Remembering China’s last emperor
On a sunny day in 1960 in the Beijing Botanical Garden, a bespectacled man in a Mao jacket nurtured a small bed of flowers. Many had forgotten that this gardener had once been responsible for more than just a patch of land. This workman, commonly known as Puyi, had once owned the entire empire.To get more news about
empress wanrong, you can visit shine news official website.
Born in 1906, the last Chinese emperor, Aisin Gioro Puyi, started his reign when he was only two. He was chosen to be the emperor by Empress Dowager Cixi. Throughout his tumultuous life, Puyi was crowned and deposed three times.In 1950, after the Chinese Communist Party came to power under Mao Zedong , he was imprisoned as a war criminal for betraying his country during the second world war. He spent his life at a prison cell in Fushun for almost a decade until being pardoned in 1959. The last monarch was then appointed as a gardener and lived his life as an ordinary citizen until he passed away in 1967.
To mark the 50th anniversary of Puyi’s death, we browsed through the archives of the Palace Museum – the place where Puyi had once called home – to find some of Puyi’s possessions. The relics reflect the imperial life of the last Chinese emperor, and the fading glory of the Qing dynasty. After Puyi became a regular citizen, he too had to buy a ticket to enter his old home.
In 1919, Scottish diplomat Reginald Johnston was appointed as tutor to 13-year-old Puyi. He insisted on taking the short-sighted Puyi to an optometrist, despite the objection of the former imperial concubines, who thought it was a violation of tradition for the Dragon Emperor to wear glasses.
The above picture shows a pair of Puyi’s eyeglasses collected by the Palace Museum. The pair had oval-shaped lenses with a 14ct gold metal frame and was made by an optical company named Jing Yi. The arms were flexible and could be tweaked to fit the wearer’s head.
Author and curator, Sally Yu Leung will explore the origins and modern-day interpretation of the qipao (Mandarin gown/cheongsam) through the Last Empress Wanrong.
In spite of being an opium addict and the scandal that surrounded her marriage to Emperor Puyi, Empress Wanrong was known for both her modernity and her unerring sense of style in a qipao. She had a star quality about her that few people at the time naturally possessed. Since her death at the age of thirty-nine, Empress Wanrong's style can still wow a generation of women today in the twenty-first century.
Sally Yu Leung is an independent lecturer, author and curator of Chinese decorative arts. From 1983 - 2000, she was a board member of the Chinese American International School. Since 2001, she has also assumed the role of Chinese culture and calligraphy instructor for Pixar Animation Studios. She is the consultant and chief designer of the Interior Cultural Enhancement Project for the International School of Beijing at Shunyi, China. In 2005, she was the recipient of the Woman Warrior Award in the Arts. From 1999 - 2009, she served as a commissioner for the Asian Art Museum, San Francisco. In June 2012, she was listed in the Chinese Ministry of Culture's Ha
