I. The Glory of the Gobulo Clan
A Family Among the Eight Banners
The Gobulo (郭布羅) clan — the family into which Wanrong was born — was of Daur ancestry and registered under the Manchu Plain White Banner. It had earned its place among the Eight Banners through military service, and the blood and pride of a military aristocracy had been passed down through the generations.
The Eight Banners (Baqi) were the unique military and political organization of the Manchu people, formally established by Nurhaci in 1615. Originally a Manchu institution, it eventually incorporated Mongol and Han Chinese units as well. The eight banners were distinguished by color — yellow, white, red, and blue — each appearing in two forms: “plain” (zheng, a solid color) and “bordered” (xiang, with a contrasting border). Among the eight, three held the highest rank: the Plain Yellow Banner, the Bordered Yellow Banner, and the Plain White Banner. These were known as the “Upper Three Banners” (Shang San Qi) — directly commanded by the emperor himself, responsible for guarding the palace and serving in the imperial administration. The remaining five were the “Lower Five Banners,” led by imperial princes and nobles.
Wanrong belonged to the Manchu Plain White Banner — one of the Upper Three Banners. She was not merely from a family “enrolled in the Eight Banners.” She came from the emperor’s own banners, the highest tier of the Qing military aristocracy. Puyi himself belonged to the Plain Yellow Banner. Both stood at the very summit of the banner system.
The Era of Great-Grandfather and Grandfather
Wanrong’s great-grandfather served as deputy commander-in-chief during the reign of the Xianfeng Emperor, establishing the clan’s foundation as a military noble family.
His son — Wanrong’s grandfather, Changshun (長順) — served under three successive emperors, Xianfeng, Tongzhi, and Guangxu, and represented the peak of the clan’s glory. His military achievements earned him the highest postings, including General of Uliastai and General of Jilin, and he guarded the frontier for decades. He played a significant role in suppressing the Muslim rebellion in what is now Xinjiang, and in resisting Russian encroachment.
As General of Jilin in the Guangxu era, he carried out bureaucratic reform, bandit suppression, and disaster relief, and supervised the compilation of the 122-volume local history Jilin Tongzhi. This work remains an important source for the history and geography of China’s northeast to this day.
Father: Rongyuan
Wanrong’s father, Rongyuan (榮源), was a high-ranking official who had studied at the Imperial University of Peking. A man of progressive ideas, he championed gender equality and placed great importance on educating his children.
Wanrong’s birth mother, Hengxin (恒馨), came from the imperial Aisin-Gioro clan, but died when Wanrong was very small. Wanrong was raised by her stepmother, Hengxiang (恒香), also a woman of the imperial clan. Through her mother’s line, Wanrong descended from the Qianlong Emperor, by way of his eldest son, Yonghuang — just as Puyi descended from Qianlong through the Jiaqing Emperor.
Among the Qianlong Emperor’s descendants in the imperial clan, a person’s generation can be read from the first character of their name — daughters as well as sons. Puyi belonged to the Pu (溥) generation, and so did Wanrong’s maternal great-grandfather, Puxu. Her maternal grandfather Yuchang was of the next generation, Yu (毓), and her mother Hengxin of the one after that, Heng (恒). Wanrong herself bore no such character, because her father’s clan was Gobulo, not Aisin-Gioro. By the reckoning of the imperial clan, she stood three generations below the man she married.
✦ Satoe’s Take: Although the Gobulo clan held a place among the Eight Banners, the family’s true rise to power began only in the generation of Wanrong’s great-grandfather — and the clan was Daur, not Manchu by origin. It was a relatively new presence among the Qing’s established noble families. Yet Wanrong herself belonged to the Plain White Banner — one of the Upper Three Banners, directly under the emperor’s command. A marriage alliance with the imperial house would have been a powerful way to cement the family’s status. What is striking is that even though ten years had passed since the fall of the Qing dynasty, Wanrong’s father still paid an enormous bribe of 200,000 silver taels to secure for her the position of empress. To spend nearly the entire family fortune on a marriage into a dynasty that no longer held real power — in that desperate act, one senses the extraordinary ambition of a military family determined to raise its honor still higher through a blood connection to the imperial house. For a family of the Upper Three Banners, the empress’s seat was not an overreach. In their eyes, it was where they belonged.
II. The Woman Called Wanrong
Her Education
Rongyuan ensured that his daughter received the same traditional education in music, weiqi, calligraphy, and painting as her brothers — and went further still, hiring an English tutor. Wanrong grew up grounded in the Chinese classics and familiar with the Western world.
Among noblewomen of the late Qing, it was exceedingly rare to be versed in both Chinese and Western learning. With the refinement of an illustrious family and abundant talent of her own, Wanrong was a truly extraordinary figure.
✦ Satoe’s Take: I believe her father was convinced that Wanrong — beautiful, talented, educated in both Chinese and Western traditions, fluent in English, and capable of representing the court in foreign diplomacy — was the very model of a “twentieth-century empress.” The court had long chosen empresses for their bloodline above all else, right up to the empress of the Guangxu Emperor. But this university-educated progressive seems to have found his ideal in a modern woman who combined intellect, beauty, and languages.
The Cost of Entering the Palace
The imperial court, however, was a world far removed from her father’s ideals. To install Wanrong as empress, he paid 200,000 silver taels in bribes to court officials, consuming nearly the entire family fortune.
Her Siblings
Wanrong’s elder brother Runliang married Puyi’s eldest sister, Yunying (韞媖), who died young in 1925. Her younger half-brother Runqi married Puyi’s third sister, Yunying (韞穎), in 1932. Through Wanrong’s entry into the palace, the Gobulo family became doubly bound to the Qing imperial house.
Runqi studied at the Imperial Japanese Army Academy and served close to Puyi during the Manchukuo period. Fluent in several languages, he lived a turbulent life — from the son of a noble, to a war criminal, to an ordinary citizen. In his later years he worked as a researcher and practiced traditional medicine, and devoted himself to restoring his sister’s reputation. He insisted again and again that Wanrong was not a madwoman, but a victim of a feudal marriage and the tragedies of her age.
III. Entering the Palace — The Vanished Gate, the Ghost Gate, and the Emperor Who Could Only Wait
What the Gates of the Forbidden City Tell Us
The gates of the Forbidden City speak more eloquently than any words. Who passed through which gate was an unspoken declaration of exactly who that person was.
In the Qing cosmological worldview, direction was bound to destiny. South was the direction of yang, the Son of Heaven, legitimacy, and life. North was the direction of yin, death, flight, and endings. East was associated with ghosts, the dead, and ill omen. The gates of the Forbidden City embodied this cosmology.
The Gate an Empress Was Meant to Use
The gates an empress was properly meant to pass through were the Daqing Gate and the Meridian Gate (Wumen). The Daqing Gate, which stood at the southern end of what is now Tiananmen Square, was the highest-ranking gate of the Qing dynasty — permitted only to the emperor, the empress dowager, and the empress. An empress was allowed to pass through it on her wedding day, and on that day only.
Beyond the Meridian Gate lay the Hall of Supreme Harmony, the Hall of Central Harmony, and the Hall of Preserved Harmony — the very heart of Qing power. To enter through the southern gate was to connect directly with the center of power. It was not mere ceremony; it was a declaration: “This woman belongs to the legitimate lineage and power of the dynasty.”
But the Meridian Gate was not simply one opening. It had five passageways, each assigned to a different rank. The central passage was reserved for the emperor alone — with two exceptions: an empress passed through it on her wedding day, and the top three scholars of the imperial examination were permitted to walk through it once, on the day their results were announced. On either side of the center were passages for civil officials on the left and military officials on the right. The two outermost passages, set into the flanking walls, were for everyone else. Even “entering through the Meridian Gate” was subdivided by rank. For an empress, to enter properly meant to walk the very same central path as the emperor — a declaration in stone and space that she stood beside him at the pinnacle of the dynasty.
The Gate for Imperial Consorts — and Empress Dowager Cixi
Imperial consorts entered through the Gate of Divine Prowess (Shenwumen) in the north — the direction of yin, flight, and endings. Women undergoing the imperial selection (xiunü) entered through this gate; those who were rejected left through the same gate.
Empress Dowager Cixi was one of them. She passed through the Shenwu Gate because she had been chosen as a consort. The principal consort — later the Eastern Empress Dowager — had entered the Forbidden City as empress through the Daqing Gate. The gates they passed through told the whole story of the difference in their ranks.
And yet Cixi seized power equal to — indeed greater than — that of the Eastern Empress Dowager. A member of the imperial family is said to have remarked to Cixi, “Those who entered through the Shenwu Gate ought to leave through the Shenwu Gate.” It was a devastating line: Have you forgotten which gate you walked through?
The Gate Wanrong Actually Used — the East Glorious Gate (Donghuamen)
The gate Wanrong passed through was the East Glorious Gate (Donghuamen). In the Qing dynasty, the coffins of emperors, empresses, and members of the imperial family were carried out through this gate. During the reign of the Jiaqing Emperor, rebels tried to storm the Forbidden City through it. It also served as the everyday entrance and exit for court officials. People called it the “Ghost Gate” — not in the Japanese feng shui sense, where the unlucky direction is the northeast, but in the Chinese sense: the gate through which the souls of the dead pass. The gate of coffins, the gate of the departed.
Why the East Glorious Gate?
The reason lay in political reality. By 1922, the Qing dynasty had fallen ten years earlier. Under the Articles of Favorable Treatment of the Great Qing Emperor, the Outer Court — including the Daqing Gate, the Meridian Gate, and the Three Great Halls — had come under the administration of the Beiyang government. The only space left to Puyi’s small court was the Inner Court, north of the Qianqing Gate. That Wanrong could not pass through the Daqing Gate and the Meridian Gate was not a deliberate snub. It was the harsh reality imposed on a fallen dynasty.
✦ Satoe’s Take: Those Articles of Favorable Treatment were the legacy of Empress Dowager Longyu, who agreed to the abdication in 1912 in exchange for them. In my article on Longyu, I called the court they preserved a goldfish bowl — a small world kept alive for its residents. Wanrong was marrying into that bowl. And the very narrowness of the bowl Longyu had secured is what closed the southern gates to her and sent her through the Ghost Gate.
After repeated negotiations between the office in charge of the grand wedding and the Beiyang government, it was decided, as an exception, to open the long-closed East Glorious Gate for Wanrong’s palanquin alone. A red notice was hung on the left column of the gate: “All attendees and well-wishers are to enter through the Shenwu Gate.” To open the so-called Ghost Gate exclusively for the empress, with every consideration possible — that was the best a fallen dynasty could do.
That same day, the secondary consort Wenxiu entered through the Shenwu Gate.
The Emperor Who Could Only Wait — in the Palace of Heavenly Purity
And Puyi was waiting in the Palace of Heavenly Purity (Qianqinggong). He could not enter the Outer Court. He was not free even to go to the gate to receive his bride. The seventeen-year-old emperor had access to only half of his own palace. Records note that the ceremony was hurried and the emperor did not come out to greet her — but that was not coldness. It was powerlessness.
✦ Satoe’s Take: Wanrong is the only empress who was able to pass through neither the Daqing Gate nor the Meridian Gate. She became empress without ever once experiencing the proper ceremonies of her rank. And the meaning of that vanished gate has since been erased twice over. The Daqing Gate was demolished, and near its site now stands the Chairman Mao Memorial Hall. On Tiananmen, a massive portrait of Mao Zedong hangs on high. To physically erase the gate Wanrong should have passed through, and to place new symbols of authority on that very ground — a conqueror raising his own monument over the most sacred symbols of the old dynasty is the clearest message power has always sent. The gate Wanrong should have passed through no longer exists, and few people today know what it once meant. A double erasure lies there.
I have visited the Forbidden City myself. The moment I passed through the Meridian Gate, I stopped in my tracks — the scene before me was the coronation scene from the film The Last Emperor, come to life. The colossal U-shaped wall with its five towers stretching left and right, the vast courtyard opening up beyond — it overwhelms the body as much as the eye. You understand immediately: this space was designed to make everyone who enters feel small before imperial power. The Donghuamen, by contrast, I never even saw. My guide told me it was not worth visiting, and I walked past. I did not know then that it was the gate Wanrong had passed through. That gap — between the gate that crushes you with its grandeur and the gate dismissed as not worth a glance — is itself the story of Wanrong’s wedding day.
IV. Life in the Forbidden City
The Palace of Gathered Elegance — from Empress Dowager Cixi to Wanrong
The Palace of Gathered Elegance (Chuxiugong), where Wanrong lived, bears a name meaning “to cultivate virtue and talent.” It was rebuilt in 1655 (the 12th year of Shunzhi), and in 1884 (the 10th year of Guangxu) it underwent a massive reconstruction costing 630,000 silver taels to celebrate Empress Dowager Cixi’s 50th birthday. The formerly separate Yikungong and Chuxiugong were joined into a grand complex of four courtyards. Once home to Cixi herself, it was one of the most modern spaces in the entire Forbidden City.
✦ Satoe’s Take: Just how vast was 630,000 silver taels? Records from the Daoguang Emperor’s reign show that the entire annual expenditure of the imperial court did not exceed 200,000 taels. In other words, this single renovation consumed more than three years of the Daoguang court’s whole budget. The famously thrifty Daoguang Emperor would likely have fainted at the news.
After entering the palace in 1922, Wanrong lived here. She remodeled the Lijingxuan hall at the rear of the Chuxiugong into a Western-style dining room, with crystal chandeliers, a piano, and even a Western-style bathroom.
A Westernized Daily Life
In that dining room, Wanrong taught Puyi how to use a knife and fork, how to eat steak, and how to drink coffee.
She studied English with an American teacher, Isabel Ingram, and Puyi and Wanrong called each other by English names — “Henry” and “Elizabeth.” A telephone line connected Puyi’s Hall of Mental Cultivation (Yangxindian) with Wanrong’s Chuxiugong.
Bicycles — A Small Rebellion
To understand why this mattered, one must first know what court ladies were expected to wear. They wore elaborate hair ornaments and platform shoes with high, thick soles, known as “flowerpot shoes.” The formal headdress called the da la chi — a large frame covered in blue satin and decorated with kingfisher feathers and jewels — was so heavy that the slightest quick movement made it sway. The platform shoes put enormous strain on the ankles, and simply walking carried a real risk of a sprain. Even modern actresses in period dramas have said the costume frightened them: the head feels so heavy, and they worried about twisting an ankle. So court ladies were carried in palanquins or walked slowly, supported by attendants. That was the palace’s idea of “normal.”
Both Wanrong and Puyi loved cycling, and the palace held dozens of new bicycles imported from Britain, Germany, and France. In an era when bicycles — called “iron donkeys” — were extraordinarily expensive, Wanrong often ordered the latest models.
To pedal swiftly through spaces where one was supposed to glide slowly on attendants’ arms — no wonder the court was bewildered. Eunuchs had to jog alongside to keep the empress from falling.
The heavy headdress made cycling impossible, so Wanrong took it off and pinned her hair with silver hairpins instead. Clothing was another problem. A qipao was meant to cover the feet entirely, with something like trousers worn beneath — but those were considered underwear. Cycling made the hem ride up and expose them: in modern terms, showing one’s underwear in public. Showing the feet was itself a serious taboo. In the Qing dynasty, a woman’s feet carried sexual connotations, and exposing them was a grave breach of chastity. Even the glimpse of an embroidered shoe-tip was not mere carelessness; it struck at something deep in the court’s moral code. When Wanrong tucked her long qipao into a belt to move freely, the court must have seen an empress behaving far beneath her station. And to ride at all, she had flat shoes, something like ballet flats, made for herself — which also scandalized those around her.
To let Wanrong ride freely, Puyi had the thresholds of the palace halls sawed down, and even had wooden ramps built over the tall steps. To appreciate how extraordinary this was, one must understand what the threshold meant in Chinese culture.
The threshold (menkan) began as a practical device: to keep out rainwater, dust, sand, snakes, rats, and insects, and to protect the base of the doors. But in China it had long carried a meaning beyond its function. The Book of Rites states that officials entering and leaving the ruler’s gate must not step on the threshold; stepping over it without touching it was a mark of respect. The height of a threshold showed a household’s rank and standing — the more powerful the family, the higher the threshold. The expression “the threshold is too high,” still used in Japanese today, means something is beyond one’s reach. The thresholds of the Forbidden City were symbols of the order and authority of the Qing dynasty itself. To saw them down was to literally cut apart that order for Wanrong’s sake. In the eyes of the court, it could only look like a desecration of dynastic dignity.
A Lonely Empress
Yet Wanrong’s life in the palace was lonely. Puyi almost never shared a bed with her, and in the two years after their marriage he visited the Chuxiugong only a handful of times.
She often sat by lamplight writing letters to Puyi in English, signed “Elizabeth.” In the quiet of the night she would sit alone before her mirror, gazing at herself with a kind of self-mockery. It was common knowledge at court that the emperor and empress did not share a bed.
In the stifling life of the palace, Wanrong sought every pleasure she could find. She kept dogs and fed them beef and pork liver — at a time when most ordinary Chinese could not afford such food for themselves. And the habit of smoking the water pipe began to take hold.
In China at the time, “smoking” meant the water pipe, not modern cigarettes, and it was widely popular even at court. People had long added flavorings to the tobacco, such as jasmine and other fragrant herbs. So adding opium felt, at first, like little more than trying a new flavor that made the smoke more pleasant. Opium also calmed the mind and dulled pain, which made it all the more welcome. Tobacco blended with opium had reached China as early as the 17th century, and the later British trade in Indian opium spread the habit on a vast scale — the chain of events that led to the Opium Wars. Wanrong, too, was drawn from the water pipe into opium in the course of this same current.
✦ Satoe’s Take: In the film The Last Emperor, Wanrong is shown smoking opium with something like a cigar — but that differs from historical reality. Once you understand the smoking culture of the time, you see that her addiction could only have come through the gateway of the water pipe. Without showing that, the true circumstances of her tragedy cannot be accurately conveyed.
V. The Day They Left the Forbidden City
On November 5, 1924, after Feng Yuxiang’s coup, Puyi was ordered to leave the Forbidden City that very day. At that moment, he was reportedly eating an apple in the Chuxiugong.
Puyi kept silent. The secondary consort Wenxiu suggested that leaving might be acceptable, but Wanrong firmly objected.
Yet that same day, Wanrong left the Forbidden City with Puyi. The gate they passed through was not the East Glorious Gate but the Gate of Divine Prowess — the northern gate of the Inner Court.
✦ Satoe’s Take: On the day she entered the palace, Wanrong passed through the East Glorious Gate — the gate of ghosts and ill omen. On the day she left, she passed through the Shenwu Gate — the direction of yin, flight, and endings. She left the Forbidden City through the gate that imperial consorts used to enter. She had never entered with the ceremonies befitting an empress, and her departure, too, was not through a proper gate.
The Shenwu Gate is also the gate of a dynasty’s ending. In 1644, the Chongzhen Emperor of the Ming passed through it on his way to Jingshan, where he took his own life. That day, the Ming ended. In 1924, Puyi and Wanrong passed through the same gate. They would never return, and with that moment the Qing, too, reached its true end. The gate one passes through declares one’s fate — and Wanrong’s life was exactly that.
✦ Satoe’s Take: Wanrong had entered through the Ghost Gate, and on the day she left she once again followed a destiny she had not chosen. The palace to which her father had sent her at the cost of 200,000 silver taels gave her the name of empress, but not a place to live as one. The vanished gate, the emperor who could only wait, the lonely nights — and yet Wanrong never, to the very end, let go of being “the empress.” Was that pride? Or submission to fate?
✦ Satoe’s Take: In The Last Emperor, Puyi’s expulsion shows him squinting into blinding light as he crosses an open square and exits through what looks like a southern gate. But this cannot be right. By then, the southern Outer Court and its great gates were under the Beiyang government. Puyi had no access to the south. He left through the Shenwu Gate in the north. Bertolucci used the gates as visual poetry — the blinding light of the outside world, the passage from darkness into dazzling freedom. It is beautiful cinema. But the gates of the Forbidden City were never just a backdrop. Who passed through which gate, and in which direction, declared who that person was and what their fate would be. That, I think, Bertolucci did not grasp.
Perhaps this is, at root, a difference in how East and West see the world. To a Western eye, the scene reads as liberation — a man stepping out of a closed world into the open air. To an Eastern eye, passing north through the Shenwu Gate means something else entirely: the end of a dynasty. The same gate through which the Chongzhen Emperor walked to his death in 1644. What Bertolucci filmed as release, a Japanese viewer would recognize as a march toward extinction. The same gate, the same light — two opposite meanings, depending on which side of the world you were born on.
I have walked through the Shenwu Gate myself. There is no open square on the other side. Step out through that north-facing gate, and Jingshan rises immediately before you. There is no blinding light, no moment where the eyes must adjust. The gate Bertolucci filmed is simply not this gate. My daughter and I climbed Jingshan together, and as we walked I said to her, “It’s hard to imagine the Chongzhen Emperor climbing up here.” Partway up the hill is the spot where the last Ming emperor is said to have hanged himself. Looking back from the hill, the golden roof tiles of the Forbidden City lay layered and gleaming in the light. The Chongzhen Emperor, who ended his life on Jingshan, and Puyi, who was pushed out through the Shenwu Gate — both reached the end of their dynasty with no means of facing the reality before them. The same gate had witnessed the endings of two dynasties.
VI. After the Forbidden City — To Be Continued
Wanrong wore the phoenix robe, the mark of an empress. Yet the Qing dynasty had fallen ten years before, and Puyi was an emperor without a throne and without real power. From the very beginning, she was given only the form of an empress, never its substance. The gate she should have passed through was closed to her; the central path she should have walked, her feet never trod; the ceremonies were never completed. She never became an empress of the Qing in the full sense of the word.
What followed — her radiant years in Tianjin as “Elizabeth,” her own fateful choice to follow Puyi to Manchukuo, the slow destruction of her mind and body there, and her death in a Yanji prison in 1946 — is the story of Part II. And yet, until the very end, Wanrong went on believing that she was the empress. Was that pitiable? Or did she hold onto something no one could ever take from her?
→ Continue to Part II — Wanrong in Manchukuo: Opium, Collapse, and the “Fake Empress”
“Satoe’s Take” represents the author’s personal analysis and interpretation. Please read it as distinct from the documented historical record. This article is part of the Late Qing Dynasty Series on the blog Kanreki Sanpo (還暦散歩).
Related: Yoshiko Kawashima Beyond “The Last Emperor”: What Her Japanese Hometown Remembers