BEIJING, Apr 8 (IPS) - China's last emperor, shown as a hedonistic collaborator in Bernardo Bertolucci's film of the same name, has been revealed by his widow as a lonely, vulnerable man who even threatened suicide when she spoke of divorce.
A striking figure at the age of 70, Li Shuxian wed Aisijero 'Henry' Pu Yi in 1962, four years after serving 15 years in prison for supporting the Japanese invaders in World War II.
Dressed in deep blue, the slim, dark-haired Li spoke of her life with Pu Yi in an exclusive interview before taking part in this week's traditional 'Qing Ming' festival, in which the Chinese pay their respects to their dead relatives.
Friends and relatives joined her Wednesday at a hillside some 120 km west of Beijing, where Pu Yi's ashes were buried in January after being kept in the vaults of the people's cemetery in Beijing since his death 28 years ago.
The modest gravesite, marked only by a marble tablet inscribed with his name, lies 300 metres away from the gigantic palace-like mausoleum of his adoptive father and predecessor, Emperor Guang Xu of the Qing dynasty (1644-1911).
At 16, following the imperial tradition, Pu Yi married two women, but one divorced him nine years later and the other died of illness.
In 1939, he fell in love with a 17-year-old student, Tan Yuling, but Tan, who resented the Japanese, died hours after a doctor sent by the occupation forces gave her an injection to treat her for typhoid fever.
To avoid taking up with a Japanese woman, as the invaders suggested, Pu Yi chose at random a 14-year-old school girl to be his concubine but she divorced him 15 years later while he was in prison.