I have designed a lot of themed travel routes, never thought that there would be a trip related to Puyi, until recently found that there are many Puyi or once lived in the northeast of the palace, some of which are still deserted into ruins, which began to have an interest in his whereabouts.
The relationship with Puyi was in the big chestnut town of The border between China and North Korea, and the companion said that there was a Puyi abdication palace there, so we stopped by to see it.
Linjiang Railway Bridge on the border between China and North Korea
The town of Big Chestnut is on the Yalu River, about ten kilometers away from Linjiang City. It's a very ordinary town with signs of decay. The former train is now out of service, the railway is abandoned, and the side of the tunnel has collapsed.
I had passed by here two years ago, and the ordinary appearance of the town did not attract my attention in the slightest, and no one could have imagined that Puyi would abdicate here without doing my homework in advance.
Big Chestnut Town
North Korea across the street from the town of Big Chestnut
In "The First Half of My Life", Puyi said that after the Soviet army invaded Changchun, the Japanese army planned to retreat to southern Manchuria and establish Tonghua as the capital of the country, but why he fled to Tonghua and then went to the remote Linjiang, the book does not introduce.
I guess the Japanese may have let Puyi take refuge in Linjiang for a while, and then move to Tonghua when the war is stable.
The Linjiang area produces coal and iron ore, and Japan has been deeply cultivating here for many years since the Russo-Japanese War, and the ruling foundation and military system are relatively solid, and the Linjiang River is next to Korea, with a railway, mountains and mountains, easy to defend and difficult to attack, and it is indeed a suitable place to retreat.
However, the situation changed too quickly, the Japanese army was defeated like a landslide, Puyi fled to Linjiang for a few days, and Japan announced its surrender. After that, when he went to Tonghua, he did not prepare to build a capital, but fled to Japan.
Abandoned railway lines and tunnels from Linjiang to big chestnut town
Turn right from the G331 National Highway, just enter the town of Big Chestnut, you can see a bungalow on the side wall painted with the "Puyi Xuanzhao Abdication Memorial Hall" indication sign, towards the direction of the sign can see a red brick wall in the iron gate, the iron door above the iron door, engraved "Pseudo-Manchu Emperor Puyi Palace". Looking in through the iron gate, those ordinary houses were the emperor's last palace.
Inside the courtyard of the palace
There is no luxurious decoration in the palace, which has now been transformed into a museum, telling the life of Puyi with words and pictures and a small number of cultural relics, compared with the introduction of Puyi in the Changchun Puppet Manchu Palace, here focuses on the story of Puyi's escape to this place.
Inside the museum
The Great Chestnut Palace now looks like a humble bungalow, but it was the best place in the neighborhood at the time, and its predecessor was the residence of the Japanese-built Big Chestnut Coal Mine Chief. Puyi and Empress Wanrong, as well as Li Yuqin, a fugui man, lived here, while the rest lived in another coal mine staff dormitory.
Set in the palace bungalow
But no matter how this is also a small bungalow that is broken, Puyi said in his autobiography "The First Half of My Life", "This kind of Japanese-style room cannot be well soundproofed, and it is noisy all day long." ”
Come to think of it, in that kind of life-and-death moment of escape, people's nerves are tense, and a little weak voice will make people extremely anxious, not to mention Puyi, who is tortured to the nerves.
Fortunately, he lived in such a noisy broken bungalow for less than a week, and then announced his abdication to Shenyang to prepare for his escape to Japan.
After that, everyone knows the story, Puyi was intercepted by the Soviet army in Shenyang to the Soviet Union, and after returning, he was imprisoned in the Fushun War Criminals Management Center (he moved to Harbin during the War to Resist US Aggression and Aid Korea), and thus began his career of repentance.
The movie "The Last Emperor" is puyi's trip back from the Soviet Union to return to China, this famous Oscar-winning movie I just made up because I want to write a travelogue, I tried to watch it once before, but the English lines are too dramatic, did not stick to it.
This time I watched the movie in its entirety, survived the first half of the paragraph to ignore the English lines, but still came out of the play - after seeing Puyi's real picture and the narrative of his life, Zun Long with a tough face is too dramatic.
The real Puyi is really not so sunny, if the confession in "The First Half of My Life" is his real experience, then he is too cowardly, too timid, and it is difficult to associate with the image of Zun Long in the movie.
Puyi
Zun Long
In "The First Half of My Life", Puyi recounts that he served as a puppet emperor in Changchun, he was oppressed by the Japanese to be mentally abnormal, always abusing his relatives, friends and servants, after torturing others, his conscience was too unwilling to go, and he had to pray for forgiveness and blessing from various gods and Buddhas.
Puppet Manchurian Palace
As a person who has not completely lost his personality, puppets are not so easy to do. In this life, he has never been at the mercy of others, not only at the mercy of others, but also to spread out the dark and weak side of his heart to everyone to see and analyze.
In fact, in the years of puppet Manchukuo, Puyi was essentially under house arrest, and he only had one chance to go on a tour a year, and he had to be under the supervision of the Japanese.
Although the Puppet Manchu Palace is luxurious, it is actually a luxurious cage.
Because of the chance encounter in the town of Big Chestnut, I became a little interested in Puyi, so I searched for his information on the Internet and found that there were two palaces built for his southern tour in Liaoning Province, one was the palace in Qingchengzi Town, Fengcheng, and the other was the palace in Langtou Town, Dandong.
Overlooking the Qingcheng Zi Palace
Qingcheng Zigong is in the middle of a residential area, and if I hadn't seen the stone stele protected by cultural relics in front of the door, I would have thought that this palace was forged on the basis of Japanese-style houses.
On the one hand, Qingcheng sub-town is too remote, 100 kilometers away from Fengcheng City, and the scale is not large, it is a very ordinary town, it is difficult to imagine that there will be a palace in such a place;
On the other hand, qingchengzi palace is very peculiar, and the word "royal palace" hanging above its gate is brightly hanging, which is a bit funny, because the general palace does not seem to really write "palace", such a plaque will only appear in cartoons, it feels like the dragon palace in the sea of Nezha. I don't know if the word "palace" was added for later repairs.
In order to solve my doubts, I went to check the information. It turned out that Qingchengzi Town was an important mining town, which was rich in lead and zinc mines, and the reason why Puyi came here was because at the end of the Pacific War, the Japanese war was in danger, and he was needed to go to the military industry to boost the morale of miners and soldiers in the front.
Today's Qingchengzi Silver Mine
Whether the word "imperial palace" was added to posterity is unknown, but the "Youth Palace" character above the "Imperial Palace" was hung in 1981, when the Qingcheng Zixing Palace was used as a youth activity garden. Prior to this, the palace was used as a reading room, a club, a conference room, and so on.
After years of renovation, the interior and exterior have changed a lot, and some sculptures have been destroyed in a specific period. Later, in order to strengthen the protection of cultural relics, the iron sheet of the roof was also replaced.
The walls of the palace are inscribed with words
The architectural style of the Aojo Zigong is a combination of "Japanese and Foreign" styles, using traditional Japanese Japanese roofs and Western-style architectural outlines. As a remote palace only for Puyi to rest, its workmanship is still very exquisite, just from the two support columns built by the external rain can be seen, if it is not to query the data, I thought it was really two pieces of wood, but in fact, it is concrete, this imitation is better than many parks now.
Japanese roof
The two supporting columns are cement
The Qingcheng Zi Palace has now been circled around and is basically protected, compared to the Palace of Dandong Langtou, it is very lucky.
Inside the Dandong Langtou Palace
The Dandong Langtou Palace, which is also a municipal protected cultural relic, has now been completely reduced to ruins, except for the external wall and a building, the interior has almost all collapsed and damaged.
Although I am a "scavenger" - a ruin lover, I still have some regrets when I see a cultural relic that has fallen into ruins in disrepair.
Panoramic view of the Langtou Palace
Collapsed roof
Compared with the Qingchengzi Palace, the Langtou Palace is much larger in scale and much more magnificent. This is a multi-storey building that combines "Chinese and Western Japan", designed by the Japanese Tanigawa, the roof is made of Japanese Japanese roof, the building as a whole is Also European, and the exterior and portico sculptures are Chinese.
Dragons are carved on the walls
Western-style loft
Chinese-style porches and sculptures
The palace was laid in 1940 and completed in three years. On the outer wall of the first floor is carved the words "August 2600 of the Imperial Chronicle of The Emperor". The Imperial Chronicle is a Japanese chronology that begins with the first year of the reign of Emperor Shinmu, japan's first emperor, 660 years before the Western calendar, that is, 2000 AD equals 2660 imperial years.
Although the Langtou Palace is magnificent, it is rumored that Puyi did not come here on the day of the inspection, but lived in a Japanese shrine on the Jinjiang Mountain.
Andong Shrine in Kintai Mountains
The palace, which was not fortunate enough to be founded, was taken over by the Dandong Air Force after the founding of the country. On the day I went, I met an old man who had worked in the army and went back to visit, and he said that part of it was once the army's canteen, and he had eaten here.
The old man I met
Later, the palace was outsourced and transformed into a "Donghang palace hotel" for tourists to visit, dine and entertain. Many of the decorations that can be seen when entering the palace now should be in the style of entertainment transformation, only the outer walls and attics still maintain their original appearance.
Interior decoration of the nightclub
Later, at the appeal of cultural relics protection volunteers, Langtou Palace became a municipal protected cultural relic. But that was only a name, and now it has become a garbage pile to be bulldozed. The taxi driver told me that this part of Langtou Town was preparing to be demolished, and I said that the palace was there, and the driver said that no one had taken care of it for a long time, and it must be pickpocketed.
Monument to cultural relics hidden in the woods
As a logo when it is a museum
As the largest palace built for Puyi outside the puppet Manchu Palace, the langtou palace had such a miserable fate, not only had it never sought a holy face, but after many years, the whole body could not be retained, which was really not as good as the big chestnut town palace on the border and the Qingchengzi palace in a remote mountainous area.
Outside the palace, a stone stele that fell to the ground reflected the shadow of a tree, and an ant crawled on it
In addition to the four palaces mentioned above - the puppet Manchu Palace, the Great Chestnut Abdication Palace, the Qingchengzi "Imperial Palace" and the Langtou Puyi East Palace, if you want to continue to trace the traces of Puyi, you must also go to Tanggangzi Hot Spring in Anshan, which is the first place where Puyi stayed after landing in the northeast from Tianjin, and then Puyi was arranged by the Japanese to live in Lushun and Dalian for a period of time, and finally after the Japanese planned the newly established puppet Manchu state affairs, Puyi went north to Changchun. Of course, there is one last place for the complete Puyi Northeast Trail - the Fushun War Criminals Management Center.
Tanggangzi Hot Spring
Puyi's residence in Dalian
Fushun War Criminals Management Center
I've always loved following an IP since my middle East rail trip, and it was the first time I'd made a trip around someone's trail. Puyi is not a glorious positive figure, but his life course is linked to the entire modern history of China. If we want to understand the puppet state of Manchukuo, walking around in the northeast along his life of landing, house arrest, ascending to the throne, southern tour, escaping, and detaining, we will have a deeper and more three-dimensional understanding of history and its people.
Record the northeast in my eyes, do not sell stereotypes, do not pretend to be stupid