The Forbidden City is not a city at all but a palace of the soul. It comprises a succession of enormous stark granite courtyards each surmounted by a terracotta hall behind which there are ever larger and higher courtyards and a still larger halls. Eventually the highest building is reached which contains the throne room and unexpectedly tiny apartment of the Emperor of China, behind which descends a mirror image of all the preceding courtyards, but these in two-thirds scale, filled with flowers, trees and falling water—a symbol of heaven. Throughout its history, the front courtyards were always empty and eerily silent except for ceremonial occasions: behind the Imperial throne, however, lived nine thousand eunuchs and nine hundred concubines.
I wandered this palace almost alone some years ago, and I’ve rarely been anywhere so disturbing: the ambiance of the intriguing Dowager Empresses, their faces caked in makeup, their fingernails twelve inches long, commanding huskily from a chair through a veil behind the throne of their creatures, the boy-emperors: the memory of the poisonings, the suicides, the cruelties which took place here—all these suffuse the place, but more than anything what troubled me was the almost palpable presence of the last emperor.
Henry Pu Yi was born in 1906 and placed on the peacock throne at the age of two. He was raised in the Forbidden City as a God-king, above all law, from whose will all truth proceeded, but only in adolescence was it revealed to him that he had no empire to govern. China had become a republic under Sun Yat-sen who had thought it prudent simply to leave the emperor, his court, and thousands of eunuchs in place, powerless, with a guard on the door. Pu Yi discovered that the absolute freedom he had been told he enjoyed was a fiction, and that the whole of his self image an illusion. His front and back courtyards were neither heaven nor earth, his eunuchs were robbing him blind, and neither his empress nor his concubines could bear him children.
Expelled from the Forbidden City he became for a time the puppet king of Manchuria under horrific Japanese occupation, and eventually, after five years in a Russian prison and a further ten years of confession in a Maoist re-education centre, he was released to serve as a model communist worker and publish his servile autobiography From Emperor to Citizen. He lived long enough to fear the rise of Mao’s fanatical Red Guard who hated anyone associated with the past, and died a scrupulously anonymous Beijing gardener in 1967.
The image of Pu Yi in his palace is an allegory of the soul without Christ, into whose ears a world grown old and corrupt whispers suggestions in such a way that he thinks they are his own thoughts, who asserts his kingship over an imaginary heaven and earth, who is ultimately disillusioned, yet recreates other kingdoms worst than the first, and finally comes to honorable but bleak terms with life.
The tragedy of Pu Yi was not what he lost but what he failed to gain. His path through life was one of confession and accommodation without absolution or redemption. Having discovered he was not a king, he could only be a slave. Even in his palace, he only experienced authority from the outside.
Strangely, while the public confession of sin has become fashionable in recent years, the Church has tended to shy away from it, forgetting perhaps how much it matters. What could be more liberating to be able to confess that the remembrance of our sins “is grievous unto us; the burden of them intolerable.” How wonderful to know that there is another to take the burden from us, to hear authoritatively that God has had mercy on us, and that our sins are pardoned and delivered from us. What could be more liberating that to know that we are kings, kings in exile, and that we shall reign with the king whose city is never forbidden, whose gates are never shut.