How China’s Last Empress Lost Everything and Died in Prison an Opium Addict
Her husband survived the revolution, growing old among his family, but Wanrong was not so lucky
Published in
12 min readApr 24, 2021
When I first saw Bernardo Bertolucci’s film The Last Emperor, I was fascinated, not only by its artistry but by the realization that the story was new to me. Not once in all my years of schooling did I recall learning anything about what happened to China’s Imperial family after the formation of the Republic of China in 1912 and or when the Communists took over in 1949.
The schools I attended focused on American and European history. We kids could find China on a map (How could you miss it?), but that was about it. The story might be new to many other people, too, particularly the part about the life and death of China’s last empress Wanrong.
