Loyal To The End

On February 7, 1906, a male infant was born in Beijing, and the court official Wen Su was called upon to choose a name for him. He chose the name Pu Yi, and also, according to one version of the story, personally placed the boy on the Dragon throne in 1908, just three years before the Qing Dynasty fell. Wen Su was one of the top imperial officials right at the end of the China's long dynastic history, and he remained for decades afterwards the most loyal of all the courtiers around the dethroned emperor. He was also an accomplished poet and calligrapher and maintained a long correspondence with his sons and with others that is here collected and published for the first time. The story of Wen Su parallels the history of China from the late 19th century as it moved through one crisis to another towards the mid-20th Century and the triumph of the Communist Party in 1949. He was on the wrong side of that history, but what value does loyalty have?