Henry Pu Yi, from emperor to citizen

Pu Yi, China's last emperor, did not lead an ordinary life, even after his abdication. He stayed in the Forbidden City until 1924 when the warlord Feng Yuxiang launched a coup that forced Pu Yi to stay at his father's mansion with the rest of his court. By this time, his court also included a wife and a consort.

When Pu Yi was 16, it was decided that the time had come for him to marry. His advisers showed him pictures of four Manchu girls and told him to pick one. He chose a 13-year old girl named Wen Hsiu, whom his advisers considered too ugly to become Empress. They made him choose another girl, Wan Jung, also called Elizabeth, who came from a rich family and was considered "acceptable." And because Pu Yi had expressed an interest in Wen Hsiu, it was deemed improper that she should be married to someone else. Instead, Pu Yi took her as his concubine.

A British tutor

Before Pu Yi and his court were finally driven out of the Forbidden City, the Manchus still nurtured hope of restoring the emperor to his throne. They thought that maintaining contact with Western powers could help them reach this goal. It was because of this that Pu Yi, at the age of 13, started learning English.

His teacher was Reginald Johnston, a senior official of the British Colonial Office. Johnston was not really a teacher, but he exerted a great influence on Pu Yi. Under his guidance, Pu Yi became interested in Western things, to the point that he asked Johnston to help him pick an English name for himself. From the list of English kings that Johnston gave him, Pu Yi chose Henry.

Johnston was also the first to notice that Pu Yi needed eyeglasses. Over the objections of his advisers who thought that eyeglasses were too Western, Pu Yi got the trademark spectacles that he would wear for the rest of his life.

Emperor of Manchukuo

The Japanese Army invaded Manchuria in 1931. The next year, they offered to smuggle Pu Yi into the area. Pu Yi had earlier sought protection from the Japanese, staying at their embassy in Peking and later in Tientsin on the coast of China, where they had a lot of influence.

Pu Yi was named regent of the new independent state of Manchukuo in 1932. Two years later, he would be crowned as Emperor. In truth, though, he was nothing more than a figurehead, with the Japanese making all the decisions, even about his personal life, for him.

The Japanese put pressure on Pu Yi to marry a Japanese woman, but he married a Manchu woman called Yu-ling instead. Six years after their marriage, Yu-ling died, after a Japanese doctor administered some medicine to cure her of illness. He was again asked to choose a wife, and he picked a 15-year old Manchurian girl named Li Yuqin, who studied at a Japanese-run school.

Manchuria became the military-industrial base for Japan during the Second World War. At the end of the war, Soviet forces invaded Manchuria and Pu Yi and his court were forced to flee again. After Japan's surrender, Pu Yi abdicated the throne once more.

The Soviets told Pu Yi that he and eight of his entourage would be flown to Japan. Pu Yi chose none of his wives to accompany him but elected to travel with his brother, three nephews, two brothers-in-law, a doctor and a servant.

Instead of bringing him to Japan, however, the Soviets brought him to the USSR where we was kept under house arrest. Pu Yi was called to testify against Japanese war criminals in 1946. He maintained that as emperor of Manchukuo, he was a mere puppet of the Japanese government.

Re-education and reform

It wasn't until 1950 that Pu Yi would return to China. Immediately after his return, he was sent to a prison camp to be re-educated. As a sign of his re-education, he voluntarily gave up the priceless imperial seal that he had always carried with him.

He stayed at a labor camp for nine years, only being released in 1959 after receiving pardon from Mao Zedong. Already in his fifties, he went to live in his father's house. He was assigned to work as a gardener at the Academy of Sciences' Institute of Botany. In 1962, he married Li Shuxian, a nurse from a small Beijing hospital. He was a member of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC) from 1964 until his death in 1967. The transformation from emperor to citizen was complete.