The Last Emperor of China: My Husband Puyi

This book is essentially a collection of anecdotes about the last Manchu emperor Puyi by his last wife Li Shuxian. Though it is filled with tempting photographs depicting his life as emperor and later Japanese puppet, the text mainly covers his final years in the 1960s.

It is difficult to gauge how much we are to trust the contents. It is easily apparent that Puyi, and his wife, became important vehicles of Communist propaganda after he was released from Fushun prison and developed ties to Zhou Enlai. She rarely strays from depictions of him as a thoroughly reformed, if scatterbrained, lover of China's new liberation. The only time she contradicts this is in her depiction of him as a daring voice willing to stand up for his friends when they came under attack during the cultural revolution. She offers almost unbelievable stories of his complete inability to perform simple daily tasks. These are difficult to buy since she met him years after his long imprisonment.

The book had enough interesting anecdotes to make a few hours in the airport pass, and it is interesting to find out how much he was coddled by Communist government officials in his final years and used as an ideal reformed citizen of the New China. However, unsurprisingly given the editor and origins of the work, the book seems rather lazily compiled and doesn't try much to explore more critically some of the more issues involved in his life.