the man whose work he traced, and gave rise to the particular brand of self-sublimation referred to by the strange term ‘transference.’ So the young emperor felt he was slipping into the persona of another captive monarch; when he dipped his brush in ink, when the bristles swelled, filling with the exact measure of ink Huizong would have used, Puyi found himself in a prison camp eight hundred years earlier, looking at a snow-covered landscape, at the tents for guards and prisoners, at vast plains and the summits of distant hills. He held his breath, his hand exerted its gentle pressure, a concentration of all Huizong’s stylistic precision and elegance. Under this pressure, the point of long polecat hairs released the correct amount of ink onto the paper, or rather it was Puyi’s personality which was released onto it, or, as he often claimed, Huizong’s. Over time he confused the traces of ink with trails of urine that left furrows in the thick carpet of snow inside Huizong’s tent one stormy night. The unfortunate prisoner, tormented by a prostate problem, had woken in the middle of the night but not had time to reach the latrines outside. Sometimes, while he was copying, Puyi shed tears which ran over the waxed tracing paper, and the traces of those tears can be seen to this day on the yellow hemp paper of one of Huizong’s works conserved at the Tokyo Museum. He would fly into a tantrum when he failed to master a vital technique—one that was not particular to Huizong but also adopted by other great calligraphers—which consisted in always working with a raised hand, without leaning either hand or elbow on the table so that, by suspending the entire arm, the pressure exerted by the point of the brush on the paper could be regulated, allowing each movement to take wing with complete freedom, and creating a rhythmic sequence of downstrokes and upstrokes. The moment Puyi lifted his wrist in the air it stopped obeying him and quivered like a leaf, which put him into a paroxysm of rage and, perverse as he was, the only way he could calm himself was to take pleasure in the suffering of others: with a gloved hand he would whip or cave in the skull of one or several eunuchs who had witnessed his failure, his sadistic inspiration conceiving hideous tortures for the sole pleasure of hearing his victims weep and beg and shriek in pain.
“Early in April 1925, thirteen years after the fall of the empire, Puyi was released from his gilded prison, the Forbidden City, guarded by the newly formed Republican Army, following a sort of epileptic fit which plunged him into a profound state of lethargy and left him more dead than alive. He was moved to the Japanese concession of Tianjin, south of Peking, where he stayed in bed for weeks on end, and only smiled again when a procession of porters some two kilometres long arrived, their shoulders chafing under great swaying trunks. There were three thousand of them, all filled with precious objects collected by his ancestors, but in his eyes the most beautiful of these trunks full of national treasures, of streaming pearls, rivers of diamonds, cascades of jade, gold, porcelain, copper, sculptures, paintings, calligraphy, etc., was the one set aside for the works of Emperor Huizong. As soon as his convalescence was under way, he threw himself back into his masters works in order, this time, to copy the paintings, a field in which Huizong excelled perhaps even more than in calligraphy, occupying a position comparable to that of Modigliani or Degas in Western painting.
“No one could be absolutely sure what his recovery could be attributed to: Was it Huizong’s painting or the Japanese sumo wrestler by the name of Yamata whose body was so huge his tiny head seemed to be tucked inside his sloping shoulders, and who played an indispensable part in the emperors day-to-day life? Towards noon Puyi would indicate he was awake by ringing a bell and the sumo wrestler, naked as the day he was born, would approach him, moving like a silent mountain, and carry him to the bathroom in his warm arms that were as soft as any woman’s. He would lay him in a marble bath where the temperature of the water had been regulated and was scrupulously monitored—using a German thermometer—by the sumo himself, who knew that the least discrepancy in heat would provoke a fresh