There is a single sentence about her in five hundred pages. Reginald Johnston, tutor to the last emperor, wrote his memoir in 1934 and mentioned in passing that a Miss Isabel Ingram, the empress’s American friend, sometimes joined their picnics in the garden. That is all. She had spent two years in the Forbidden City, six days a week, in the empress’s private rooms, watching a marriage the whole world had decided was a corpse. The Last Emperor of China by Paul French exists because somebody finally went and read what she wrote.
The Tutor The Last Emperor of China Puts Back
The Ingram of The Last Emperor of China by Paul French was a missionary’s daughter, born in Peking in 1902, raised in and around the city, sent to Wellesley and returned before the ink on the diploma was dry. Her father was an eye specialist at the Rockefeller-funded hospital. Her older sister had the tutoring post first and gave it up to marry. Isabel took over in September 1922, was paid four times what her parents thought reasonable, and spent a good portion of it tipping the eight chair-bearers who carried her in.
The press of four continents ran Johnston in the hundreds of column inches: the Scottish mandarin in sable furs, his weekend cottage in the Western Hills, his medals. The Last Emperor of China by Paul French notes that the young woman doing the identical job for the empress collected a few dozen mentions, most of them written by one journalist and most of them long afterwards. The erasure was almost total, and this book is a corrective rather than a discovery: the papers were never lost, merely unread.
What a Twenty-Year-Old Wrote Down
The diaries are not solemn. They are the record of two young women getting on well in a very strange building. The empress spends an afternoon dressing her tutor in Manchu clothes and the liangbatou headdress, and the emperor, delighted, sends for a photographer and produces a robe from storage that had belonged to the Empress Dowager Cixi. A eunuch brings in boxes of hats for approval, then bracelets, and the empress buys all the small pretty ones and hands the grey spangled ones over. There is an organ, abandoned and dust-covered in one of the northern storerooms, which Ingram has cleaned and moved so the empress can play again.
Some of it is sharper. Ingram is fond of the consort Wenxiu, who gives her a bunch of jasmine buds she has been wearing, and the empress will not let that go. She asks, more than once and always in English, whether her tutor really likes the girl, and then asks whether the girl has a nice face, knowing perfectly well what the answer would have to be. It is a small piece of cruelty played as a joke between friends, and it survives because a twenty-year-old thought it worth writing down that evening.
This is the evidence that does the work in The Last Emperor of China by Paul French. Not a document, not a state paper, but the smuggled chilblain cream for the empress’s frozen feet, the winter lessons abandoned in favour of cross-stitch on a coal-warmed bed because it was more sociable, the emperor wandering in to interrupt and staying to be tickled back. Ninety years of biography has described this marriage as an arrangement between strangers. The person actually in the room described it as noisy.
The Letters That Survived
The other archive is stranger, and it is where The Last Emperor of China by Paul French becomes quietly sad. Johnston wrote to Ingram constantly, though they worked a few courtyards apart. He fretted over chaperones for weekends at his cottage. He hunted married ladies, old or young, ugly or pretty, who might make a visit respectable. And he complained that she had promised to look for him in the audience of an amateur play and had spent the evening looking at somebody else instead. He invented a nagging imaginary housekeeper called Mrs Walkinshaw and used her, for decades, to say things he could not say directly, including that she was jealous of Ingram and had been slightly mollified to learn that Ingram had refused him a farewell kiss.
Those letters exist. Hers do not. After Johnston died in 1938, the woman he had been planning to marry burned his entire correspondence and papers, forty years of it, against his explicit written instruction. It is a loss the book has to work around on every page of its second half, and French is honest that the result is a portrait of one side of a friendship. He is also, reasonably, convinced that the one-sentence mention in the memoir is not indifference but grief. Anyone who has spent time with personal papers in a public archive will recognise the shape of the problem: the story that survives is the story somebody chose not to destroy.
Where The Last Emperor of China Reaches Too Far
The argument is convincing. The book around it is baggier than the two-year frame suggests, and four things in particular slacken The Last Emperor of China by Paul French.
- The set-dressing chapters are borrowed. A long run of foreign visitors describing the palace’s roofs and walls, one after another, until the author concedes in the middle of it that these accounts get repetitive.
- The eunuch history is a separate book. Absorbing, thorough, and it leaves 1923 behind for the Ming dynasty and does not hurry back.
- The intimacy is inferred, not shown. Whether Johnston proposed, and whether Ingram understood what she was refusing, rests on readings of teasing letters. The word surmise appears, correctly, and more than once.
- Twenty-two years in one chapter. Everything after the expulsion, the exile and the opium and the Japanese throne and the terrible ending, arrives at a gallop behind 250 unhurried pages. Defensible as design. Still a rush to read.
Readers who liked the way The Last Emperor of China by Paul French cross-examines its own sources should try Monsters in the Archives by Caroline Bicks, which is similarly interested in what a collection of papers will and will not tell you, or London Falling by Patrick Radden Keefe for a reporter working an old death through documents. Parallel Lives by Iain Pears is the one to reach for if the Johnston letters are what stays with you. On content, the book is unsparing about castration, physical punishment of servants, two suicides, opium addiction and withdrawal, and the killing of an infant.
After the Last Page
On the morning of 5 November 1924 Ingram’s rickshaw took her to the staff gate as usual and found bayonets pointed outward. She argued with the soldiers. She told them her business was with the empress. They laughed at her, nervously, and told her the empress had already gone, hatless and coatless and with no luggage. She went home and waited for news that never really came. Years later she told a Philadelphia paper that the day had been the end of her beautiful China, and she was not being sentimental: she never saw Wanrong again, and Wanrong died in a Manchurian jail cell in 1946 with nobody who had known her anywhere nearby. The Last Emperor of China by Paul French cannot undo any of that. What it can do, and does, is put the person who was actually watching back at the front of the room.