Jin scours antique shops to keep his family history alive
Print Edition
HIS uncle was the last Emperor of China, reigning over the nation from the Forbidden City. Now Jin Yulan scours Beijing’s antique shops for anything that might once have belonged to his family.
The Qing Dynasty (1644-1911) ruled over China for 268 years until it was deposed after the 1911 Revolution. Jin opened an exhibition of his artefacts in Beijing this week.
A retired teacher, Jin says he likes things “with a sense of age, with a kind of culture and history to them.”
“I never knew the life of the court,” he says.
“I can’t say how good life there was or how succulent the food would have been. But I feel a link with my ancestors and this bond will last forever.”
Born in 1948, Jia was sent to the countryside during the “cultural revolution” (1966-76) and only returned to the capital in the 1990s.
Jin’s uncle, Pu Yi, was just 2 years old when he took the throne in 1908. Abdicating while still a child in 1912, he later served as Tokyo’s puppet emperor of then-Manchuria in northeast China after Japan invaded in the 1930s.
He was arrested by Soviet forces in 1945 and imprisoned in China until 1959.
When he was freed, his clan held a dinner that was “the largest family reunion since the fall of the Qing dynasty,” Jin said.
“Pu Yi took my hands, he was very kind. It was the first time that I had seen him.
“We spoke very freely. I saw him more as a human being than an emperor,” Jin says, highlighting the contrast between his uncle’s earlier and later life. “When he was younger, people would kowtow before him.”
Pu Yi died of cancer in 1967.
Jin started collecting pieces as a boy, scouring flea markets and picking up items that could have belonged to his family.
One of the artefacts on display at his exhibition, in a former aristocratic residence in Beijing, is a kaleidoscope given to Pu Yi’s father by Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany during a visit to Berlin in 1901.
Jin played with the kaleidoscope as a child.
A photo from the late 1920s shows Pu Yi surrounded by his brothers and sisters.
“The child sitting on the floor is my father,” Jin explains of the emperor’s half-brother, who died last year at the age of 96, the last of his generation.
Jin has not been to the Forbidden City, the emperor’s former home, saying he does not think it is “worth the price of the ticket.”
But with the passage of time, people are becoming increasingly interested in Qing history, he says.
“The dynasty is dead, but we can look at it from an objective point of view and I think most people are well disposed to the imperial family.”
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