We got the Changchun light rail✽ to the Puppet Emperor’s Palace train station. The palace entrance was on a wide street with a coterie of policemen guarding the gate. Tickets were acquired in the booking office/souvenir shop opposite at a cost of 70 CN¥ per head (pensioners with ID, passport, free).

Although it said on a site website that you could hire an audio guide in English for the museum, the counter staff indicated that there were none available. Unfortunately, this deficiency was felt during the tour because there was a great lack of explanatory notes in English for the exhibits as well.

For a lot of people, outside China, the tour could be a very informative one, especially if your only prior knowledge of the last emperor of the ultimate Chinese (Qing) dynasty comes, for example, from a less than impeccable historical source such as films like Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Last Emperor.

With the use of language aids or without them, exploring the physical structures of the former Manchukuo (Manchu State) Imperial Palace provides a fascinating insight into a dark chapter of official life in Dongbei under the Japanese military occupation of the 1930s and 1940s.

‘Emperor’ Pu-Yi, his ’empress’ and the rest of the royal family lived in grand accommodation at the behest of their Japanese masters. Notwithstanding that the Pu-Yi regime was a contrived one propped up by a foreign invader and effectively wielded very little actual power itself in the region, the elaborate parts of the whole, the palatial splendour, were certainly befitting of a royal palace. Pu-Yi’s residential quarters and that of his family were definitely on the de luxe end of comfortable.

The palace layout divides into two main sections, the royal family’s area and the regime’s administrative area. This second section was larger than I had anticipated, comprising the offices and buildings allocated to the phoney emperor’s apparatus of government, his secretariat and other administrative functions.

One of the most interesting and sought-out items in the museum’s exhibits is the personal vehicle which belonged to Pu-Yi, a 5.7m long black car✪ housed in its own (garage) section of the complex. The “king-sized” vehicle is quite a rare old 1930s auto, a famous “Bubble Car” – American made by the Park Automobile Co. There’s a little souvenir annex attached to the ‘garage’ for car enthusiasts to secure a momento.

The palace contains a lot of Pu-Yi paraphernalia and minutiae, personal items like his traditional ceremonial garb, his official uniforms, his BP device and his trademark circular spectacles. Wall photos and information extracts chart the last Chinese monarch’s story from the imperial palace to incarceration to rehabilitation and life as an ordinary private citizen.

The environs of the palace buildings are well worth a ramble through. Within the grounds are gardens which are charming if (or because) they are a bit quirky. Next to this is a fish pond with a fountain and rockeries. Close by there the emperor’s swimming pool, sans water and it’s tilework is in quite a poor, dilapidated state.

The outside feature of the palace that most captured my imagination though was below it: an air-raid shelter. The increasingly paranoid puppet monarch (no doubt alarmed by the fading fortunes of Japan in the world war) had his own underground bunker constructed. The rooms in the bunkers were grimly threadbare, starkly contrasting with the lavish living quarters of the palace above.

Elsewhere there apparently used to be a tennis court and a small golf course on the grounds. To leave the palace you need to go through an inner gate which looks like the exit, but it’s not, the actual exit going from the palace to the street is further down a hill. As you walk, to your right look for the palace’s horse racetrack (still operating, there was show-jumping happening while we visited). The entire perimeter of the palace is surrounded by high concrete and brick walls.

For the historical narrative of Japan’s Manchurian Puppet-State in the Thirties and Forties, refer to my June 2019 blog entry, Manchukuo: An Instrument of Imperial Expansion for the Puppet-masters of Japan

For Pu-Yi to end up as the joker in the pack of playing cards sold at the Puppet Emperor Palace Museum would seem to many in China to be a apt footnote to his story.

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✽ light rail but still heavy security…even though we were travelling only four stations on a city subway network, we still had to submit to the body wave scanners and screening process and the baggage through the electronic detection belt

✪ about seven metres in length