The Empty Throne

Whom did P'u-yi choose to succeed him as Son of Heaven, Lord of Ten Thousand Years, Grand Khan of Tartary? Who might now legitimately claim the empty throne of China? Tony Scotland tracked down the last Emperor's widow and eventually located and unmasked the Manchu Pretender.

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The last Emperor of China died in 1967. Despite an Empress, three successive concubines and a communist wife, he left no children. But no Manchu Emperor, even a "reformed" one, ever dies without leaving an heir to carry out the obligatory rituals of ancestor worship and sacrifice at his tomb: the rules of the Ch'ing Dynasty required only that the heir should be a Manchu prince of the succeeding generation. So whom did P'u-yi choose to succeed him as Son of Heaven, Lord of Ten Thousand Years, Grand Khan of Tartary? Who might now legitimately claim the empty throne of China? With the help of the guide and interpreter, Loud Report, and a Manchurian historian named Professor Wang, Tony Scotland tracked down the last Emperor's widow, with whom he paid his respects at P'u-yi's burial place in the Hall of Revolutionary Heroes in Beijing. And at last, after a series of adventures, he located and unmasked the Manchu Pretender in a mud-floored hovel close to the site of the Imperial Palace. This is a detective story, a travel book, an imperial saga and a romance of modern China.
As Tony Scotland's quest unfolds, he paints in the historical background, while reflecting the rapidly changing face of modern China.