Empress Cixi Ruled China for 47 Years. What Happened to Her Heirs?

The Hall of Supreme Harmony December 2, 1908 A two-year-old boy named Puyi is carried up the steps of the Dragon Throne in the arms of his father, Prince Chun. The child is screaming. He has been screaming since the eunuchs took him from his home two weeks earlier, and he has not stopped. His father holds him on the vast golden seat while two thousand courtiers perform the ritual prostration below, and the boy thrashes and howls through every second of it. Prince Chun, desperate, leans close to his son's ear and whispers the only words he can think of. Don't cry. It'll be over soon. The courtiers hear him. They remember. Later they will say the Prince Regent prophesied the fall of the dynasty in the very moment of its last enthronement. It would be over in three years. Seventeen days before this ceremony. In the Hall of Graceful Bird at Zhongnanhai, the woman who arranged all of it was still alive. Empress Dowager Cixi was seventy-two years old. She had controlled the government of China for forty-seven years, longer than Queen Victoria sat on her throne, longer than most of her four hundred million subjects had been alive. She had ruled through three emperors. She had outlasted every rival, every reform movement, every foreign invasion, and every member of her own family who had tried to govern without her permission. Now she was dying of dysentery, and she had one final act of power to perform. On the afternoon of November the 14th, 1908, the Guangxu Emperor died in his island prison at Zhongnanhai. He was thirty-seven years old. He had been Cixi's captive for a decade. A century later, forensic scientists would confirm what the court already whispered. He had been poisoned with a single massive dose of arsenic. The timing was not coincidental. Cixi, who knew she was dying, could not allow the nephew she had caged to survive her and undo everything she had built. That same evening, with one emperor dead and the dynasty's future hanging on her next words, Cixi summoned the infant Puyi's father to her bedside and made her decision. Eunuchs and guardsmen crossed Beijing to the Prince Chun mansion. They took the two-year-old from his wet nurse. The boy screamed the entire journey to the palace. Brought before Cixi, he saw what he would later describe as an emaciated and terrifying hideous face. And he wailed until a eunuch produced a string of sugar candy to quiet him. Cixi died the next afternoon, November the 15th, 1908 at approximately three in the afternoon. Her final documented words, recorded in the Qing palace archives, were an instruction she had violated every day of her life. Never again allow any woman to hold supreme power in the state. It is against the house law of our dynasty and should be strictly forbidden. She had chosen three emperors. Her biological son, Tongzhi, died at eighteen. Her nephew, Guangxu, was dead at thirty-seven, poisoned on her orders the day before her own death. The toddler she placed on the dragon throne would live long enough to be confused by bus fare. He would be emperor, then exile, then puppet, then war criminal, then prisoner, then gardener, then a tourist in his own palace. He would marry five women and father no children. The dynasty of the Aisin Gioro, which had ruled China for 268 years across twelve emperors and four hundred million subjects, would dissolve into ordinary citizenship within a single lifetime. Today, the nominal head of that bloodline is an 83-year-old retired civil servant in Beijing named Jin Yuzhang. He asks people to call him by his surname. This is what happened to every heir empress Cixi ever chose. To understand what Cixi destroyed, it is necessary to understand what the Qing dynasty was. The Aisin Gioro clan came from Manchuria. They were not Chinese. They were Jurchen horsemen from beyond the Great Wall who conquered the Ming dynasty in 1644 and established a foreign military occupation that lasted 268 years. At its peak, the Qing Empire governed roughly 400 million people across 13 million square kilometers of territory, from the Pacific coast to the deserts of Central Asia, from the frozen Amur River to the jungles of Indochina's border. Twelve emperors sat on the dragon throne before Cixi's intervention, and the dynasty had survived the Taiping Rebellion, the deadliest civil war in human history, which killed an estimated 20 to 30 million people between 1850 and 1864. The Qing had been weakened. They had not been broken. That required Cixi. She was born on November 29, 1835, to a Manchu family of modest rank. She entered the Forbidden City as a concubine of the fifth rank, the lowest tier of imperial consorts, assigned to the Xianfeng Emperor. On her elevation began on April 27, 1856, when she gave birth to the Emperor's only surviving son, Zaichun. In the hierarchy of the Forbidden City, a son was currency, and Cixi had produced the only coin in circulation. When the Xianfeng Emperor died on August 22, 1861, fleeing the aftermath of the Second Opium War at his summer palace in Chengde, he appointed eight regents to govern on behalf of the five-year-old Zaichun. Cixi moved within weeks. She allied with Prince Gong, the late Emperor's half-brother, and launched what became known as the Xinyu coup. The eight regents were arrested. The lead regent, Sushun, was dragged to the execution ground at Kaishiku and beheaded. Then two others were presented with strips of white silk and permitted to hang themselves, a courtesy reserved for men of rank. On November 12, 1861, an imperial edict declared that all state matters would henceforth be decided by the two empresses Dowager, Qian, the late Emperor's primary wife, and Cixi. The arrangement that followed was unique in the dynasty's history. In the eastern chamber of warmth inside the Hall of Mental Cultivation, two thrones were placed side by side, separated from the minister's audience by a yellow silk curtain. The child emperor sat in front. Cixi sat behind. She listened to every report, dictated every response, approved every appointment. The Chinese called it chui lian teng zheng, ruling behind the curtain. It was meant to be temporary. It lasted forty-seven years, but every potential rival was removed with the same precision. Co-regent Qian died suddenly in 1881, under circumstances that remain debated. Cixi's critics have long suspected poison, though no evidence has been found. Prince Gong, the man who had helped Cixi seize power, was dismissed from all his posts in 1884 when his influence grew threatening. The curtain remained. The voice behind it did not change. And the woman behind the curtain now controlled the fate of every heir she would place on the throne, starting with the son she had already begun to destroy. Tongzhi was Cixi's only biological child, and her first instrument of power. Born Zaichun on April 27, 1856, he ascended the throne at age five and spent his entire childhood as his mother's justification for governing. The regency was formally terminated on February 23, 1873, when the sixteen-year-old emperor assumed personal rule. His independence lasted twenty-three months. The marriage revealed everything. Cixi wanted a pliable bride she could control. Co-regent Qian favoured a young woman named Alute, daughter of Chongzhi, a Mongol nobleman who held the distinction of being the only Mongol in Qing history to achieve first place in the imperial examinations. Tongzhi chose Alute, he married her on October 16, 1872, and Cixi never forgave either of them. Court records suggest she interfered relentlessly in the marriage, restricting the young couple's time together, criticising Alute's conduct, and reportedly directing Tongzhi's attention toward his secondary consort instead. Officials close to the court recorded that Cixi complained openly. We made a mistake in selecting a wife for him. Tongzhi died on January 12, 1875. He was eighteen years old. The official imperial medical records list the cause of death as smallpox, and the records are detailed, daily entries tracking the progression of lesions across his body. The alternative theory persists, that Tongzhi contracted syphilis during visits to brothels outside the Forbidden City—visits that some sources claim were encouraged by eunuchs loyal to Cixi to weaken her son's authority and keep him dependent. The Diary of Weng Tonga, Tongzhi's tutor, contains veiled references to the emperor's nocturnal excursions. Most modern historians favour the smallpox diagnosis—the disease killed quickly. Syphilis would have taken years. Tongzhi's decline was acute. What followed was worse. Empress Alute died on March 27, 1875, 74 days after her husband. The circumstances remain among the darkest in Qing court history. Contemporary accounts differ. Some say she swallowed gold, others that she took opium, others that she simply stopped eating as an act of marital devotion. Several accounts state she was pregnant at the time of her death. A surviving heir would have threatened Cixi's plans for succession because a son of Tongzhi would have a stronger claim to the throne than anyone Cixi could hand-pick. Whether Cixi pressured Alute into suicide, or merely created the conditions in which suicide became the only dignified option, is a question the historical record does not resolve. The result is the same. Eritongzhi's line ended completely. His wife, his potential child, and any future claim on the throne—all of it gone within 74 days. Cixi was now free to choose her next emperor without constraint. She had learned something from her son's brief rebellion. This time, she would select someone younger, more dependent, and bound to her by blood from both sides. The selection violated dynastic law, and everyone in the court knew it. Under Qing custom, each new emperor should come from the generation below his predecessor—a symbolic son, even if adopted. Cixi ignored this. She reached sideways, into Tongzhi's own generation, and chose Zetian—a boy who was simultaneously her nephew by blood, and the late Xianfeng Emperor's nephew by clan. He was three years old. He was the son of Prince Chun, and Cixi's own younger sister, which meant Cixi was both his aunt by blood and his adoptive mother by dynastic convention. The arrangement guaranteed that no one would perform ancestral rites for the dead Tongzhi, an omission that horrified Confucian officials. One censor, Wu Qedu, protested the decision by swallowing poison on the steps of the palace. Cixi noted his objection and proceeded. The boy was installed as the Guangxu Emperor. His regency under Cixi lasted until 1889, when he formally assumed personal authority at seventeen. But the assumption was ceremonial. Cixi had retired to the Summer Palace, the vast lakeside compound she had rebuilt at a cost of thirty million tales of silver. Funds diverted, according to her critics, from the modernization of the Chinese navy. She continued to receive ministers. She continued to approve appointments. And the curtain had moved, but the voice behind it had not. The rupture came in the summer of 1898. China had been humiliated in the First Sino-Japanese War of 1894-95, forced to cede Taiwan, recognize Korean independence, and pay an indemnity of 200 million tales. Guangxu, now twenty-six, was desperate to modernize. Beginning June 11, 1898, he issued a torrent of reform edicts. Over forty in one hundred and three days. He ordered the establishment of Peking University, abolished the ancient eight-legged essay examination, proposed elected advisory assemblies, restructured the military, and encouraged the development of agriculture, industry, and commerce. His advisers, the reformers Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao, had believed the window for change was closing and grew reckless. They approached General Yuan Shikai with a plot to surround the Summer Palace, neutralize Cixi's loyalist commander Ronglu, and place Cixi under permanent house arrest. Yuan Shikai listened. Then he went to Ronglu and told him everything. On September 21, 1898, Cixi returned to the Forbidden City and ended the hundred days' reform in a single morning. Six of Guangxu's reform advisers, known afterward as the Six Gentlemen of Wushu, were arrested and beheaded at the Kaishiku execution ground without trial. Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao fled into foreign exile. Guangxu was confined to Yingtai Pavilion, a small palace built on an island in the lake at Zhongnanhai, accessible only by a single guarded causeway. And he would remain there for the final decade of his life. During the Boxer Rebellion of 1900, as Cixi fled Beijing ahead of the Eight-Nation Expeditionary Force, she reportedly ordered the drowning of Guangxu's beloved Pearl Concubine. The young woman was thrown down a well in the northeastern corner of the Forbidden City. Guangxu, forced to accompany Cixi on the flight to Xi'an, could do nothing. He is recorded as having told others his private conclusion about his situation. If she refuses to delegate power to me, I shall abandon my throne. I do not want to be emperor of a conquered nation. He never abandoned it. He never regained it. He sat on the island for ten years, increasingly frail, cut off from the court, watching the empire decline from behind guarded walls. He died on November the 14th, 1908, at approximately 6.33 in the evening. He was 37. For a hundred years the timing, one day before Cixi's own death, generated suspicion, but no proof. Then proof arrived. In 2003, Chinese authorities opened Guangxu's tomb at the Western Qing tombs and began a five-year forensic study conducted jointly by the China Institute of Atomic Energy, the Beijing Municipal Public Security Bureau, and the tomb's administrative office. Scientists tested hair, bone fragments, and the clothing in which the emperor had been buried. The results, announced on November the 4th, 2008, were unambiguous. Guangxu's hair contained arsenic at concentrations 2,404 times higher than normal background levels. The arsenic in his remains was 261 times higher than levels found in his wife, Empress Longyu, buried in the same tomb. The clothing draped over his stomach showed far higher arsenic concentrations than the clothing on his limbs, consistent with a single, large oral dose that was absorbed through the abdominal organs. The total arsenic recovered from his remains was approximately 201.5 milligrams. A lethal dose of arsenic ranges from 60 to 200 milligrams. The pattern ruled out chronic exposure through traditional Chinese medicines. The conclusion was definitive. Guangxu died of acute arsenic poisoning. An oral account passed through the family of Pu Liang, a Qing minister of rights, describes the sequence. On the morning of November the 14th, the eunuch Li Lianying, Cixi's most trusted personal servant, was seen leaving the Empress Dowager's chambers carrying a bowl of yogurt intended for the emperor's morning meal. Two hours later, the emperor's condition deteriorated catastrophically. By evening, he was dead. Cixi had ensured that the nephew she caged would not survive her to reverse a single decision she had ever made. He was the second heir she chose. He was the second she destroyed. A century after the crime, scientists confirmed what the court already suspected. I'm curious. Did you know this case was only solved in 2008? Let me know in the comments. Cixi died on November the 15th, 1908. The toddler she placed on the throne was two years and nine months old. His father, Zhaifeng, served as prince regent. But the dynasty had entered its terminal crisis. Three years separated the enthronement from the revolution. The end began with an accident. On the night of October the 9th, 1911, in the Russian concession of Hankou, a bomb being assembled by revolutionary conspirators detonated prematurely. The explosion drew police. A search of the premises uncovered membership lists, seals, banners, and plans for an uprising. The conspirators' identities were now known. They had two choices. Flee or fight. At approximately seven in the evening on October the 10th, soldiers of the 8th Engineering Battalion of the new army garrison at Wuchang mutinied. They seized the provincial armory and the ammunition depot. By morning, they held the city. Within six weeks, a eighteen of China's twenty-four provinces declared independence from the Qing court. Sun Yat-sen, the revolutionary leader, learned of the uprising from a newspaper. He was in Denver, Colorado at the time, fundraising among overseas Chinese. He was inaugurated as provisional president of the Republic of China on January the 1st, 1912, in Nanjing. But the real power lay elsewhere. Yuan Shikai, the same general who had betrayed Guangxu's reformers in 1898, controlled the Beiyang Army, the only modern military force in northern China. The court recalled him from retirement in desperation. Yuan played both sides with practiced skill. He told the dynasty that only he could negotiate a peaceful settlement. He told the Republicans that only he could deliver the emperor's abdication. Both sides needed him. He extracted his price from each. On February the 12th, 1912, Empress Dowager Longyu, Guangxu's widow, Cixi's niece, endorsed the abdication edict on behalf of the six-year-old Puyi. The language was carefully constructed. The whole country is tending towards a Republican form of government. It is the will of heaven, and we should not resist the views of millions for the glory of one family. We, the emperor, hand over the sovereignty to the people. The word abdication never appeared in the document. In exchange, the Republic signed the Articles of Favorable Treatment. The terms appeared generous. The emperor would retain his title and be treated by the Republic with the courtesy due to a foreign monarch. He would receive an annual subsidy of four million silver tails. He would continue to reside in the Forbidden City. His private property would receive the special protection of the state. He would maintain his existing guard force. His ancestral temples and tombs would be maintained and guarded at public expense. Nearly every promise was broken. The annual subsidy was reduced, delayed, and eventually stopped entirely. The Republic's political chaos—warlordism, rival governments, civil war—meant no authority existed to enforce the agreement. The Forbidden City became an island of imperial ceremony surrounded by a Republic that had no use for it. The final breach came on November 5, 1924. The warlord Feng Yuxiang, who had seized Beijing in a coup, sent Republican soldiers to the Forbidden City with an ultimatum. The imperial household had three hours to leave. Ampuyi was eating an apple at nine in the morning when the order arrived. By the afternoon he was gone. He departed in a fleet of automobiles—first to his father's estate, then to the Japanese legation, and finally to the Japanese concession in Tianjin. He was eighteen years old. He had lived his entire life inside the walls of a palace that now belonged to someone else. He took with him a collection of jewels, scrolls, and paintings that he and his courtiers had been systematically smuggling out for years, selling them to fund a household the Republic refused to support. The Articles of Favorable Treatment, which had purchased the peaceful end of 268 years of imperial rule, lasted twelve years. Every clause was eventually violated. The emperor who had been promised the courtesies of a foreign sovereign was expelled from his home with less notice than a tenant receives from a landlord. In Tianjin, Puyi lived in the Japanese concession for seven years, surrounded by loyalist courtiers, Japanese intelligence officers, and his own delusions of restoration. The Japanese cultivated him carefully—they did not need to work hard. Puyi wanted what they were offering—a throne, even a puppet one. On September 18, 1931, the Japanese manufactured the Mukden Incident, a staged explosion on the South Manchuria Railway, and used it as a pretext to invade and occupy Manchuria. Japanese intelligence officer Kenji Doihara travelled to Tianjin and smuggled Puyi out in the trunk of a car, spiriting him north. On March 1, 1932, the Japanese installed him as chief executive of Manchukuo, their newly-fabricated state carved from the three northeastern provinces of China. Two years later, on March 1, 1934, they crowned him Emperor Kangde in a ceremony designed to legitimise the occupation. The reality was absolute Japanese control. Puyi's liaison officer, Colonel Yoshioka Yasunori, attended every meeting, reviewed every document, and dictated every public statement. Puyi described the arrangement in a metaphor that contained no ambiguity. If one compares the Kwantung Army to a source of high-tension electric current and myself to an electric motor, then Yoshioka was a wire of high conductivity. His father, Zhai Feng, visited Manchukuo once, in 1934. He confirmed his worst fears. I told his son he was an idiot for trusting the Japanese, and returned to Beijing. They never discussed it again. Manchukuo collapsed in August 1945 with the Soviet invasion of Manchuria. Puyi attempted to flee to Japan. On approximately August 19, Soviet paratroopers landed at the Mukden airfield and captured him as he waited for an evacuation flight. He spent five years in Soviet detention at facilities in Chita and Khabarovsk, living in relative comfort. Stalin had ordered he be treated well, likely preserving him as a political card to play against the Chinese communists. In August 1946, Puyi was brought to Tokyo to testify at the International Military Tribunal for the Far East. He spent approximately eight days on the witness stand. Observers described him as fearful, evasive, and shifty. Chassa he blamed the Japanese for everything, and accepted no personal responsibility. He testified that his wife Tan Yuling had been murdered by a Japanese doctor. The tribunal recorded his testimony, and moved on. In mid-1950, the Soviets transferred Puyi to Chinese communist custody. He was assigned prisoner number 981 at the Fushun War Criminals What followed was the most complete personal transformation in the story. For approximately nine years, the man who had been carried to the Dragon Throne and dressed by eunuchs every morning of his life was subjected to Marxist-Leninist study sessions, self-criticism meetings, manual labor, and the acquisition of basic human skills he had never learned. He could not brush his own teeth. He could not tie his own shoelaces. He could not dress himself. He had never boiled water. The re-education program required him to learn all of it, and to understand why he had never needed to before. He was released with a special pardon on December 4, 1959. He was 53 years old. His first job was as a gardener at the Beijing Botanical Garden, tending plants in a greenhouse. He was later assigned to the Literary and Historical Research Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference, where he worked as a researcher and editor. He was, by all accounts, astonishingly inept at ordinary life. He once let every woman board a city bus ahead of him, including the conductor, and the bus departed without him. He had never used money, and stood bewildered in front of shop counters. He described his own experience with a phrase that became the title of his autobiography. He said he was learning how to become a human being. Puyi married five times. He produced no biological children. His brother Puyi later told biographer Edward Baer that the former emperor was found to be biologically incapable of reproduction. The direct imperial line—the succession chain Cixi had engineered from her deathbed—ended with him. His first wife was Gobolo Wanrong, known to Westerners as Elizabeth. They married on December 1, 1922, in the last grand imperial wedding the Forbidden City ever hosted. She was seventeen. She was beautiful, educated, and spoke English. Puyi never consummated the marriage. Inside the Forbidden City, and later in Tianjin and Manchukuo, Wanrong's isolation was total. Puyi ignored her, and the Japanese surveilled her. She began smoking opium in the early 1930s, and by the end of the decade she was severely addicted. Lonely and desperate, she had an affair with a palace guard. She became pregnant. When the daughter was born, the baby was killed. Accounts differ on the exact method, but multiple sources state the infant was thrown into a furnace on Puyi's orders. When Manchukuo fell in August 1945, Puyi fled by airplane without her. She was captured by Chinese communist guerrillas and imprisoned in Yanji, Jilin Province. She died on June 20, 1946, at the age of 39, of malnutrition, opium withdrawal, and neglect. Prison guards wrapped her body in a straw mat and buried it in the mountains outside the town. Her grave has never been found. His second wife was Wengxiu. Born Erdet Wengxiu, a secondary consort chosen for him in the same year as his marriage to Wenrong. She was 13 at the time of the wedding. Puyi largely ignored her too. In 1931, Wengxiu did something no imperial consort had ever done in Chinese history. She sued for divorce. She hired a lawyer, filed papers in a Tianjin court, and on October 22, 1931, the divorce was granted. The press called it the Consort's Revolution. She received 55,000 yuan in alimony and a set of conditions. She could never remarry and could never work as a concubine. Her later life was marked by poverty. She worked as a primary school teacher and reportedly sold cigarettes on the street to supplement her income. She died of a heart attack on September 17, 1953. By age 44, she was buried in a pauper's grave. His third wife was Tan Yuling. He married her in 1937 in Manchukuo, and by all accounts she was the only wife he genuinely loved. She was 16 at the time of the marriage. She died on August 14, 1942, at the age of 22. The circumstances were suspicious in the extreme. She had fallen ill, and a Japanese doctor named Yoshioka—reportedly no relation to the liaison officer—treated her. Before administering an injection, the doctor spent three hours in private conference with Japanese military officials. After the injection, Tan Yuling's condition deteriorated rapidly, and she died. Puyi believed to the end of his life that the Japanese had murdered her to prevent him from producing an heir outside their control. He kept a photograph of her inscribed with the words My Dearest Yuling and a lock of her hair until the day he died. His fourth wife was Li Yukin, a girl of 15 when she was married to him in 1943, essentially selected for him by the Japanese. She divorced him in May of 1957 while he was still in Fushun prison. She remarried, had two sons, and lived a quiet life until her death on April 24, 2001, at the age of 72. His fifth and final wife was Li Shuxian, a nurse and hospital worker. They were introduced through colleagues at the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference with the personal approval of Premier Zhou Enlai. They married on April 30, 1962. There were no children. She was by his side during his final years as a common citizen. Puyi died on October 17, 1967, at 2.30 in the morning, of kidney cancer and coronary artery disease. He was 61 years old. It was the height of the Cultural Revolution, and medical staff at the hospital reportedly linked arms to prevent Red Guards from entering his ward. His body was cremated. His ashes were placed in the Babaoshan Revolutionary Cemetery, and in January of 1995, Li Shuxian arranged their transfer to a commercial cemetery near the Western Qing tombs, a few miles from the Emperor's whose succession he was supposed to continue. Li Shuxian survived him by 30 years. She died of lung cancer on June 9, 1997, at 72. Five marriages. No children. The throne Cixi had filled from her deathbed produced not a descendant through the man she placed on it. With Puyi childless, the remnants of the Imperial line passed to his brothers. The eldest of them, Pujie, was born on April 16, 1907, one year after Puyi. He was Puyi's full sibling, same father, same mother, and his life traced an almost identical arc of Imperial service, foreign manipulation, imprisonment, and reinvention. Pujie was educated in Japan, first at the Gakushuin, the peers' school reserved for the Japanese aristocracy, and then at the Imperial Japanese Army Academy. In 1937, the Kwantung Army arranged his marriage to Hiro Saga, a Japanese noblewoman distantly related to Emperor Hirohito. But the purpose was strategic, to inject Japanese blood into the Manchu Imperial line and create a half-Japanese heir who could legitimize permanent control of Manchukuo. The marriage took place on April 3, 1937. Against all political calculation, it became a genuine love match. They had two daughters. The elder, Huisheng, was born in 1938. In 1957, at the age of 19, she died in what Japanese police recorded as a murder-suicide with a forbidden lover at a hotel near Mount Emagi. She had been raised in Japan after the war while her father was imprisoned in China, caught between two countries that had destroyed each other, belonging fully to neither. The younger daughter, Huisheng, was born on March 13, 1940, and survived. She married a Japanese businessman named Fukunaga Kenji and has lived in Japan since. Pujie endured Soviet prisoner-of-war camps alongside his brother, and then spent a decade at the Fushun War Criminals Management Center. After his release in 1960, he was reunited with Hero Saga in Beijing, an arrangement made possible by Premier Zhou Enlai's personal intervention. He built a second life as a calligrapher and a member of the National People's Congress, where he served as Vice-Chairman of the Nationalities Committee. He also served as technical advisor for Bernardo Bertolucci's 1987 film The Last Emperor, the movie that introduced his brother's story to the Western world. He died on February 28, 1994, at the age of 86. The youngest of Pujie's half-brothers was Purin, a collator known by his adopted Chinese name, Jin Yuji. Born on September 21, 1918, he was 12 years younger than Pujie and had almost no memory of the Forbidden City. Of all the siblings, he chose the most deliberate path of self-erasure. In 1947, he converted the Prince Chun Mansion, the family estate where Pujie had been taken from his wet nurse's arms, into a public primary school. In 1957, he donated his personal fortune to the state. He spent the rest of his working life teaching elementary school students in Beijing. He served three terms on the Beijing Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference and conducted historical research after retirement, but he never sought public prominence and lived modestly. When Pujie died in 1994, I Purin became the last surviving brother of The Last Emperor. He held that distinction for 21 years. He died on April 10, 2015, of pneumonia, at the age of 96. With his death, the last direct sibling link to the Dragon Throne was severed. Their father, Zhai Feng, the reluctant Prince Regent who had carried Pujie screaming onto the throne and whispered the words the courtiers remembered as prophecy. He outlived the dynasty by four decades. He resigned the regency on December 6, 1911, as the revolution swept the country and by most accounts he felt relief. He told his family, Now I am back in the family and can finally care for my children. He strongly opposed Pujie's collaboration with Japan and never visited Manchukuo after his single trip in 1934 confirmed his fears. He lived quietly in Beijing under Japanese occupation, through the Chinese Civil War, and into the first years of the People's Republic. He died on February 3, 1951, of pneumonia, at the age of 68. The man who had whispered, Don't cry on the Dragon Throne died in the same city as the throne, in a country that no longer remembered he existed. If you're finding value in this, subscribing is the best way to support the channel. It's free and it helps us keep going. When Purin died in 2015, the nominal headship of the House of Aisin Gioro passed to his eldest son. His name is Jin Yuzhang. He was born on May 3, 1942, and which makes him 83 years old. He is the current head of the imperial family that once ruled 400 million people across the largest contiguous empire in Chinese history. He is a retired civil servant. Jin Yuzhang was educated at the China University of Geosciences. After graduation in 1968, he was assigned to the Qinghai Bureau of Geology and Mineral Resources, where he worked for 17 years conducting geological surveys on the Tibetan Plateau, about as far from the Dragon Throne as it is possible to get while remaining inside China's borders. He returned to Beijing in 1985 and served at the Chongwen District Bureau of Environmental Protection. He later became a non-communist party deputy governor of the Chongwen District and a member of the Beijing Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference. He retired in 2008. In December of 2022, he received the Jinghua Concentric Award for his years of political consultative service, a bureaucratic commendation for a bureaucratic career. His role as head of the Aisin Gioro clan carries no legal authority. The People's Republic of China does not recognize aristocratic titles, does not acknowledge dynastic succession, and has never made any restitution to the former imperial family. All imperial properties were confiscated or nationalized decades ago. There are no pending claims, no lawsuits, no formal restoration movements. Jin Yuzhang has stated his position plainly. Being an emperor is not an easy thing, he has said. He prefers to be addressed by his surname. The broader Aisin Gioro clan has not vanished. It has dispersed. Estimates place the number of living descendants at between 300,000 and 400,000 people. At the time of abdication in 1912, there were approximately 140,000 members of the extended imperial family. Most changed their names in the decades that followed, adopting Han Chinese surnames to survive. Jin, meaning gold, was the most common, a direct translation of the Manchu word Aisin. Others chose Jiao, Luo, or Ai. During the Cultural Revolution, when any connection to the old ruling class could mean imprisonment or death, imperial ancestry was something to hide, not to claim. Today, the descendants live ordinary lives. Some are aware of their lineage, and some are not. The calligrapher Qigong, a ninth-generation descendant of the emperor Yongzheng, became one of China's most celebrated artists before his death in 2005. He famously refused to trade on his ancestry, saying he would not eat from his ancestor's table. The actress Ariel Aisin Jioro, born in 1983, is a distant descendant of the imperial house. She refuses to take roles in Qing dynasty costume dramas. In a village in northeastern China, every household descends from the imperial clan. They still wear traditional Manchu clothing, keep long braids, hang portraits of Qing emperors on their walls, and marry only within the Manchu community. The Forbidden City The palace Cixi ruled from behind a yellow silk curtain. Ay, the palace where Puyi screamed on the Dragon Throne, the palace Fengyuxiang emptied with a three-hour ultimatum, is now the Palace Museum, the most visited museum on earth. In 2019, approximately 19 million people walked through its gates. After the disruptions of the pandemic, the number recovered to over 17 million in 2024. Tickets must be booked online and sell out within seconds during peak periods. The area open to visitors expanded from 30% of the complex in 2012 to 76% by 2020. 980 buildings stand on 720,000 square metres of ground. The collection holds nearly 1.9 million cultural relics. The tomb of the woman who started all of miles northeast of Beijing. It was looted in July of 1928 by the warlord Sun Dianying, who used dynamite to blow open the entrance, stripped the mausoleum of everything valuable. The 108 golden buddhas, the 24,704 pearls, the luminous night pearl placed in Cixi's mouth, and left her body exposed for over 50 days. He reportedly gifted the night pearl to Sung Mei Ling, the wife of Chiang Kai-shek, and was never punished. Guangxu's tomb at the Western Qing Tombs, the tomb the forensic scientists opened in 2003 to extract the arsenic-saturated remains, is now open to tourists. A few miles away, in a commercial cemetery accessible to anyone who pays the entrance fee, rest the ashes of Puyi. The last emperor of China is buried near the emperors whose succession he was supposed to continue in a plot purchased by his widow in a graveyard that advertises on the internet. In the 1960s, when Puyi was working as a researcher and editor in Beijing, he visited the Forbidden City as an ordinary citizen. He bought a ticket. He walked through the same gates he had been carried through as a screaming toddler. In one of the palace halls dedicated to the Guangxu emperor, he stopped in front of a displayed photograph. The placard identified it as a portrait of Guangxu. Puyi studied it for a moment, and then turned to the museum guide. That is my father, he said. The experts had gotten it wrong. The last man alive who had actually known the emperors had become a tourist in his own home. Today, 300,000 people carry the name of the dynasty, and not one of them carries the throne.