4 OCTOBER 1963, Page 22

Peripeteia of a Puppet

A Dream of Tartary : The Origins and Misfor- tunes of Henry P'u Yi. By Henry McAleavy. (Allen and Unwin, 30s.) THE subject of this interesting study was wear- ing spats and a frock-coat when he granted me an audience almost exactly thirty years ago; he was shortly to be proclaimed Emperor of Manchukuo, the Japanese puppet-state to which at that time only the Republic of El Salvador —and she, I believe, inadvertently—had ac- corded diplomatic recognition. P'u Yi was then twenty-nine, but it was his third tour of duty as Emperor. placed on the Dragon Throne in 1908 by the Empress Dowager (who immediately afterwards succumbed to a surfeit of cream and crab-apples), the last representative of the Manchu dynasty, after being forced by republi- can pressures to abdicate in 1912, was briefly and precariously reinstated five years later before withdrawing, on a lavish pension, from public life to the Japanese Concession in Tientsin.

His reign—if the word can be applied to the functions of an impotent and unimpressive figure- head—in Manchukuo was brought brusquely to an end when the Russians overran the territory at the end of the Second World War. They took him away to the Soviet Union and kept him there, under reasonable conditions, for five years; in 1946 he was flown to Tokyo to give evidence (which he did with unbecoming relish) against those of his former patrons who were being tried as war criminals. In 1950, to his acute alarm, the Russians returned him to China, where, after nine years of corrective detention, he was released and is now thought to be em- ployed in a government cultural bureau in Peking. He no longer, of course, wears spats.

Relying largely on Chinese and Japanese sources, Mr. McAleavy has reconstructed the extraordinary career of (unfortunately for his readers) a very negative individual. The oppres- _sive flummery of court etiquette in the Forbidden City gave P'u Yi, admittedly, a bad start in life: but no worse than it had given, for nearly three centuries, to his medecessors on the Dragon Throne, and none of them, in later life, achieved such all-round insignificance. As a small boy the Emperor was discouraged from physical exertion; this is what happened if he proposed a stroll:

A battalion of eunuchs was drawn up with the Emperor in the middle, and at a given signal moved off into the courtyard. Two went in front, uttering a high-pitched yell to warn loiterers to get out of the way. Some of their

colleagues bore a sedan-chair, in case the sovereign should be overcome by fatigue. Others carried boxes of fruit. . . . Extra clothing was taken to ward off any chill. Finally, in case the unaccustomed exercise should provoke the Son of Heaven into a desire to do what nobody else could do for him, a chamber-pot closed the order of march.

A less enervating regime was instituted when Sir Reginald Johnston, a forthright Scottish .

bachelor, was seconded from the Colonial Office to become P'u Yi's tutor. The Emperor learned to ride a bicycle, studied English instead of the prescribed but useless Manchu, got spectacles for his myopiC eyes and, finally, cut off his pigtail. Today Johnston (to whom, incidentally, Mr. McAlcavy is less than fair) is portrayed in Chinese history-books as a sinister agent of

British foreign policy; in fact, he was a benevo- lent, single-minded man who under conditions of great difficulty did all he could for his graceless pupil and was genuinely fond of him. In China, where nothing is quite the same as it is in other parts of the world, even historical truth wears an unfamiliar guise. To many of its sources the fairy-tale and the gossip-column seem to have made important contributions, and we often have the feeling that what we are told is not so much the facts as a fable based on the most striking of them. Mr. McAleavy, as his two previous books showed, has a marked talent for interpreting the annals of the Treaty Port era, and A Dream of Tartary is full of fascinat- ing sidelights and digressions. It is really a scrap- book; it throws, for instance, almost no new light on P'u Yi's relations with the Japanese in Manchuria during the twelve years of his 'reign' (the sort of thing which serious students of the period would want to know about), but it amasses a miscellany of backstairs gossip, news- paper stories and faits divers which more re- spectable historians' would, to the disadvantage of their readers, overlook. It is an original book, with a tart, slightly salacious flavour. P'u Yi's progress from the pigtail via the frock-coat to the boiler-suit is a story which no one interested in modern China ought to miss.

PETER FLEMING