Customer Reviews

From Emperor to Citizen: The Autobiography of Aisin-Gioro Pu Yi

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Pu Yi Last Emperor of China, his life, and his death.Considering that the book is a translation I think it was very well written,bringing out the past,the present and what happened to Pu Yi at the end of his life.The book is very easy to read considering that it is an autobiography.It has many black and white pictures. This book encouraged me to trace the life of Pu Yi which I was lucky to do,right before Tianmen Square incident.
I hired a Mandarin taxi driver and ask him to take me around and trace Pu Yi's life from the Forbidden City to his last residence.
I went around and did all that.However I was not allowed to go to the Prisons.It is a military area.
I saw the places in the Forbidden City,the house that he lived in after being reformed.The house were he lived with his wife the nurse.Finally I was allowed to go into the cemetery were his remains are in a very small sinnabar wooden box, with a small oval picture,and his name Pu Yi.He is burried way behind the big shots that came and died after him.You must really look to find him.I was lucky enough to do this,as it so happened that the movie of Bertolucci The Last Emperor of China had come out.In China Chinese people love Italians.So when they asked me are you American I said no Italia.They answered ah Marco Polo.Isn't that funny?
I suggest that you read this book if you are fascinated with the Chinese culture.After all what happened,happened and things cannot change.Our daughter also did a paper in High School about the Last Emperor of China using this book as a guide.I hope that this was useful to you,I enjoyed it very much.

I bought this book at the Forbidden City in Beijing while studying in China. Although the translation is awkward at points, the content is truly eye opening. The story will be familiar to anyone who has seen Bernardo Bertolucci's "The Last Emperor", but the depth to which this autobiographical account takes the reader is far deeper than that of the film. To stand in the Forbidden City and think of the turmoil that was occuring in China at the time of the author, Pu Yi, is truly amazing. I hope that anyone looking to understand the history of China at the turn of the century will try to find this book.

I bought this book when I was in Holiday in Malaysia. I have always been fascinated by Pu Yi. How he felt being on the dragon throne and falling from the greatest height and living through it and reforming is such a fantastic story.

I think his story is fair portrayal of his life though in the ending it was a bit tinted to glorify the communist party. But overall it gave a good assessment of his life, his pains, his cowardice and most of all his reformation to a citizen.

You could almost feel his anguish as he was writing it.

I would highly recommend this book as I could not put it down since I bought it.

The autobiography of the 12th Manchu emperor of China is in every aspect astonishing and remarkable.
It gives a rare insight into the lives and mentalities of the inhabitants of the Forbidden City from the emperor to the lowest class of his `staff' (the pages). The Forbidden City was not less than a prison for everyone and in the first place for the emperor himself, despite his absolutist power. He was all the time surrounded and spied upon by members of his clan, by councilors, by eunuchs and by foot folk. The Forbidden City was a den of poisonous vipers, which intrigued, schemed and conspired to keep their privileges and to save their lives at the cost of their enemies. Very few inhabitants could be trusted in this violent power struggle full of `mysterious' deaths.

The emperor himself was a cruel, maniacal, sadistic, superstitious, vicious, suspicious, unstable madman. `Frankly speaking, I didn't know what love was, to me wife and concubines were both the slaves and the tools of their master.'

But the Chinese people still wanted a stable and strong central power, being sick of the disasters inflicted by warlordism.

After being dethroned, the emperor's main objective was the restoration of his imperial powers. He even chose to become a Japanese puppet ruler in `Manchukuo': `I shamelessly became a leading traitor and the cover for a sanguinary regime which turned a large part of my country into a colony.'
When the communists conquered mainland China, they didn't kill the emperor, but tried to remold him into a normal citizen. They arrived at turning him into a real `human' being.

Henry Pu Yi wrote an amazingly candid autobiography, showing the abysmal `human' corruption of absolute power.
It is a must read for all Chinese scholars and for all those who want to understand who and what we are.

I would definetly recommend this book. I did wish that it spoke more of his days in the Forbidden City, though I enjoyed reading about his "remoulding" and how he came to see the errors of his ways. It was hard for me to keep the Chinese names straight, but that might have more to do with me than the book itself.

A great first person account from the Last Emperor of China. I think it is a moving personal narrative of the growth of a man but it also sheds light on the problems and horrors of the late Qing dynasty which facilitated the rise in Communism in China. One of the things I found fascinating was he personal acknowledgement of his faults and a deep introspective. I was left to wonder about what might have been if this man had been caught by the Russians or the Europeans. His Chinese war criminal trial was a joke by the standard of those for the Nazis. Let it seemed for him, the lack of rule of law allowed him time for this personal reform. The book was defiantly food for thought.

Pu Yi, the last emperor of China, writes a fine autobiography providing insights and commentary as to his life inside and eventually outside of the Imperial Palace, known as the "Forbidden City." He is frank and seemingly honest about what went on inside of the palace and how he felt about his peculiar situation: being an Emperor in a new Republic and then an abdicated Emperor aligned with the Japanese in Manchuria and finally, a prisoner of the People's 'new China' under Chairman Mao. One should read this book for a candid and straight forward look into the tragic personal life of Pu Yi and the history of the Ching dynasty and its last hereditary leader.

From Emperor to Citizen is the autobiography of the last emperor of China, Pu Yi. He was emperor as a young child during the early 1900s, and later served as a puppet emperor (among other titles) of the Japanese run Manchukuo during the 1930s-40s.

His story is broken into two volumes. The first volume covers the period from before Pu Yi's birth (primarily about the imperial family) up until the period of the Japanese Manchukuo. The second volume covers the Japanese Manchukuo period through the early Communist years. The book was written while Pu Yi lived under the Chinese Communist government, and also published under the same government. The customary Communist slant (misinformation) on historical events and persons is presented throughout the book.

Both volumes contain several pages of pictures. Some of the pictures could have been better labeled. But it is always nice to have pictures to connect the people mentioned with a face.

The book starts out reporting some information about the years/players prior to Pu Yi's birth and his early childhood. It reads more like stale gossip than actual careful historical reporting/analysis or first-hand knowledge, bringing the accuracy into question. Either the book was poorly written to begin with or the translation of the volumes into English did not result in the finest writing style. This, added to the mostly uninteresting information presented, made the first volume a slow read. But it does have a few interesting tidbits. For example, it was amusing to read the action taken by the 15 year old emperor when he had his first phone installed in the Mind Nurture Palace, and promptly "rang up a Peking opera actor and an acrobat and hung up before saying who he was", and then called up a restaurant and "ordered a meal to be sent round to a false address". Who would expect this from the Lord of 10,000 Years, aka the Son of Heaven?

Other comments left me befuddled - such as when Pu Yi tells how Chang Yuan-fu, the chief eunuch of the empress dowager Lung Yu, lived in a magnificent mansion....with several concubines. A eunuch with several concubines?? Hmmmmmmm.

The second volume is a little more interesting. Pu Yi relates how he was used by the Japanese in the Manchukuo government. This information provides some small insight into how the Japanese operated to control the Chinese people, and continue to expand their realm. Pu Yi does mention a few of the Japanese atrocities, but goes surprisingly light on them. And not so surprising, he continuously sings the praises of communism. He does not mention any of the millions of people who were murdered one way or another by the Communist regime. The way Pu Yi presents life under Mao Tse-tung makes it sound something like Mr. Roger's neighborhood.

Throughout the book, Pu Yi reveals many of his own human failings. He is more frank about a few things than might be expected for someone of his renown. He readily reveals that he was extremely self-centered, arrogant, without empathy, cruel and melodramatic. He also gives the impression of being none too bright. At times he comes across as mentally disturbed. After about 10 years undergoing the very creepy Communist "remolding", Pu Yi stated that he now realized that he was not some superior being. But did he realize that he, his family, and his close associates were treated much better than the poor saps who were not famous faces/names for the Communist propaganda?

Pu Yi could not control who his ancestors were and the form of government they chose. But he did choose to victimize countless numbers of people in a variety of ways, and then to serve as a poster boy for Communist propaganda.

This autobiography would have been a better read if it had been better written, better edited, and had it omitted the Communist misinformation. Since so much of the information is blatant propaganda, it puts much of the information presented into question.

A good book, a bit monotone, maybe, but gives reliable resources on Pu-Yi. Just the thing for a school report, but not for enjoyment (I didn't think so). Note that the book was published in 1987, when Russia was still under Soviet control.

The first half of the book is interesting in that it gives some sense of the way an emperor lived and was influenced by his court and provides a description of historic events by the eyewitness. However, the second part of the book can only be read with a smile by anyone, like myself, who lived in the Soviet Union.