introduction
There is a sentence in the "Book of Poetry and Sangrou": "I am not born, and I am angry in the sky", which is often used to refer to bad luck. Speaking of "bad luck and bad fate", Puyi, the last feudal emperor in China, must be on the list. If he had not been born in the midst of great changes in the world for thousands of years, just an ordinary emperor at the end of the feudal dynasty, he might have been able to become a lord of shoucheng, rather than the first half of his life was turbulent and displaced, and he rose and fell between many identities.
The emperors of the Qing Dynasty all seemed to follow an unwritten rule — ascending the throne at a young age. This phenomenon, which rarely occurred in other dynasties, was common in the Qing Dynasty: the Shunzhi Emperor, the Kangxi Emperor, and the Tongzhi Emperor all ascended the throne at the age of 6, the Guangxu Emperor ascended the throne at the age of 4, and Puyi ascended the throne at the age of 3. Compared with them, Xianfeng, who ascended the throne at the age of 19, and Qianlong, who ascended the throne at the age of 25, both look old. However, their young age when they ascended the throne did not prove that their abilities were not good, such as the Shunzhi Emperor and the Kangxi Emperor were both Wenzhi martial arts, and the Qing Dynasty was prosperous.
▲Puyi wax figure
01
As we all know, the Manchu Qing government in the late Qing Dynasty was already weak to the outside world, and puyi himself, the last emperor of the Qing Dynasty, was also indulging in pleasure for many years, and his unenterprising image affected many people's judgment of him. After all, the experience of the first half of his life was really difficult for ordinary people to experience, as a puppet of Empress Dowager Cixi when he was the emperor of the Qing Dynasty; he was expelled from Beijing by warlords when he thought that he could implement a constitutional monarchy; he was called emperor in puppet Manchukuo, but in fact he was constrained by the Japanese everywhere. Until the founding of New China, he was pardoned by Comrade Runzhi and became a member of the National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference.
▲Puppet Manchurian Palace
After being pardoned in 1959, Puyi returned to Beijing from the place of labor reform in Fushun and applied for his first household registration certificate. On it, Puyi registered his cultural level as a junior high school. This makes people wonder how the Qing Dynasty royal family cultivated its own princes, especially the heirs to the throne. How high is their true cultural level? Puyi's cultural level is only junior high school? For this reason, some experts retorted: This is not the case, so it is a big mistake to think, Puyi's actual level is not comparable to ordinary people, let us also sigh.
▲Puyi stills
It is said that the qing dynasty princes were the most Chinese and literate of the princes of all dynasties. On the one hand, thanks to the fact that since Yongzheng, most of the emperors of the Qing Dynasty did not know how to appoint princes, but chose the most capable people in their own sons, which gave each prince the opportunity to ascend to the throne, and how could he not work hard to enrich his strength? On the other hand, it is naturally because the Qing Dynasty's "Prince Cultivation System" draws on the educational experience of previous dynasties, coupled with the Qing Dynasty's extremely strict training of princes, making the qing Dynasty's crown prince's success rate quite high.
02
Most of the qing dynasty princes entered a special imperial training institution at the age of six, going to the study room, and the graduation time was not fixed, but was determined by their master. The precocious may "graduate" when they are teenagers, and the less intelligent may wait until they are thirty or forty years old and still need to go to the study room every day to study. For example, during the Daoguang period, Prince Hui was almost forty years old, and he still needed to go to the study room to study after handling the affairs of the dynasty. The length of study every day is "in and out", which is ten hours long, and there are only six and a half days of holidays every year, which is much more painful than modern students.
▲ Stills from the upper study
After reading in the study room, the princes still had to learn to ride and shoot, mainly to learn archery, and after the middle of the Qing Dynasty, there were firearms and so on. Every year during the Mulan Autumn Hunt, the emperor evaluates his children's academic performance, and the princes have to prove their riding and shooting ability to the emperor and the ministers on the hunting ground. Each of these processes is carried out by special guards, and the prince cannot be allowed to be lazy in the slightest. However, the last three generations of emperors of the Qing Dynasty failed to give birth to princes due to physical reasons, and Guangxu and Puyi were all from the side to the heirs, so they did not experience such rigorous training, but after they became emperors, these were compulsory courses.
▲Stills of the Forbidden City at the end of the Qing Dynasty
According to historical records, there were a total of eight teachers who taught Puyi, speaking Manchu, Chinese and English respectively, and these teachers were all all at the same time, among which the English teacher was a high-achieving student from Oxford University, responsible for teaching Puyi English, mathematics and Western history. In addition, Puyi also has a fairly good appreciation of cultural relics in his ears, after all, he grew up in the Forbidden City, which integrates the treasures of the world, and all kinds of tributes have seen the best, and the collection of famous artists is countless.
▲Puyi's household registration stills
In that era of extremely high illiteracy rate, the basic people who could read and write were people with certain economic strength or literary status in the family, and Puyi, as a person who had received a first-class education, although he had not been cold for ten years and had not obtained any diplomas, his level was not generalized by "junior high school". His biography "The First Half of My Life" is well-written, by no means an autobiography of a person without literary skills, in addition to his proficiency in English, listening, speaking, reading, writing and foreign communication, which many college students at that time could not do. Therefore, in many respects he was not inferior to the experts of the time.
epilogue
Li Bai once expressed his pride in "Difficult to Walk": "Long winds and waves will sometimes hang on the clouds and sails to the sea. "Talented people are not buried and can be useful wherever they are. Puyi may not be called a high-ranking eight dou, but in many ways he is also stronger than most people at that time, although he failed to be an emperor by virtue of this, he also did a good job in his position as a cppcc member. Just as the so-called "heaven does not live up to the hard-hearted people", as long as they are willing to work hard and have been accumulating, they will not always be secretly invested in the pearl.
Resources:
"Poetry Sutra Sangrou"
"Difficult to walk"