A Visit to Changchun

 

 

I  longed to see the historic sites and relics of China’s  past, and for me, the main focus of the visit to Changchun was  the Imperial Palace, former residence of China’s Last Emperor. Katharine and Ed came with me on an overnight train from Tonghua. I have more to say later about overnight train journeys in China.

You could say that China’s ‘Last Emperor’, the subject of Bertolucci's film of that name, paid a heavy price for his status. Born to privilege and protected from the problems of survival which were a daily challenge for most of his subjects, Puyi was heavily influenced and controlled by his elders throughout his life. His grandmother, for instance, became a legend of ruthless cruelty in China and was rumoured to have poisoned Puyi’s uncle, the reigning Emperor. When was born on February 7, 1906, the Qing Dynasty was already in trouble. An old Chinese saying statesthat it takes three generations for a family to decline, and for the Chinese dynasties the decline into corruption was a steep and spectacular one. Completely helpless and encouraged to be so, Puyi was separated from his mother at an early age, hardly ever saw his father and was brought up surrounded by eunuchs who pandered to his whims. He was manipulated variously   by family elders, a treacherous general, Japanese and Russian invaders and finally by the Communists who took over in 1949. Every decision was made for him, including choice of wives and ‘consorts’.

Within the complex of grey buildings that housed the royal villa, the palace itself was a revelation, being nothing at all like the Forbidden City in Beijing, but a grand-scale 1930’s villa such as might please an old-fashioned curmudgeon from the pages of Evelyn Waugh or John Mortimer. Luxuriously furnished with polished wood furniture, chandeliers and rugs, everything seemed designed for comfort and use rather than to impress.

The residence at Changchun expressed an elegance and convenience that lofty public rooms with gilded furniture and portrait-hung walls never could. Unlike the vast, chilly spaces of the old Imperial palaces with their thrones and screens and costly ornaments, here things were arranged on a more domestic scale, laid out for a man who had much leisure and few official duties.  We looked through doorways and glimpsed waxen figurines representing the debauched Empress on a silk-covered daybed, the Emperor at his desk or in meetings with Japanese officials, flanked by a well-stocked drinks cabinet, and further on a billiard room and a music room with a wind-up gramophone.

Katharine admired the neatness and order of a small suite of Japanese-style rooms, with tatami mats and sliding screens, and wondered aloud how much it would cost to convert a London flat to this cool and uncluttered look. We took  photos in a long conservatory facing the garden, sitting on the parapets of fountains  at either end of the room. Outside we walked around a  tiled swimming pool with and steps leading down,  so recently drained it seemed that one could almost hear the laughter of a poolside cocktail party in a humid  Beijing August afternoon, or the faint echo of racquets striking balls in the a tennis court.

Puyi could never really ‘boomerang’ - his moves were always for political reasons, and he couldn’t return. He never enjoyed any kind of independence, and the sense of a destiny unfulfilled must have stayed with him to the end of his life. Ironically enough his sister lived out her days unrecognised, selling matches on the streets of Tonghua.