A highly personal (and therefore subjective) telling of Chinese history, spanning 1898 to 1934, and also a rare first-hand experience from inside the Forbidden City. Johnston is an intellectual tutor who grows into a surrogate father to Puyi, and talks in rich detail about China’s transition from a monarchy in chaos, to that of a republic in chaos (Johnston is hugely biased in favour of the monarchy). The book helps you understand the foundation of the 1911 revolution, which was a bigger historical event than the advent of Mao. Equally, the book itself is of historical importance as it was used against Puyi in his trail in 1946 at the International Military Tribunal for the Far East in Tokyo.