Puyi
China's last emperor, enthroned as a toddler and forced to abdicate at six, who ended his life as a gardener under Mao.
He may be the only man in modern history who was worshipped as a living emperor, tried as a war criminal, and paid to weed a public garden, in that order. Puyi was not yet three years old in December 1908 when he was carried screaming to the Dragon Throne, plucked from his family on the orders of the dying Empress Dowager Cixi. He reigned as the Xuantong Emperor for barely three years. On 12 February 1912 his regents signed an abdication that ended not just the Qing dynasty but more than two thousand years of imperial rule stretching back to 221 BC. He was six.
The pampered ghost
The 1912 settlement let the child keep his title, his eunuchs, and the northern half of the Forbidden City, a shrunken court frozen in time while a republic formed around its walls. Puyi grew up a ceremonial emperor of nothing, tutored for a time by the Scotsman Reginald Johnston, riding a bicycle through courtyards built for sedan chairs. In 1917 a warlord briefly restored him for a farcical twelve days. In 1924 another warlord simply expelled him, and the last emperor walked out of the only world he had ever known.
Emperor of a puppet
Japan found a use for him. After it seized Manchuria in 1931, Tokyo installed Puyi as the figurehead ruler of Manchukuo, a puppet state carved from China's northeast; in 1934 they crowned him emperor again, this time of a country that took its orders from the Japanese army. To his countrymen it made him a collaborator. When the Soviet Union invaded in August 1945, Red Army troops seized him at an airfield as he tried to flee to Japan. He spent five years in Soviet custody, testified at the Tokyo war-crimes tribunal in 1946, and in 1950 was handed to Mao's new People's Republic.
From emperor to gardener
What followed was stranger than exile. Puyi spent nearly a decade in a re-education prison in Fushun, where a man who had never dressed himself was taught to tie his own shoes and grow his own food. Released under amnesty in 1959, the former Son of Heaven was given a job tending plants at the Beijing Botanical Garden and later a desk as a historical researcher. He rode public buses and once bought a ticket to tour his own former palace. He wrote a state-approved memoir titled From Emperor to Citizen, and when the Cultural Revolution turned violent, Premier Zhou Enlai placed the former emperor under official protection. He died of kidney cancer in 1967, childless, as Red Guards rampaged through the same city where he had once been a god. The throne he was born to had been gone for fifty-five years.