The Six-Year-Old Who Lost an Empire
On February 12, 1912, a six-year-old boy's abdication ended more than 2,000 years of imperial rule in China.
He was six years old — he had turned six just five days earlier — and he did not understand what was happening. Years later, in his autobiography, Puyi remembered the scene: the Empress Dowager Longyu sitting on a platform in a side room of the palace, wiping her eyes with a handkerchief, while the heavyset general Yuan Shikai knelt before her on a red cushion, tears streaming down his own face. The little emperor sat beside the widow and wondered why the grown-ups were crying. That was the moment, on February 12, 1912, when the adults decided his reign was over.
The Qing dynasty had ruled China since 1644, and for more than two thousand years China had been governed by emperors. But by 1911 the dynasty was hollow. That October, an army garrison in Wuhan mutinied, and province after province broke away, demanding a republic. The court sent its strongest general, Yuan Shikai, to crush the revolt — but Yuan saw which way history was moving and began bargaining with both sides instead. Puyi's father, Prince Chun, had ruled as regent; on December 6 he stepped aside, leaving the Empress Dowager Longyu to face the storm alone.
What Longyu signed that February day was the Imperial Edict of the Abdication of the Qing Emperor. "The whole country is tending towards a republican form of government," it read. "We, the Emperor, hand over the sovereignty to the people. We decide the form of government to be a constitutional republic." With those words, the Great Qing — 268 years of rule — came to an end, and with it the entire imperial system. In exchange, the court was promised generous terms: Puyi kept his title, received a large annual stipend, and was allowed to go on living in the Forbidden City, a boy emperor of nothing, in a palace the size of a small town.
Puyi's strange life was only beginning. In 1917 a warlord briefly put him back on the throne for eleven days. In 1924 another warlord expelled him from the palace for good. He later became the puppet ruler of the Japanese-controlled state of Manchukuo, was captured by the Soviets at the end of World War II, and was handed back to China in 1950 for years of re-education. He emerged, remarkably, as an ordinary citizen — at one point working as a gardener in Beijing — and lived quietly until his death in 1967.
The abdication of a bewildered six-year-old remains one of history's great hinges: the day the world's oldest continuous system of monarchy gave way, not with a final battle, but with a widow's signature and a child's confusion.
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