The China archive has no shortage of memoirs written by the power-adjacent. Mao’s physician, Li Zhisui, wrote a best-selling tell-all of his famous patient in The Private Life of Chairman Mao (1996). Desmond Shun dished about his time as courtier to the wife of former Chinese premier Wen Jiabao in Red Roulette (2021). Twilight in the Forbidden City, Reginald Johnston’s 1934 memoir of life as an imperial tutor to Puyi, the last Qing emperor, fits neatly on the bookshelf beside these other confidants-turned-chroniclers. Fans of 1980s cinema may remember Johnston as played by Peter O’Toole in Bernardo Bertolucci’s 1987 Puyi biopic The Last Emperor.
Twilight in the Forbidden City starts with a potted history of the events leading to the end of the Qing Dynasty in 1912, and Puyi’s abdication at the age of six. This is followed by a much more detailed account of the five years (1919–1924) that Johnston spent as the private English teacher and confidant to Puyi, who was then 13 years old and still living in the Forbidden City. Well aware of our voyeuristic tendencies, Johnston devotes only a few opening chapters to his hot takes on Chinese history — some of which have not aged well (“Had the Boxers appeared a generation later, they would have learned much from the principles and practices of Hitlerite Germany”) — before wisely shifting to what we came for: dishing the dirt on the last emperor and his flunkies.
The Forbidden City of Puyi’s time was not the palace of his ancestors. Still, like Puyi’s own memoir From Emperor to Citizen (我的前半生, Xinhua, 1950) or Sun Yaoting’s The Last Eunuch of China (末代太监孙耀庭传, People’s Literature Publishing House, 2004) — both of which cover the same period of history — Johnston’s behind-the-scenes book gives us tantalizing glimpses from which we can extrapolate what life might have been like for denizens of the Forbidden City in better day