Emperor’s scion puts Chinese history on show
beijing — His uncle was the last Emperor of China, reigning over the Middle Kingdom from the Forbidden City. Now Jin Yulan scours the antique shops of Communistruled Beijing for trinkets that might once have belonged to his family.
The Qing dynasty ruled over China for 268 years until it was deposed after the 1911 revolution. But interest in the past is growing and when Jin opened an exhibition of his artefacts this week dozens of enthusiasts attended.
A retired teacher dressed in a polo shirt and jacket, Jin says he likes things “with a sense of age, with a kind of culture and history to them”.
“I never knew the life of the court,” he laments. “I can’t say how good life there was or how succulent the food would have been. But I feel a link with my ancestors and this bond will last forever.”
Born in 1948, shortly before Mao Zedong’s Communists took power, Jin has had a life of marked contrast to the Imperial finery of his forebears. During the Cultural Revolution — when Mao’s Red Guards sought to destroy China’s heritage — he was exiled to the countryside of Henan and ended up spending more than 20 years in the central province, only returning to the capital in the 1990s.
“The Red Guards sacked our house and confiscated our belongings,” he said. “They took 90 per cent of what we owned.”
Jin’s uncle Pu Yi was aged two when he took the throne in 1908. Abdicating while still a child in 1912, he later served as Tokyo’s puppet emperor of Manchuria after Japan invaded in the 1930s.
He was arrested by Soviet forces in 1945 and imprisoned by China’s new Communist authorities until 1959.
When he was freed, his AisinGioro clan held a dinner that was “the largest family reunion since the fall of the Qing dynasty”, Jin said. “Pu Yi took my hands, he was very kind. It was the first time that I had seen him. He was wearing the same black cotton clothes that he would have worn in prison — the only thing he had removed was his number.” — AFP