brought an end to any hopes of perpetuating their lineage. Puyi’s case seems all the more fateful as, bearing in mind his status as last emperor, the phenomenon takes on an almost metaphysical dimension far beyond his personal destiny. He was, anyway, a sickly child and his fragile state was aggravated over the years by countless Chinese and Western remedies, high-dose injections, prayers, rituals and all sorts of cures, aromatic fumigations and aphrodisiacs extracted from the testicles of various species of mammal, bird and fish, the most famous of which is incontrovertibly the Tibetan ‘grass worm,’ a small flatworm, a plathelminth of the peziza order, about two or three centimetres long, it looks like the grey silkworm and is called Bombyx mori. This worm owes its name to the fact that after it dies in winter its body, buried beneath the Himalayan snow, turns into grass, which eventually pokes through the snow and grows all through the spring, now enjoying an entirely vegetal existence. Even so, massive doses of this powerful aphrodisiac famous for its success were unable to stir the imperial organ from its lethargy Worse than that, they plunged the emperor into states of extreme panic, bringing on outbursts when he believed he was prey to tiny creatures writhing inside his stomach, invading his liver and making their way up to his heart and brain, sometimes claiming it was caterpillars with pearly grey fur that were inside him, breaking him down, eating him up and coupling in his insides to the death, sometimes pointed bamboo shoots that he felt he could see gleaming green, springing up from every part of his body as it cooled, cooled, cooled like a field the day after a lost battle, like a drifting iceberg. Then he would throw himself body and soul into calligraphy, a true art at the time as it still is now. From morning till night he applied himself to copying out the works of another emperor, Huizong (1082-1135) of the Song dynasty, an artistic genius but a very mediocre administrator who also experienced a long period of sterility and undertook an arduous military campaign until the late arrival of his first child, not before he had had an artificial mountain erected to the north of the capital on the advice of a soothsayer. At the end of his reign the country was in ruins and he lost the war. When the ‘Northern Barbarians,’ the Jins, headed for the capital he gave the order, on the advice of another soothsayer, to open the gates of the city, believing a celestial army would come to his aid. He lived his last years—as Puyi would later—in captivity in the absolute silence of the far north, eight thousand kilometres from the palace he could now visit only in his dreams. So few of his works were left in this world that each of them, even down to fragments of letters, assumed an immeasurable value; they were of primordial importance in the imperial family’s collection, and Puyi, who was its sole heir, could enjoy not only admiring them but also copying them. He would spread out on the table a masterpiece, often written on hemp paper coloured yellow by a concoction of vegetable pulp used to protect it from worms and insects, a type of paper used only for transcribing sutras and which acquired an attractive warm grey patina with age. Then he would lay over it a thin sheet of translucent paper covered with a light coating of wax, which meant he could trace with perfect accuracy. He had brushes made just like those used by his predecessor, with bristles of polecat hairs, reputed for their stiffness, arranged around a central point; mastering them takes years of assiduous practice but produces an elastic resistance that lends each stroke a keen powerful edge and transposes every nuance of the calligrapher’s personality. In the Forbidden City there is still a graveyard for the polecat-hair brushes once used by Puyi; each has its own tomb, a headstone and an epitaph written by the emperor himself with the maker’s name, the date it was first used, the day it was scrapped, etc. During these long daily tracing sessions, Puyi felt the giant of Chinese calligraphy guiding his hand, entrusting to him the secret held within each stroke and every character; if we are to believe the diagnosis made by the Court doctors years later, this activity created a hypnotic, emotional, besotted relationship between the tracer and