China's last emperor cried through his own coronation at age two
On 2 December 1908, a toddler was carried onto the Dragon Throne by his father. Frightened by the crowd and the thunder of ceremonial drums, the new Xuantong Emperor burst into tears while his father whispered that it would soon be over. Decades later Puyi wrote that he had ruined the great ceremony with his crying.
Puyi was born in Beijing in 1906, the son of Prince Chun. Empress Dowager Cixi chose him to succeed his childless uncle, the Guangxu Emperor, and one November evening palace officials arrived without warning to take the screaming two-year-old away. Only his wet nurse, Wang Lianshou, was allowed to go with him. Meeting the ailing Cixi, he threw away the sweets she offered and howled for his nanny. She died less than two days later.
His childhood was lavish and lonely. Grown men knelt as he passed, and no one refused him anything, which by his own later account made him a spoiled and cruel boy. He did not see his mother for seven years, and his beloved nurse was sent away when he was eight. His education covered the Confucian classics and nothing else; he later admitted he learned no mathematics or science and for a long time did not know where Peking was.
Revolution overtook him early. After an army mutiny in Wuhan in 1911 spread across the country, Empress Dowager Longyu signed his abdication in February 1912, ending a dynasty that had ruled since 1644. A deal let him keep his title and live on in the Forbidden City, and a loyalist general briefly restored him for twelve days in 1917. Expelled from the palace in 1924, he moved to Tianjin, and after Japan invaded Manchuria he became ruler, then emperor, of the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo.
When the war ended in 1945, Soviet troops captured him, and he later testified at the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal. Detained as a war criminal, first by the Soviets and then in China, until 1959, he was granted amnesty and presented as a model of reeducation. He published an autobiography, worked as a gardener and later as a researcher, and died in 1967 without children.
Source: Puyi
