In 1924, the redoubtable travel-writer Mrs Alec-Tweedie dropped in on the Forbidden City and had tea with the Last Emperor. It was a stilted, awkward affair, for which she ended up writing more words about the wait than the chat itself. She, like everybody else in the 1920s, was fascinated with the absurd situation in the palace, in which the final monarch of the Qing dynasty was effectively held prisoner in a “cruelly restricted golden cage”, ruler of little more than half a city-block, watched and guarded by an army of surly eunuchs, whom he rightly suspected were busily pilfering the family jewels.

Puyi was trapped in limbo while his overthrowers argued over the best way to deal with him. His tutor and adviser, Reginald Johnston, was kept in place by the British in the vague hope there might be a restoration, which would put the UK at the heart of a new constitutional monarchy. Warlords thought he was a toxic reminder of the past, and a potential rallying cry for counter-revolutionaries, and with that in mind, he was best dealt with in the “Romanov” manner: taken out and shot. For the new-formed Chinese Republic he was a clueless aristocrat, best kept out of sight.

Puyi was all too aware of this, and cherished the notion of fleeing from it all and somehow finding a new life in exile. In halting, broken English, he told Mrs Alec-Tweedie of his unlikely plans.

“I go Oxford,” he said.

But he didn’t go Oxford. Not long after their meeting, he was banished from the Forbidden City and escaped to a new limbo in Tianjin. Wisely, as it turned out, he had done some pilfering of his own, and could live for a time on some of the proceeds from the antiques he had liberated from the Forbidden City. Paul French’s new book The Last Emperor of China, is particularly good on the politics of these shenanigans. The prevailing narrative of Puyi’s story is that the eunuchs were nicking all his stuff, and even staged a fire in the palace so that losses were harder to account for. But French reminds us that Puyi and the Republic were in fervent disagreement about whose stuff it actually was. That’s the problem with keeping your monarchy alive after a revolution — they keep pointing out that they still own everything. Was the Forbidden City a super-massive stately home, occupied by the last members of the Aisin Gioro family? Or were they merely living exhibits in a giant museum owned by the state?

French zeroes in on this conundrum, pointing out that both Puyi and his thieving eunuchs were relics of a departed era, with little hope of surviving in the new world order unless they could somehow spirit some of “their” possessions out of the sight of their usurpers. He also pauses his narrative repeatedly, to wander off in illuminating discussions of who these people were. It is as if the Bertolucci film suddenly has an extensive hypertext, freeze-framing on passing faces and downloading their entire history, before restarting the story to show their odd behaviours in a new light.

And so we get back-stories and motivations for a whole bunch of supporting players, including Willem Oudendijk, the Dutch diplomat who is dragged into Puyi’s escape plans, holds some of his stolen goods, and has to tell him that sending the Embassy limo to pick him up would be a diplomatic disaster. Then there’s “Elizabeth” Wanrong, the Empress, and “Grace” Wenxiu, the Emperor’s consort, set up in many a book as seething frenemies, but actually more often giggling co-conspirators. The eunuchs themselves get a chapter in which we see just what they have been through to get there, and just how marooned they are by changing times. And then there are the bit-players, like Dr Ernest Peake, the visiting physician who is fascinated by the whole set-up, and whose son Mervyn is inspired by it to write a whole fantasy about a lone aristocrat, trapped in a castle that is also a prison.

French’s subtitle is “Twilight of the Forbidden City”, which echoes Johnston’s memoir, but also suggests that the Forbidden City itself is the true subject. Someone at his publishers must have also worked out that is’s and of’s and deictic shrapnel are most easily disregarded by search engines, and that before long, this book is sure to be returned as a top search result for anyone looking for Johnston, or Puyi or even the peerless Bernardo Bertolucci film, The Last Emperor.

And, about that: the problem with the Bertolucci film is that it’s really, really good. It is so faithful to the true story in so many ways, its cast so persuasive in their various roles, that it can be difficult to think of Puyi’s life in any other terms. His own memoir was a major source, but was not only ghostwritten at the time for political purposes, but has been shunted and redacted in the 21st century to appease new Party requirements. Reginald Johnston’s own Twilight in the Forbidden City was also a hugely useful resource, but as French points out, it has its omissions.

The most glaring is the one that French addresses most directly — in the 500 pages of his memoir, Johnston only once mentions Isabel Ingram, who was the English tutor to the Empress Wanrong, and in just as intimate a contact with the imperial couple as he was. French has dug up Ingram’s correspondence archive, which not only includes her letters to her sister, but also Johnston’s letters to her — Johnston’s own archives having been destroyed after his death. French believes that Johnston’s silence about Ingram was the result of his disappointment about her rejection of his advances, an unrequited sulk that led to, for example, the fact that Wanrong’s English tutor is only mentioned once in the Bertolucci film.

But Ingram comes alive in French’s book, with her vivid accounts of life with the imperial couple — her own perspective on events already familiar from Johnston, and all-new anecdotes and moments like a disc of movie extras. Photographs from Puyi’s own collection recentre her in the story, which creates a delightfully fresh angle on this well-told tale. In the film, we see Puyi laying his head to the cobblestones, to hear the strange sounds of the world outside. But here, we see him clambering onto the rooftops of his palace-prison, to gaze out upon the bustling world outside, and to hear “the city of sounds”. This is no authorial fancy — French has the pictures to prove it.

Two years after Puyi was expelled from his palace, Mrs Alec-Tweedie returned and found it literally abandoned, left to the ravages of time, untouched since that day.

“It was November when they took flight,” she wrote. “November is a chrysanthemum time, and countless pots were evidently full of growing chrysanthemums and asters. There they stood in 1926 in dozens, the flowers dead and brown, the earth like yellow sand, the pots begrimed with dust.”

Jonathan Clements is the author of A Short History of Beijing. His Ethel Brilliana: The Well-Travelled Mrs Alec-Tweedie, is forthcoming from the History Press. The Last Emperor of China: Twilight of the Forbidden City by Paul French is published by Elliot & Thompson.

“Go west, young man. Go west. Way west.” Beyond the Rocky Mountains, beyond California, across the Pacific, there was still a place where cowboys could be cowboys. For nearly three decades, the out-of-work rodeo riders and cow punchers of the Old West had one last place they could live on – China.

Fred Barton (1889-1967) showed up in China at the tail end of the Qing dynasty, offering to help the Chinese military pep up its strength with a steady supply of proper warhorses, rather than the stocky Mongolian ponies they were used to. He stayed around after the Revolution of 1911, to supply vital mounts to the Chinese Republic and its various warlord helpmeets, including Manchuria’s Zhang Zuolin, who had an entire company of White Russian cavalrymen, the Mukden Lancers.

Barton proposed driving 3,500 Russian Orlov horses from Siberia, through Manchuria and Mongolia, to a ranch in north-west China, where he would breed them with several hundred American Morgans. Before long, this would generate an annual delivery of hundreds of towering battle-ready mounts, ready to supply China’s many conflicts of the 1920s and beyond.

Montana cowboys and eight former horsemen on loan from the US 15th Infantry in Tianjin were drafted to help Fred Barton’s grand enterprise. It didn’t always go to plan. They were watering their 650 Morgan studs on the outskirts of Beijing, when the horses were spooked by the entirely alien odour of a passing line of camels. It took a week to round them all back up again.

Larry Weirather’s book Fred Barton and the Warlords’ Horses of China: How an American Cowboy Brought the Old West to the Far East is thick with detail and local colour about this oddest of historical stories. He relates the unexpected trip-hazard of underground rodent warrens, close to the surface where the hoof of an unsuspecting horse could smash through the roof of a marmot lair. On the plus-side, marmot pelts could be dyed black and passed off as sable to the clueless ladies of the California elite.

The story is a fascinating clash of Wild West clichés with the shock of new, oriental hazards and tall tales. I was particularly taken with the depiction of Kalgan, the westernmost point on the railway that led to Beijing – which is why, incidentally Mannerheim’s ride across Asia stopped there in July 1908, because from that moment on, he could get the train. Weirather describes a city over-run with Mongols, whose steppe ways literally ride rough-shod over the manners and practices of the Chinese residents. Kalgan is the last bastion of the old Silk and Tea Road caravans, where camel trains from the west unload their cargoes.

Accomplished rodeo performers, Barton and his men show off some of their skills to the Mongols. The Mongols, in turn, teach them “horse skiing”, which is like an equine version of water-skiing, impossible on American plains scattered with cacti and scrub, but entirely feasible on the featureless grasslands near the Gobi Desert.

Weirather’s story is rooted in broader issues of climate and technology, some of which played out before Barton was even born. From 1875-1875 it rained a lot on the American prairie, creating huge swathes of verdant grassland, enough for the cattle- and horse-rearing barons to think of it as a practically infinite source of free food. In today’s money, an entrepreneur could clear a profit of a million modern-day dollars by delivering a thousand steers to market.

That all changed with the Great Die-Off of the winter of 1886-1887, which annihilated entire herds out on the prairie, and brought a sudden end to what had once been the “open range”. Grassland was suddenly a resource to be fenced in, and the great long-range cattle drives became a thing of the past.

Meanwhile, the American railroads were making a difference. Cattle could be killed and processed out on the plains, and shipped in refrigerated trucks to the east coast, or even outward across the Atlantic. The internal combustion engine was starting to make a noise of its own, and the prices of horses were fated to dip.

The First World War was the last great horse-trade in history, with the US military prepared to pay up to $225 for a strong beast fit to pull artillery. One and a half million horses went to war in the European theatre. At the outbreak of the war, Russia alone ordered twenty million horseshoes – a sign of the era’s true reliance on live mounts. But in peacetime, horses were soon outpaced by trains and cars and tractors. In 1919, the horse-driver Hadley Robinson reached the banks of the Yellowstone River, expecting to trade his herd at $100 a head. Instead, he was offered only $90, and turned his horses loose in disgust.

Before long, horse-traders were being offered only $12, and by the 1920s, the best deal a trader could get was $10 for the knacker’s yard.

There was, however, one exception. Chinese warlords would pay $350 a head for the best warhorses, which proved to be an irresistible temptation for the last entrepreneurs of the Old West. But Barton’s long horse-drive was fraught with perils, both natural and supernatural. Weirather reports him finding a vast field of impossibly lush grass, only for his Mongol guides to inform him that it is the site of an ancient battle, and that the pasture is so rich because it has fed for centuries on human blood. They have to move on, or risk a Mongol curse.

This whole edifice came crashing down in the 1930s, when the Japanese over-ran much of the Chinese Republican military. Barton’s Taiyuan ranch fell to the Japanese in 1937, whereupon he and his men escaped back to obscurity in the US. China’s next flirtation with foreign “consultants” would be its drive to recruit airmen for the Flying Tigers, but that is another story.

As late as the Korean War in the early 1950s, American POWs reported the sight of Chinese officers riding on what were unmistakeably Morgan horses. They were baffled as to how they got there. As for Fred Barton, he went into what some might describe as a “quiet” retirement, dedicated to preserving artefacts and memorabilia of the Old West, even as the media went crazy for it.

He even became an adviser for Wild West movies, although it seems his consultancy was often ignored. He was particularly animated, for example, about the shapes of the hats worn on screen, which had creases in them of which he highly disapproved: “The Movies and Television today show cowboys riding saddles with little or no cantle, looks like an English saddle with a horn. Also they put cheese hats on the cowboys. I never saw a [sic] open-range cowpuncher with a cheese cake hat.”

This story is not “untold.” Barton told it plenty himself when he was alive, and in 1977, Ralph Miracle published an extensive essay about it in Montana: The Magazine of Western History. Weirather himself has written a book previously on the topic, and this new version adds substantial new information that came to light after people knew where to find him to unload their stories — I will note, however, than in the oh-so-techy 2020s, it took me four tries to get Amazon to show me his book, as it kept correcting his name to “Weather.” Even so, as I so often find myself wondering in my researches, why isn’t this already a movie? Of course, there was Destination Gobi, starring Richard Widmark, which was a heavily fictionalised account of a true story from WW2, in which a band of Navy personnel in China ended up fighting the Japanese with horse-mounted bazookas, using steeds descended from Barton’s stock. But of Barton’s incredible ride, there is no sign in the mass media. Weirather even supplies the perfect framing device for the movie, in which bookseller Richard Upton visits the ageing Barton at his home in the 1960s.

He rings the doorbell, and waits expectantly while someone inside slides bolt after bolt, and unhooks chain after chain, in a series of locks that stretch all the way from the top to the bottom of the door. When it finally opens, Barton looks him up and down, and then says: “You’re five minutes early!”

He slams the door in Upton’s face, and switches back all the locks with agonising slowness, only to immediately unbolt them all again to open the door at the appointed time.

Jonathan Clements is the author of A Brief History of China. Pictures of Fred Barton are from the Archival Collections of the Montana Historical Society.

In the twenty years since I wrote the first edition, the imagery of Chairman Mao has gained new currency in modern China, sometimes literally. In 2012, I found two ladies selling trinkets on a street corner in Xi’an. Their baskets included stacks of ‘ghost money’ – counterfeit cash for filial Chinese to burn on pyres in order to send gifts to their ancestors in the afterlife. It was designed in a reasonable facsimile of real-life 100-yuan notes, printed in red ink and bearing the image of Chairman Mao. Each promised to pay the bearer on demand the sum of ten million yuan, redeemable at the ‘Bank of Hell’. I found it ironic that the man who had once tried to ban both money and superstition should endure as the figurehead on cash for use in the spirit world.

I bought a supposed fortune in ghost money for a knockdown price, since the women were trying to offload their Mao notes as fast as possible. Such realistic ghost money had recently been declared illegal, in a re-establishment of respect for Mao that would see a new edition of his Selected Quotations (the famous Little Red Book) republished a few months later. The following October, when I went looking for ghost money again, I could only buy notes bearing the face of the King of Hell. I would keep my Mao money for a decade, until I was persuaded to burn it on camera for William Shatner’s The UnXplained to demonstrate how to turn my ancestors into millionaires.

Only two months after I bought the last of the Mao ghost money on the street, China’s new president Xi Jinping delivered a stirring speech about his plans for the nation during what would turn out to be his lifelong term in office. He was determined, he said, for the Chinese Communist Party to celebrate its centenary in 2021 without any slanders or smears committed against it by hostile forces peddling an incorrect version of history. In doing so, he used the phrase ‘historical nihilism’ (lishi xuwuzhuyi), a term that has come to colour huge areas in subsequent discourse.

Thereafter, if I described myself as a historian, people became noticeably jumpy. There was, after all, now a hotline for concerned citizens to call if they encountered anyone suspected of harming the reputation of the Communist Party and its role in creating the new China. History was now whatever the Party said it was, which has effectively criminalised anyone who dares to question it.

From the introduction to the new edition of Mao by Jonathan Clements.

“The set outside looks unfamiliar. By which I mean that we are used to seeing the same buildings dressed, and redressed and reused in multiple movies shot on the Shaw Brothers backlot, but this is not a film by Shaw Brothers. Where are they getting that village from? If it’s not somewhere in Hong Kong, where is it?

“Well, the answer is supplied as we ride off, because right there you can see a very distinctive gorge with a road that’s been cut into the side of it. And that is not in Hong Kong at all. That is Taroko Gorge in eastern Taiwan, now known as Taroko National Park, one of a few river valleys to be cut through marble, and the sacred territory of the Truku people.

“So really it should be called Truku Gorge, but we use the pronunciation first established internationally when the place was a Japanese colony in the early 20th century. The thing about Taroko Gorge, is it, like everywhere else in Taiwan, has been subjected to a feverish renovation and rebuilding project since 1949, as the Kuomintang, the ruling Nationalist party, try to establish that Taiwan has always been part of China.

“So if anywhere is going to get little lion statues, and intricately carved fairy tale bridges, and little pagodas, shoved up in the 20 years before the film crew showed up, it’s Taroko Gorge, which is great. Because Lo Wei wants to make a film in a place that looks like China, and here we have the KMT shovelling as much cement as they can to oblige.”

From my commentary track to Arrow Films’ forthcoming Blu-ray release of Golden Harvest’s The Hurricane, drawing on the materials I used for my Rebel Island: The Incredible History of Taiwan.

“Some scholars have argued that far from clinging to the past until they were overwhelmed, the Qing dynasty created modern China in 1644, by establishing a previously unseen level of centralized control, and by wiping out the northern border problem. The Qing dynasty is hence, in the words of William T. Rowe, ‘a constantly moving target,’ only passing from living memory in the twenty-first century.

“We might equally argue that the period of ‘humiliation’ began not in the 1840s, but two hundred years earlier, in 1644, when the first and most successful foreign element, the Manchus themselves, swept in from the north-east to form a lasting, exploitative aristocracy.

“Or, if we accept, as all modern Chinese books do, that the Manchus were simply another sector of the Chinese world, and that they were hence not really foreign, then surely their regime, with its wars of conquest in Central Asia, its self-assurance of its racial and cultural superiority, and a military mission that doubled the size of Chinese territory in the space of 150 years, was an immensely successful imperialist power, not all that different in attitude from the outsiders that would bring it down.”

From A Brief History of China by Jonathan Clements, and hopefully shedding a little light on the politicised arguments behind the shelving of The Battle for Penghu.

Over at the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, I update my entry on China with details of the relatively new sub-genre of stories in which time-travelling boffins try to make China great again.

My voice sneaks onto the Lost Rivers documentary by my old Route Awakening cohorts in Singapore. I pop up on a couple of occasions, and sadly they didn’t use the takes where I tried to perform in the voice of David Bowie.