Floating lightly on History's stream

Waimarino Bulletin, Issue 3, 5 August 1988, Page 27

Floating lightly on History's stream

Bernado Bertotucci's "The Last Emperor" is the winner of four Golden Globes including best picture, was the Royal Command Performance film for 1988 and has been hailed as the motion picture event of the year. Pu Yi, the last Chi-

nese Emperor, ascends the throne at the age of three at the command of Tzu Hsi, the famous dowager Empress of the Boxer rebellion and dies in 1967 at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution. As a child he grows up playing at "Emperors" until the moment he discovers

that it is not just a game. He really IS an Emperor. As Emperor though, Pu Yi is merely the lead actor in an elaborate play in which he is the symbol of power, a figurehead unable to exercise any real power at all. The Empire now had become a mere spectacle and the Forbidden City has been transmitted into a fascinating stage crowded with eunuchs, concubines and dignitaries, all obstinately determined to ignore the reality, the reality being

that the audience, the Chinese people, have abandoned the theatre. Pu Yi's life embraces the whole century: from the end of the Ching Dynasty to the first Republic of Sun Yat Sen; from the Warlords to the Kumintang of Chiang Kai-Shek, from the Long March to the state of Manchukuo in

which Pu Yi becomes a puppet-emperor manipulated by the Japanese; from Stalin's prisons to Mao's re-education programmes. Eventually the Emperor becomes a citizen like everyone else. After the empty spaces of the Forbidden City he finds himself amongst the vast ocean of humanity, one of the hundreds of thousands of Chinese listening to Mao's speeches in Tien An Men Square. The story of Pu Yi is the story of "the tribulations of a Chinese in

China": child tyrant, Confucian - English gentleman, puppet o f the Japanese, war criminal, great repenter and finally, head gardener at Pekings' Botanical Gardens. Pu Yi is an oriental Peter Pan capable of the most unpredictable metamorphoses, floating so lightly on the stream of history that he never sinks.