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
When we lobbed through the doors of a provincial Chinese hot springs hotel which bore the name “The Milky War”, I did momentarily think of the famous 1980s song by The Church. Once inside, any association with inter-galactic imagery quickly vanished. The Milky Way Hot Springs Hotel in Changchun turned out to be an empty metaphor, the hotel’s interior didn’t correspond to anything remotely resembling the stars of any Solar System I’ve seen✥. 
In one sense though I found the “Milky Way” was actually “out of this world”. It was nothing like any other hotel I had encountered before. The reception area was very opulent, very large, lots of gratuitous items of an aspiring luxurious lifestyle. 
But we didn’t get a chance to absorb the Milky Way extravagance because we were whisked through to a changing area where our shoes were ‘confiscated’ and replaced by flip-flops (a variation on the usual practice in China of leaving your shoes at the front door). We were instructed to divest ourselves of our street clothes (which were bagged and deposited somewhere), and given gender colour-coded pyjamas to wear inside at all times. My “Corporate Vasco de Gamas” were a greeny-yellow colour with a circular pattern (all male guests wore the identical outfit), while my partner (and all of her sex) were decked out in a matching pink number with the same pattern. Already I was feeling like I was at an institution more so than in a resort. We were also issued with a plastic wristband (also colour-coded naturally!) with an activation device which we were to use to gain entry to the “mess hall”, to open our assigned lockers in the change rooms and to redeem our shoes.
Chaoyang Street in the Imperial Palace district of Shenyang, overshadowed by the proximity of the city’s most illustrious tourist drawcard, the Gu Gong Palace itself, doesn’t get the interest it perhaps deserves. Visitors to Shenyang tend to be drawn to Gu Gong and with equal magnetic force to the “shoppers’ paradise” of the Middle Street Pedestrian Mall . But if you divert some of that time to exploring Chaoyang Street, you might happily discover some less known little treats it has to offer.
Fengtian office of Southern Manchurian Railways (131 Chaoyang Street)
Shenyang Huangchengli Cultural Industrial Park (129 Chaoyang Street)
Shenyang and Chaoyang Jie’s penchant for turning the ordinary and mundane into something fresh and different is ably illustrated by the makeover given this old industrial complex. Situated like the ex-Manchurian Railways depot in the 皇城社区 (Huangcheng neighbourhood), a narrow entrance lane from the street leads to a small square. A new project, still presently in the process of completion, is to transform what was a drab old industrial site into a visually more appealing urban landscape. An attractive and classy new arch adorns the entrance to the square and historically and culturally relevant murals and other artworks including elegant carved relief panels decorate the walls. A subject figuring prominently in the industrial park’s paintings is local celebrity and 1930s Dongbei martial strongman Marshal Zhang (“the younger”). The artistic facelift of the old industrial complex on Chaoyang Street is a refreshing innovation in Shenyang, but one for which the city has precedents, eg, Shenyang’s 1905 Cultural and Creative Park taps into that same artistic and aesthetic potential for transforming a depressed industrial wasteland. 
From near Changchun’s central train station we waved down a cab to take us to the site of Changchun’s cinematic claim to glory in China, the Jilin province city’s pioneering film studios. Although it looked fairly close on Google Maps it took an eternity to get to the former movie site of CFS, Changchun Film Studios. Road distance in China is measured in the conventional way by metric length, but also by the number of motor vehicles they’re are between point A (where you are) and point B (where you want to go).
The setting for the film studios is an impressive one. From the street front you enter a big green park and walk up a grand, sweeping drive. At the top of the drive is the film studio complex, but before you reach the studio entrance, you have to contend with Mao Tse-tung. There he is, “the Chairman” standing erect, as he was in life, larger than the life of any one Chinese person. A gigantic, white statue of Mao, waving benignly at every human figure passing within the shadow of his massive, immovable image※.
It was quite late in the day by now but we were still keen after travelling that far, to see inside the CFS Factory/Museum. The callow youth on the turnstiles gate had other ideas…he point-blank refused us entry because it was after 4 o’clock, less than an hour till the museum closed. Unable to dissuade him, we went away disgruntled but decided to explore the outside parts of the site anyway.
This bore unexpected fruit as we discovered a nice little courtyard adjacent to the factory with an overt military touch (statues of heroic patriotic types and other martial figures, battle-green painted artillery guns, etc). The factory’s military theme is continued in the forecourt which exhibits a fighter plane of 1950s vintage.
Before leaving altogether we chanced a quick look-through of the CFS gift shop which was still open. This proved a fortuitous diversion on our part…while unenthusiastically perusing the shop’s uninspiring assortment of predictable souvenirs on the shelves we noticed a side door ajar which we took advantage of by slipping through it and into the exhibits area. Thus, through a combination of arse-lucky opportunism and devious initiative we did gain entry to the factory after all and for gratis! 
The public CFS Studios display comprised a long, darkly-lit corridor which threw the lighted exhibits down one side into relief. These exhibits were a miscellany of items reflecting the film company’s past productions, the result undoubtedly of a raid on the props department and the costume wardrobes (old military weapons, uniforms and paraphernalia), old style 35mm film cameras and sound recording machines, etc.
The military theme of the factory exhibition was further underscored in the choice of film posters to display…war movies galore! The impression that CFS’ most popular movie genre was war was hard to ignore on this evidence.
Peaking inside a few of the rooms running off the main corridor revealed that the complex was still a hub for contemporary film-making. Production tech staff could be seen working on documentary and TV projects using modern technical equipment (not the antique stuff in the corridor).
Another room off the corridor held a small viewing theatre…surprisingly to me the projector was running a 1930s British B & W film starring Larry Olivier (not dubbed into Chinese and no one watching!). Elsewhere in the room there were pictures and bios of Chinese film-makers, dubbers and other behind-the-camera personnel who had made a contribution at CFS Films during its halcyon days.
The props displayed were for the most part interesting and authentic-looking (authentically old too!), but I did find the stuffed tiger mounted and encased in glass right at the end of the passageway rather incongruous and something that didn’t add to the CFS collection.
Changchun Film Studio Group Corporation (