixi didn't know she was going to drop dead the next day. So of course, she, I will be able to continue to rule from behind the throne. There's only been one empress in China's long history, and that was a long, long time ago. So, and certainly not in the Qing Dynasty. So she had managed to rule through proxies, and this would be a proxy.

• 5:17Dana Schwartz?

  Your book is called The Last Emperor of China, so I don't think I'm spoiling anything by saying it doesn't go well for Pu Yi.

• 5:25Speaker 05

  Well, no. I mean, this is the end of the Qing Dynasty, and in 1911, it collapses completely after 267 years. And we get the first Chinese republic of Dr. Sun Yat-sen. And this lasts from 1911, 1912, right through to 1949, when the Communist Revolution happens and the People's Republic is declared. But that means that Pu Yi, who is six years old at that time, his next great act is to abdicate as emperor. Of course, you know, his father abdicates on his behalf, but he ceases to become emperor. But what's really interesting, and you'll know this better than me, is when monarchies fall apart, and this is what it is, it's essentially a monarchy, when it falls apart, they tend to often get bumped off, you know?

• 6:10Speaker 05

  That's kind of the end of them, right? They get taken away, and heads come off and all the rest of it. And a few years later, of course, the Romanoffs in Russia would suffer a similar fate, but not in China. The Chinese Republic does a deal with the Qing Dynasty, which is that they can remain using their titles of emperor, empress, and prince, and so on, in the Forbidden City, which is a large piece of real estate in the center of Beijing. Many people, if they've been to Beijing, they will have visited it. It's quite an incredible place. They had that and the Summer Palace, which is just outside Beijing, and again, is a sort of formidable piece of real estate as well.

• 6:51Speaker 05

  They could have that, a very reduced court, and an annual stipend to sort of keep them going. So Pu Yi, in 1912, he stays in the Forbidden City. And, you know, until the end, 1924, he never really leaves, apart from two or three occasions, when he literally doesn't go much further than across the street. So he lives this kind of secluded life within there. But they do remain, and I think this is an amazing thing, because we should remember, people need to know, one thing that's very important, is that the Qing Dynasty is also the Manchu Dynasty. The Manchus are not Han Chinese or Chinese as we would think of.

• 7:31Speaker 05

  They were an invading tribe like the Mongols from the north of China, from Manchuria, that swept down and because of chaos within the Ming Dynasty and the Han Chinese took control. So they are what in Chinese history we call an invasion dynasty. And the republic is led by people like Sun Yat-sen, who are all Han Chinese. So arguably, they could have decided that, you know, let's just be done with these foreign invaders, let's get rid of them, kill them and send them back. And indeed, you know, it is a complete collapse of a group of people. Manchus now effectively sort of cease to exist in China, given that they ran the place for 267 years and before that ran it during the Jin Dynasty, you know?

• 8:12Speaker 05

  So basically, from 1616, they ran China, basically from when Shakespeare's writing Macbeth to going to, you know, 1912. So I think that that's a very important thing to think about and something that's very interesting in Chinese history, that, you know, they didn't decide to take them down to the basement and shoot them or bring out the guillotine into the square and chop their heads off.

• 8:33Dana Schwartz?

  And as we see with the Romanoffs, just being a child doesn't necessarily protect you if they want you to go.

• 8:40Speaker 05

  No, absolutely not. Although, you know, they built a, the republic built a robe for its own back, because of course, they then spend a lot of their time worrying that there'll be a restoration.

• 8:51Dana Schwartz?

  Yeah.

• 8:52Speaker 05

  Not necessarily that the Manchu will restore themselves back to power, but that a warlord will put Pu Yi back on the throne and declare the Republic dead and a new dynasty created. And of course, what they knew was that this would be backed by Japan,

• 9:10Dana Schwartz?

  Hmm.

• 9:10Speaker 05

  which was even at that point interfering in China's business. I mean, war with Japan would not come till, well, arguably, nineteen thirty-two and the occupation of Manchuria, but nineteen thirty-seven and the invasion of northern China by Japan. And then that's it, right? World War Two, game on, off we go. Fall of Hong Kong, fall of Singapore, Pearl Harbor, we're all involved. And that's where it all starts. So leaving Pu Yi alive, leaving him in the Forbidden City in the middle of Beijing, where people couldn't see him, but knew that the boy emperor was in there, massive press interest. American newspapers are always full of stories. British newspapers, the Chinese newspapers always speculating on what he gets up to in there.

• 9:52Dana Schwartz?

  Of course, it's fascinating.

• 9:54Speaker 05

  It was a risky, it was a risky kind of move by, by the Republican government.

• 9:59Dana Schwartz?

  What was the perspective of the average citizen? Was there a popular movement to bring down the monarchy? Or was there a lot of popular support for this child emperor who was now becoming a young adult?

• 10:12Speaker 05

  I think it's fair to say there was never a great groundswell of support for Pu Yi as an emperor, as a person. And even if you were willing to accept life under the Qing, which arguably was not that terrible, but there were various things that, for instance, everyone will, will know that Chinese men used to have a queue.

• 10:32Dana Schwartz?

  Yeah.

• 10:32Speaker 05

  Called a pigtail down their back. That was imposed on them by the Manchu. It's not a Han Chinese tradition. So of course, after nineteen twelve, everybody just chops them off, except some loyalists and old fashioned people who keep them. So there were some impositions like that. The Manchus kept all the best jobs for themselves. They, they kind of had a lot of the best houses and so on. But the most important thing was that they had kind of let the country slip. You know, during the reign of the Qing dynasty, the foreign powers, the British particularly, had come to China. They had, of course, sold opium. You know, we should always remember, particularly for us here in Britain, we were the world's largest narcotics dealer that make the Mexican cartels look like nothing with the amount of opium we were selling around the world

• 11:17Speaker 05

  from India. You know, but the Americans were in on it as well, right? That great family of the Delanos of Franklin Delano Roosevelt was rich from opium, right? The American traders, they were there as well. But that led to wars which China lost. That led to Britain taking Hong Kong. That led to the foreign powers, including America, taking what we call treaty ports, which most famously is places like Shanghai and Tianjin that were run as semi-autonomous places where Chinese law did not apply. So there'd been a gradual loss and many Chinese people felt that very deeply. The Chinese still called that the century of humiliation.

• 11:56Dana Schwartz?

  Hmm.

• 11:57Speaker 05

  For the, for the treaties that they were forced to sign, plus on their, on their northern border with Russia as well. And also, of course, it's when Japan starts to interfere. But Japan at the time is seen very much as a model that China could, could follow. You know, westernizing its army, creating gunboats and submarines and military uniforms and a proper education system, an industry, but also, of course, a constitutional monarchy.

• 12:23Dana Schwartz?

  Hmm.

• 12:23Speaker 05

  It moved from shoguns and daimos to a constitutional monarchy, which Japan, of course, still has to this day with some involvement by the emperor, but, but not, as is the case, you know, here in Britain and so on, supposedly not a direct political intervention, but still a figurehead for the nation. And there were many people who thought that possibly Pu Yi could morph into, with China into a constitutional monarchy.

• 12:51Dana Schwartz?

  I understand the appeal of that, of giving a sense of, of national pride. One thing I found very interesting in your book is it's not just the emperor and his court in the Forbidden City. He's married and the relationship between the emperor and his wife is just a fascinating one. Can you tell us a bit about who this wife was, how this marriage came to be and what their relationship was?

• 13:15Speaker 05

  Well, when Pu Yi reaches his majority of sixteen years old in nineteen twenty-two, he is required to marry. It is an arranged marriage, but this is nothing shocking to Pu Yi. And it is arranged with a young woman of the same age who is from a high ranking Manchu family. So it's not a surprise to her either.

• 13:38Dana Schwartz?

  Yeah.

• 13:38Speaker 05

  But and her name is Wanrong. Now, interestingly, Wanrong, although her father had been a high Manchu official, very traditional in many ways, she had had a Western education and she had actually gone to an American missionary school.

• 13:52Dana Schwartz?

  Hmm.

• 13:52Speaker 05

  In nearby Tianjin. And so she had experienced things like jazz records and ice cream and Western clothing and ridden around in cars. And of course, had been able to just walk around Beijing herself. So when she entered the Forbidden City to meet Pu Yi, she was much more the more worldly wise of these two. Pu Yi knew nothing, right? He knew nothing of life outside.

• 14:17Dana Schwartz?

  Once you try ice cream, you can't go back.

• 14:20Speaker 05

  Once you try ice cream, you can't go back. That's very true. She also found that once she tried Camel cigarettes, she couldn't go back either. That's slightly less. But she knew about the outside world. So they marry in December the first nineteen twenty-two and the procession from Wanrong's family mansion to the Forbidden City, which is about three miles, goes in Manchu tradition at dawn through the city. Man, old Manchus who had been deposed from power came from all over China. The Republican government paid for it all. The police and the army were mobilized again, the panic that this could be a spark for a restoration movement. Everybody in Beijing came out to see it, right? Because there had not been an imperial procession in China since

• 15:04Speaker 05

  nineteen oh eight and the funeral cortege for the she, the empress Dowager. So everybody came out on the street at three o'clock in the morning to see this. She's paraded through the streets in a palanquin, you know, the carry chair. And then she goes in through the main gate of the Forbidden City, which is the big front one that's on Tiananmen Square, that now is a big portrait of Chairman Mao on the front. And she goes in and the doors slam shut and everyone is left outside. It's about six o'clock in the morning by this time. So they're all thinking, where should we go for breakfast? And she goes inside and doesn't come out again, really, for another two years. She disappears into this interior world of what was called the little court inside the Forbidden City. And this is the

• 15:48Speaker 05

  last great imperial procession to ever take place in, in Beijing. And now it's not likely there's going to be another one. So, so it's the last kind of great piece of pomp and circumstance. And these were incredible processions. I mean, they could give the British a run for their money in terms of like the number of orchestras and soldiers and everything else parading through the streets. I mean, they really knew how to do it.

• 16:09Dana Schwartz?

  There's something tragic about, I mean, tragic and beautiful in the sense of her disappearing within the city and her not really being allowed to leave.

• 16:20Speaker 05

  Yes. And she wasn't, they weren't allowed to leave. There were on one side of, on the public side of the Forbidden City were Republican soldiers and on the inside were guards, often eunuch guards, of course, you know, I mean, eunuchs are a big tradition within the Forbidden City. So as not to, I don't know if I have to explain what a eunuch is, but.

• 16:37Dana Schwartz?

  Dilute the royal line. Yeah.

• 16:39Speaker 05

  They're not going to be able to taint the royal line. And they do everything within the Forbidden City. There's fifteen hundred of them. I mean, at the height of the Forbidden City, there were six thousand, but there's still fifteen hundred of them. And you have to think, I mean, I think I have in the book, a couple of the last eunuchs who were people who were made eunuchs, if you can call it that, sort of two years before the end of the Qing dynasty as little boys.

• 17:04Dana Schwartz?

  Oh.

• 17:05Speaker 05

  And you're just like, oh, bad timing there.

• 17:07Dana Schwartz?

  Oh, bad timing.

• 17:08Speaker 05

  It was your parents that did it, right? They thought, what are we going to do? It's a sick son. He's never going to get any work. But if we take him away and have him made into a eunuch, he'll have a job with the royal court, with the Imperial Palace. So yeah, she, she disappears in sight. And there's always speculation about her. I have a lot of pictures of them in the book, but they're pictures that were taken by the family for the family, if you like. They're not like the original, you know, nowadays, we just get handed these pictures to the press pool of like, oh, look, Prince George's first day at Eton. Oh, look, you know, here's, here's Prince William opening a supermarket in the middle of nowhere, whatever, whatever the picture is, right?

• 17:44Dana Schwartz?

  A lot of local dance festivals.

• 17:46Speaker 05

  Yeah. We don't see the kind of Christmas photos of the kids unwrapping the presents or, or everyone sort of, you know, playing Scrabble or something, right? But we have a lot of those photos from, from them because they were very keen amateur photographers. But nobody saw those at the time. She literally just kind of disappears inside the Forbidden City. And even her high ranking father, even her brother that she was very close to, have to sort of make appointments to see her. And similarly with Pu Yi's brothers and sisters, they, they have to make appointments to see them and they must refer to them as emperor and empress as well.

• 18:19Dana Schwartz?

  So despite all of this, there is still that formal hierarchy in place, even within the Forbidden City?

• 18:25Speaker 05

  Yes, it was written into the abdication. So not only was the emperor always to be referred to as the emperor and Wanrong as the empress, but also unless you happen to be one of, which we'll come on to, the couple of foreigners that were in there to sort of see them. When the emperor walked down the street, you needed to get on your knees fast and bow, you know, what we call the kowtow. That definitely had to be done. If the emperor walked through, you should turn and face the wall, not make eye contact with the emperor.

• 18:52Dana Schwartz?

  There's something about the fact that they had abdicated, that they have no political power, that does show just how silly and hollow some of those traditions really are. I think some people feel that with the, the British monarchy, you know, there's something silly about bowing to someone who doesn't really have any power over you.

• 19:12Speaker 05

  Yes, there is. And in, and in this case, you know, it, it has become a republic.

• 19:16Dana Schwartz?

  Yeah.

• 19:17Speaker 05

  So, I mean, it, it has dispensed with monarchy completely. So.

• 19:21Dana Schwartz?

  Completely.

• 19:21Speaker 05

  So there isn't, you know, Pu Yi is not on the money. Pu Yi is not, you know, popping up on the radio every so often to wish everybody a happy new year or, or, you know, whatever, right? I mean, he is, they have just ceased to exist.

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• 21:07Dana Schwartz?

  Even though this is an arranged marriage, what is their relationship like between the emperor and the empress?

• 21:14Speaker 05

  Here's where we get into the kind of part of my book, really, which is that traditionally, the relationship between Puyi and Wanrong has always been presented as a cold, emotionless relationship that lacked intimacy, that never really went anywhere. And that was how it's been presented by both Chinese and by Western scholars. And of course, also famously, which we haven't mentioned, by Bernardo Bertolucci in his 1987 film, The Last Emperor, which anyone listening to this who's over 40, 45 will have seen. Many younger people unfortunately haven't seen. You really should, because it is a fantastic film. It stands the test of time, and it was filmed within the Forbidden City, when the Forbidden

• 21:57Speaker 05

  City was still a little bit rundown in the 1980s, not the kind of mega tourist attraction that is today that's sort of manicured to within an inch of its life and kind of, you know, full of signage and shops, very different place. They're always presented as cold and intimate. And one thing that's always said is, of course, they never had children. And so, of course, some people have made a jump from that to say that they were never intimate. Now, of course, you know, if you think about that for five minutes, it doesn't really track, right? Because many, many people are unable to have children, but for one reason or another. But it doesn't mean that they don't have an active sex life necessarily. It just means that they can't conceive for some reason. Most of us get around this nowadays, of course, many scientific things, but adoption in

• 22:41Speaker 05

  the old days, or many people just don't worry about it. They learn to live with it. Of course, this is a problem, though, if you're an emperor, right? Because really, really, your sole job as a monarch is to produce an heir and a spare, right? You know, and you need to do that. So if you can't have children with a monarchy, then it's a bit of a problem, which again is why Puyi is most definitely and incontrovertibly the last emperor of China. There were no offspring. So this idea that there was no intimacy, and if I can just throw one more thing in, just to confuse people even more. There are three people in this relationship. On the day that they marry, on December the 1st, a young woman who's 14 years old from

• 23:21Speaker 05

  another Manchu family, a Mongol Manchu elite family called Wenchu, is smuggled in the back door of the Forbidden City, and she is the emperor's consort. Some people use the word concubine. I think concubine is somewhere between consort and prostitute, right? You know, and she's certainly not on that end of the scale. She is from a high-level family. She is a consort. Chinese emperors always had consorts, but Puyi was unique in only having one. I think the least number that an emperor ever had was three, and the most was 75. So 75 consorts and an empress. I mean, that's, you know, you've got to schedule some time in for everyone.

• 24:04Dana Schwartz?

  You see everyone three times a year and call it that, yeah.

• 24:09Speaker 05

  Yeah, and what a crazy Christmas dinner that would have been. Yeah, but she comes in, and it's always said that there was problems between her and Wanrong, they didn't get on. And of course, you know, to us, in Western traditions, the sort of Judeo-Christian tradition, this seems such an odd position, right? I mean, actually, if you look at royal families around Europe, you'll know it's not an odd position at all to have a consort, you know, I mean, you know, what the hell is Wallis Simpson, what the hell is anyone else, right?

• 24:37Dana Schwartz?

  No comment.

• 24:38Speaker 05

  Yeah, no comment. I mean, in Britain here, eventually you marry your consort, right? So it's kind of, she becomes queen. Some of them do make it to the top. So these people are there, and I think the Chinese have always presented, modern Chinese historians have always presented this as a strange, odd, feudal relationship, because that is in the interests of Communist China, to show that it is the sort of modern inheritor of a system that was feudal and backward. And, you know, Mao said, women hold up half the sky. The Qing Dynasty made women consorts and stuff. There's that reason to do it. In the West, I think it's more a kind of desire to sort of show China as Orientalist or exotic, what strange people they are.

• 25:19Speaker 05

  But as I say, with this book, I managed to find some diaries that had never been seen before, that were eyewitness account, and they show an actual young couple, I mean, they're 16, 17 years old at this time, 18 when they're expelled from the Forbidden City, trying to sort of, you know, build a genuine relationship. And Wanrong, Wenchu, and Puyi often entertaining themselves. They have no friends, you know, there's no one of the same age. There's some ladies in waiting, but they're lower and gossipy, a bit bitchy, quite honestly. You know, I mean, Wanrong has a brother who comes in sometimes, Puyi has a brother who comes, but there's no one else for them. So they do try to forge a relationship in this really unique circumstances of being

• 26:02Speaker 05

  a deposed monarchy inside, you know, a 500-year-old imperial palace that no one else can get in or out of.

• 26:09Dana Schwartz?

  I do wonder, I don't want to fast forward too much, but what is going to happen to them throughout this century? Because as we alluded to, a lot is going to happen in China. And when the communists take over, are they as lenient to the emperor and the empress?

• 26:25Speaker 05

  Well, I think the problem is during the 1920s, there's a lot of warlordism in China. It's a very weak republic. They get an anti-monarchist warlord who throws them out. They want to go to the British, but for various reasons, the British won't take them. And they fall into the hands of the Japanese, and this is really where the disaster happens. And the Japanese in 1931 occupy that part of northern China called Manchuria, and they eventually force Puyi to become the emperor of Manchukuo, which is what they call Manchuria. It's a puppet state. Wanrong says to him, don't do this, don't do this. If you do this, you'll be seen as a traitor to the Chinese people, right? You can't do this. But he does it. I don't think he knows what else to do.

• 27:07Speaker 05

  There is an, he is forced to an element, but he also makes a bad decision. He has no one really to advise him. And in 1937, Japan goes to invade China, and Puyi faithfully makes a claim to the Chinese people on the radio, do not resist the Japanese invasion. And that damns him as a traitor. So later on, when the communists come to power, he is captured after the end of the war, he is sent to a re-education camp, and he ends up, well, first of all, they make him a street sweeper in Beijing. But that's hopeless, because he goes out every day and sweeps the streets, and then he gets lost. Because although he was born in Beijing, he doesn't know any of the streets or where they are.

• 27:52Speaker 05

  So they give him a job in the botanical gardens as a gardener, where he can't really get lost. And he knows what bus to get home at the end of the day. So once again, he's a great survivor. The republic doesn't kill him when they overthrow the Qing Dynasty. The warlord doesn't kill him when he throws him out. The Japanese don't kill him at the end of the war. And when the communists get hold of him, and let me tell you, a lot of other people who collaborated with the Japanese during the war were put up against the wall and shot pretty quickly.

• 28:22Dana Schwartz?

  Yeah, I don't think it's known for its mercy, just, you know, in the Western imagination.

• 28:29Speaker 05

  Well, it was the end of the war. I mean, everyone was rounding up collaborators and people who had, you know, worked with the enemy. And he survives that as well. And, you know, he does, he dies fairly young, but he dies of natural causes in Beijing in the 1960s, just before the Cultural Revolution. And if he'd have lived into the Cultural Revolution, he could have again had people that wanted to kill him, and, you know, but he died just shortly before that.

• 28:54Dana Schwartz?

  And all things considered, working as a gardener isn't the worst life.

• 28:58Speaker 05

  No, it's not the worst life. I should say, by the way, Wan Rong had a particularly horrible life. Once they fell into the hands of the Japanese and became addicted to opium and her mental stability went badly because she felt that this was just disastrous, that this relationship they had had just fallen apart. She was now a traitor by dint of being married to him. And she actually has an affair with his driver in Manchuria, chauffeur in Manchuria. And she has a baby. So we know that she could have a baby. The Japanese take the baby and kill it as soon as it's born.

• 29:33Dana Schwartz?

  Oh.

• 29:33Speaker 05

  Which of course sends her into a spiral of collapsing mental health, greater opium addiction. And she dies just after the war, particularly horribly in a filthy prison up near the Chinese Korean border. It's a very sad story. Wen Xu, by the way, I should say her story because it's very interesting. She actually gets the first ever royal divorce.

• 29:54Dana Schwartz?

  Really?

• 29:55Speaker 05

  Yeah, in Manchuria. And she says, I'm not having this. I'm going off. And she goes back to Beijing, gets the divorce. And she marries an army officer that she meets somewhere. And she becomes an art school teacher.

• 30:05Dana Schwartz?

  Good for her.

• 30:07Speaker 05

  And she carries on doing this all the way through to sort of, I think, almost sort of the early 1970s. When she dies of natural causes, her husband's thinking, oh, I suppose I better call the undertaker and, you know, we'll have to arrange the funeral. And all these high officials, communist officials, turn up and say, don't worry, we're taking care of it. And he's like, what? Why have all you guys come from the sort of party leadership to arrange all of this? And it transpired that, you know, they of course knew that the last consul was still alive and in Beijing. And they considered this very important because they wanted to control history and they needed to know where these people were and who they were. She had never told the man she married.

• 30:48Dana Schwartz?

  Oh, my God.

• 30:49Speaker 05

  He was completely stunned. He had no idea who she was.

• 30:52Dana Schwartz?

  That's incredible.

• 30:53Speaker 05

  They had just lived in, you know, I mean, it was the 50s and 60s. It was very poor time in Mao's China. They lived in a tiny little room. They got their kind of allocated amount of vegetables and a bit of meat occasionally. She went and taught art. I think he did some sort of desk job for the People's Liberation Army. Had no idea who she was and what her life had been like from 14 to, well, she was only sort of 18 when she divorced the emperor. And then she had just lived a completely off the grid life after that.

• 31:23Dana Schwartz?

  Sweetie, did you ever have a boyfriend before you met me? No, no, unimportant.

• 31:27Speaker 05

  Yeah, no, there were a couple of guys, but you don't want to worry about it. You know, he had a house. He had a house in Beijing. It was quite big, but nothing special, you know?

• 31:37Dana Schwartz?

  Oh, that's incredible. Paul, I don't want to take too much of your time, but before I let you go, what inspired you specifically to focus this book on the period within the Forbidden City? You've written a number of books on Chinese history, but what was it that made you think this is what I want to focus several years of my research and attention towards?

• 31:59Speaker 05

  Yeah, well, this has been my kind of period of history that I've written about for a long time. And as you say, I've been doing it for quite a while because, you know, I went to university in the 1980s as a language student and then was sent to China. And so all I've done is China for breakfast, lunch and dinner since sort of, you know, 1985. And I always used to look at pictures, many of which are in the book. And I used to think, well, I read all these books that say that they are unhappy and not intimate and all the rest of it. But it doesn't look right. But I'm a savvy enough historian to know that you should be careful looking at pictures because you project what you want to believe.

• 32:31Dana Schwartz?

  Yeah.

• 32:32Speaker 05

  And then I happened to write an article for a magazine about Wan Rong, the last empress, because everyone talks about the last emperor. I thought, let's do something on the last empress. And I got an email, you know, these things go out on the internet now and all sorts of people contact you. And someone contacted me and they said, and I mentioned in this story that everybody knows that Pu Yi had this Scottish tutor, Reginald Johnston, who sort of taught in English. And if you've seen the film, it's Peter O'Toole. So he sort of sticks in your head as a charming character. What's never mentioned in the film or most of the books is that Wan Rong had an English tutor as well. And this was a young American girl who was the daughter of Philadelphia missionaries in China, who had gone away to Wellesley College, if I'm saying that right?

• 33:17Dana Schwartz?

  Yeah, Wellesley, yeah.

• 33:19Speaker 05

  Yeah, Wellesley. And had then returned to China and she was offered the job of being Wan Rong's tutor. So she was in the Forbidden City all of this time, these two years. She went in with her, because she started just before she was married. And they said to me, it's so lovely because no one ever mentions her, you know, and that's really great. Oh, and by the way, we have her diaries and letters. Would you like them? And I was like, oh, yes, please. And they, they sent them to me. Now, this is like a eyewitness account, day by day, inside the Forbidden City that we didn't know about before. Historians have not known about it before. Bertolucci didn't know about it when he made the film. It's all new. And what it does is it tells us the story that I thought was the case, which is there is this level of intimacy between them. For

• 34:04Speaker 05

  instance, she writes letters to Johnston and Johnston writes back to her. And she says, oh, I went for my, the English lesson today, but was cancelled. So I came home because they had drawn the curtain. And he writes a letter saying, oh, I was there the other day, but the emperor had drawn the curtain. And this becomes a euphemism for the emperor's gone into the empress's quarters and they're kind of, you know, getting in on as teenagers will do in their bedrooms. And she talks about all of the things that they did together, riding bicycles, taking photographs, ordering in Western food from the couple of Western hotels in Beijing at that time to sort of try bourguignon and spaghetti bolognese and things like that. Pranking people on the telephone, phoning up and saying, it's the emperor. And of course, there was only about 200 telephones

• 34:49Speaker 05

  in Beijing at the time. People would be like, yeah, right, mate. And put the phone down. You know, he could never get anyone to believe it. And so they had all these hobbies. They built a tennis court where they used to play tennis. They brought a film projector into the Forbidden City and they would watch Charlie Chaplin and Harold Lloyd films and so on. So they had this life and they talk about this intimacy, not just the curtain drawn, but, you know, they have picnics in the Imperial Gardens. And the American woman, Isabel Ingram, she comments, you know, oh, the emperor and empress were kissing or he was tickling her, you know, kind of juvenile kids playing around with each other, but trying to have some sort of intimate relationship. And so I felt that this, this really turns

• 35:31Speaker 05

  the story of those crucial years on its head in the sense that when they're expelled from there and the relationship falls apart, most people never, never really pay much attention to that because they think, oh, they never really liked each other anyway, right? But it's not true. It makes the later story of Wan Rong and Pu Yi so much more tragic.

• 35:48Dana Schwartz?

  Yeah.

• 35:49Speaker 05

  So, yeah, so I wanted to, I felt it was important to tell it. Plus, of course, the story has always been about the last Manchu emperor and often about his Scottish tutor, which is a well-known story because of the film. And Reginald Johnston wrote his own memoir, which called Twilight and the Forbidden City, which many people know. There's never been the female dimension to this story before. And there's never been an American dimension to this story before. So I'm hoping that now I can argue all the things I wanted to argue, but I have this kind of witness from history who actually was standing there and saw it all and went back home and wrote it all down. That's just like amazing that that turned up and fell into my lap.

• 36:32Dana Schwartz?

  Oh, wonderful. Amazing. Thank you so much for your time. The book is The Last Emperor of China, Twilight of the Forbidden City. Paul French, thank you so much for joining us. Come back anytime.

• 36:44Speaker 05

  Thank you so much. It was fun.

• 36:53Dana Schwartz?

  Noble Blood is a production of iHeartRadio and Grim and Mild from Aaron Manke. Noble Blood is hosted by me, Dana Schwartz. Writers for Noble Blood are Hannah Johnston, Hannah Zwick, Paul Jaffe, Natasha Lasky, and me, Dana Schwartz. The show is edited and produced by Jesse Funk and Gomes Griffin, with supervising producer, Reema Ilkayali, and executive producers, Aaron Manke, Trevor Young, and Matt Frederick. For more podcasts from iHeart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

• 37:35Speaker 03

  She's been thinking about this sleepover all week, but I think about her food allergies all the time. Fortunately, her doctor prescribed Zolair, omalizumab. It's proven to significantly reduce allergic reactions if a food allergy accident happens.

• 37:48Speaker 04

  Zolir 150mg is a prescription medication used to treat food allergy in people one year of age and older to reduce allergic reactions due to accidental exposure to one or more foods. While taking Zolir, you should continue to avoid all foods to which you are allergic. Don't use if you are allergic to Zolir. Zolir may cause a severe, life-threatening allergic reaction called anaphylaxis. Tell your doctor if you ever had anaphylaxis. Get help right away if you have trouble breathing or if you have swelling of your throat or tongue. Zolir should not be used for the emergency treatment of allergic reactions, including anaphylaxis. Zolir is for maintenance use to reduce allergic reactions, including anaphylaxis, while avoiding food allergens. Serious side effects such as cancer, fever, muscle aches and rash, parasitic infection, or heart and circulation problems have been reported. Please see zolir.com for full prescribing information. Ask an allergist

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• 39:12Speaker 02

  Hey, I'm Niall Rogers. This fall, I'll be driving across the country, meeting some of today's coolest and most fascinating artists. We'll explore the stories before the moments that changed everything. Because every musician remembers the moment where it all began. Experience before the moment. A Lincoln Original Series on the iHeart Radio app, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 39:43Dana Schwartz?

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.