The Last Occupant of the Forbidden City

Imperial tutor Reginald Johnston, played unforgettably by Peter O’Toole in Bertolucci’s bowdlerized film The Last Emperor, was an Oxford-educated Scot turned Confucian, with fluent Mandarin and a deep love of China. He had worked in the British administration of Hong Kong and a treaty port in Shāndōng before being invited to take up the post of Western tutor to the 13-year-old Xuāntǒng emperor in 1919. The abdication treaty had been signed seven years earlier, but Johnston’s post was created to broaden the emperor’s knowledge of foreign things, should the Republic, which tottered from its first day, ever actually fall. One monarchist warlord took temporary control of the capital in July 1917 and engineered a restoration which lasted 12 days before he was driven out by another warlord and took refuge in the Legation Quarter.

Johnston was granted leave from the British Foreign and Colonial Office, and gave Pǔyí two-hour tutorials almost daily until the emperor’s marriage in 1922. Far from restricting himself to English, which the emperor never learned to speak well, Johnston took on a broader counselling role, eventually influencing the emperor both to end the eunuch system and to undertake a complete financial overhaul of the Imperial Household Department, both of which were an immense drain on the emperor’s now limited resources.

These reforms were instituted in 1923, but the emperor was arrested the following year by the ‘Christian general’, the warlord Féng Yùxiáng (冯玉祥), who had taken Běijīng in one of several changes of control between 1912 and 1949. See Císhàn Sì.

Johnston engineered a daring escape to the Legation Quarter and lodged the emperor at the Japanese legation, where he stayed until 1925, when he moved to the Japanese concession in Tiānjīn, and then on to the newly-invented state of Manchukuo that the Japanese had set up in Manchuria. He eventually accepted the puppet position of Emperor there.

Johnston’s modern Confucianism made him firmly in favour of constitutional monarchy, and he thought that if the Guāngxù emperor’s reforms had continued, China might have followed Japan in adopting Western institutions and inventions. He had an overly rosy view of Japan’s intentions in Asia, too, imagining that an ever-stronger Japan might restore the Qīng monarchy.

But Pǔyí never returned to live in the Forbidden City, and his collaboration with the Japanese left him lucky to escape with his life after Japan’s defeat at the end of the Second World War.

Return to The Palace Museum or ‘Forbidden City’.

See other Forbidden City stories:
Monumental Mismanagement
The Two Palace Museums
Where are They Now?
A Storm in a Coffee CupThe End of the Emperors
The Last Occupant of the Forbidden City
Pride and a Fall
The Ends of the Eunuchs

Links below to neighbouring sights around the Imperial City and Tiān’ān Mén Square. Or see Main Index to A Better Guide to Běijīng.