The Flight of the Dragon

Abstract

After his expulsion from the Forbidden City in 1924, China’s ‘last emperor’, Henry Puyi 溥儀 (1906-1967), settled in Tianjin where he later presented parting gifts to his former English tutor, Reginald F. Johnston 莊士敦 (1874-1938), including an album by the Nanjing painter Chen Shu 陳舒 (active c. 1649-c. 1687) from the ex-Qing (1644-1911) imperial collection and an inscribed folding fan. These are now reunited in the library collection of SOAS University of London, where Johnston taught Chinese after his return to Britain in 1931. Together with Puyi’s preface transcribed by courtier-calligrapher Zheng Xiaoxu 鄭孝胥 (1860-1938) for Johnston’s memoire, Twilight in the Forbidden City (1934), these artworks pave the way for an investigation of the practice of connoisseurship at Puyi’s court-in-exile in China’s era of modernism, including Puyi’s use of the imperial collection and his selection of these gifts even while he also shaping to become Japan’s puppet-emperor in Manchuria (r. 1934-45). The study roams beyond the well-known network of Puyi and his court advisors among the yilao 遺老 (Qing ‘old guard’) to uncover an unexpected modernist connection with the progressive young artist, publisher and taste-maker Zheng Wuchang 鄭午昌 (1894-1952), a leading actor in the reform of guohua 國畫 ink painting. The study rediscovers how Zheng Wuchang contributed the painting to an inscribed handscroll, Flight of the Dragon (or, A Storm and a Marvel 風益圖), McCausland, ‘The Flight of the Dragon’ 2 which commemorated, for the court inner circle, Puyi’s dramatic escape from the Forbidden City amid the realities of a modern, Republican world.