The Broad Brush

 
In one of the many touching scenes in the BBC documentary called ‘The Last Emperor of China’ Pu Yi, the person in question signs his name using what looks like a stick held vertically. It is a brush. The Chinese write with a brush. Of course, they are the original calligraphers. Each stroke is an individual work of art. Each letter is full of meaning both epistemologically and symbolically.

Watch the documentary to get the background facts and the sequence of events but in a nutshell, Pu Yi had the misfortune of being the last born in a long line of Chinese imperial rulers. The empire ended during the tumultuous period in Chinese history when everything changed after WWI, precipitated by Nationalism and the threat from Japanese ambitions. Pu Yi does not come across as someone born to lead and given the distorted zeitgeist of his existence, his life was not going to be easy. Manipulated by all the powers and complicit by his own confusion, he was forced out of the forbidden palace into exile in Manchuria where the Japanese turned him into its puppet leader.

After the defeat of the Japanese, Pu Yi was charged by a war tribunal in Tokyo with war crimes. He was imprisoned, first in the USSR, then repatriated to China, where surprisingly Mao kept him alive, first in re-education camps, then freed to live as an ordinary citizen. The story is also portrayed in Bernardo Bertolucci’s extravaganza, ‘The Last Emperor’ which has none of the grand pathos that the humble documentary is able to transmit. Bertolucci’s film is based on Pu Yi’s autobiography of the same title published after his rehabilitation with the blessing of the communist regime.

The strange paradox is that here is a man to whom his own title, signifying absolute power, negated any possibility of having any of it at any level whatsoever! Even the lowest serf could determine his movements at least to some degree, whether to walk left or right, go backward or forward, eat when hungry and sleep when tired. There was a ‘power vacuum’ as it were, in a total sense. Interestingly it had outward signs. His sexual impotence was an allusion to a much greater weakness. People called him emperor from birth, yet it appears that Pu Yi never quite understood what his position in an hierarchical organisation might have meant, then he hit rock bottom, only then, to rise again.

There is an amplified absurdity about his life as a singular one, to place, among those grand narratives of our times.

 
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