Beijing Botanical Gardens

Puyi's final Pastime

In the 1960s, visitors to the Beijing Botanical Gardens would have seen a little old man bent intently over rows of flowerpots and blooming shrubbery. Born six decades earlier a few kilometres southeast near Houhai, the old man was in fact Emperor Puyi, crowned the 12th ruler of the Qing Dynasty by Empress Dowager Cixi when he was aged just two, deposed at the age of six by local warlord Yuan Shikai and later forced to be Japan’s ‘puppet Emperor’ during its occupation of Northern China.

After the wartime collapse of Japan’s Manchurian state the royal became a fugitive exile, passing through the hands of the Nationalists, Japanese, Russians and, finally, back to Communist China in 1950. After being declared ‘officially reformed’ by the Communists in 1959, Puyi was sent to work in the Beijing Botanical Gardens by special permission of Chairman Mao. This new job was supposed to represent his total transformation from (in the words of his autobiography) ‘emperor to citizen’ and stand as an example of the inevitable power of Communist reform. Puyi had discovered a love of gardening when in exile in Russia, so a move to the Botanical Gardens must have come as something of a relief to the former Son of Heaven after so many years of imprisonment and upheaval. The last seven years of his life were spent in relative peace with his fifth wife, hospital janitor Li Shuxian, and his beloved plants. Puyi finally died of cancer in October 1967 aged 61. Sonya Hallett

Beijing Botanical Gardens Xiangshan Nan Lu, Haidian district (take bus 360 or 634 from Xizhimen or 630 or 331 from Wudaokou) (tel 6259 1283). Open 9am-4pm daily. Entry costs 5RMB (extra 20RMB for conservatory).