The Last Emperor 末代皇帝 (1987): The Man Who Bought a Ticket to His Own Throne — And the Cricket That Finally Crawled Out

 The first time we see him, he is running. A three-year-old boy in an enormous yellow robe, sleeves dragging on the floor, chasing a buzzing sound through the Forbidden City.

The last time we see him, he is walking. An old man in a gray tunic, shuffling past the same gates he once called home, holding a ticket he had to pay for.

In between those two images lies one of the most extraordinary lives ever captured on film.

The Last Emperor is not a biopic. It is not a history lesson. It is, as the director Bernardo Bertolucci once described it, “a film about a man who never knew who he was — because everyone around him was too busy telling him who he should be.”

It won all nine Oscars for which it was nominated in 1988 [citation:9]. It was the first Western film ever allowed to shoot inside the Forbidden City. It has been praised as “an intimate epic” [citation:6] — a paradox that captures exactly what Bertolucci achieved.

But beneath the pageantry and the politics, there is a smaller, stranger, more profound story: the story of a cricket. And that cricket, perhaps, holds the key to everything.

Part One: The Boy Who Never Touched the Ground

Let us begin with the image that opens the film.

1. The Forbidden City. The dying Empress Dowager Cixi summons her three-year-old nephew to her bedside. She names him emperor. Then she dies.

The boy, Puyi, is carried into the Hall of Supreme Harmony for his coronation. Tens of thousands of courtiers kneel before him. The air is thick with incense and dust and the weight of centuries.

And Puyi is bored.

He squirms. He fidgets. He runs off the dais, chasing a cricket.

An old minister, Chen Baochen, pulls the cricket cage from his sleeve. “The cricket is bowing to the emperor,” he says, handing it to the boy.

This is the first gift Puyi ever receives as emperor. It is also the last gift he will ever receive that is not poisoned by politics.

For the next fifteen years, Puyi lives inside a golden cage. The Forbidden City is his world, but it is also his prison. He can see over the walls only when his brother PuJie carries him up a ladder — and what he sees terrifies him: soldiers, cars, a world that has moved on without him [citation:10].

“Why can’t I leave?” he asks.

“Because you are the emperor,” the ministers tell him.

“And what is an emperor?”

The ministers exchange glances. No one answers.

This is the central tragedy of Puyi’s life, rendered with devastating clarity by Bertolucci’s camera. The boy has been given a title — but no one has explained what it means. He has been given power — but he cannot use it. He is the most important person in China, and he is also its most helpless.

And his only friend, his wet nurse, is taken from him without warning. He runs after her, screaming. The red doors slam shut. He cannot leave.

This scene, which plays on repeat throughout the film, is the visual motif of Puyi’s existence: the door that will not open, the wall he cannot cross, the world that is always just out of reach.

Part Two: The Man Who Put on Glasses and Called It Revolution

The film’s most surprising relationship is between Puyi and his Scottish tutor, Reginald Johnston (played by Peter O’Toole in a performance of wry tenderness) [citation:9].

Johnston arrives at the Forbidden City when Puyi is a teenager. He brings with him Western clothes, Western ideas, and — most crucially — a pair of glasses.

The ministers are horrified. “The emperor does not wear glasses,” they insist.

But Puyi puts them on anyway.

This moment is one of Bertolucci’s most elegant visual metaphors. The glasses represent a new way of seeing — not just the world, but himself. For the first time, Puyi begins to question the lies he has been told.

Johnston teaches him English, geography, and the history of democracy. He tells Puyi about Oxford. Puyi begins to dream of studying there. He fires his servants. He wears suits. He rides a bicycle through the empty halls of the Forbidden City — a surreal image of modernity colliding with tradition.

But the walls do not fall. The doors do not open.

When Puyi is finally expelled from the Forbidden City in 1924, he does not feel liberated. He feels unmoored. Without the walls, without the title, without the ministers bowing to him — who is he?

This question will haunt him for the rest of his life.

Part Three: The Puppet and the Opium

The film’s middle section is its most uncomfortable — and its most honest.

Desperate to reclaim his throne, Puyi allies himself with the Japanese. They install him as the puppet emperor of Manchukuo. He believes he is reclaiming his destiny. In reality, he is becoming a tool of empire.

Bertolucci films these scenes with a sickly yellow-green light that signals decay. Puyi is surrounded by Japanese advisors who smile and bow and do nothing he asks. His wife, Wanrong (Joan Chen), sinks into opium addiction and madness. His concubine, Wenxiu (Wu Junmei), divorces him — the first imperial divorce in Chinese history — and walks out of the palace into the rain, free [citation:5].

But Puyi cannot walk out. He is trapped by his own ambition.

This is the film’s most difficult question: Is Puyi a victim of history, or did he make choices that sealed his fate? Bertolucci refuses to give a simple answer. The camera watches Puyi’s face — John Lone’s remarkable performance, full of longing and self-deception — and leaves the judgment to us.

The scene that haunts me most comes during the Soviet capture of Manchukuo. Puyi stands on a train platform, preparing to flee. Wanrong, delirious and bleeding, stumbles toward him. He turns away.

“You can’t save her,” the Japanese officers tell him.

He doesn’t try.

In that moment, we see the cost of his obsession. He has sacrificed everything — his dignity, his marriage, his humanity — for a throne that was never really his.

Part Four: The Cricket That Crawled Out

And now, the cricket.

After ten years in a Communist “re-education” prison, Puyi is released. He returns to Beijing — not as emperor, not as a prisoner, but as a man.

The final sequence of The Last Emperor is one of the most quietly devastating in all of cinema.

Puyi buys a ticket to the Forbidden City [citation:1]. He stands in line like everyone else. He shuffles past the throne room, now roped off for tourists. A little boy in a red scarf stops him.

“You can’t go in there,” the boy says.

“I used to live here,” Puyi replies.

The boy doesn’t believe him. So Puyi climbs over the rope, walks to the throne, and reaches underneath. He pulls out a small cage — the very cricket cage from his coronation, hidden there sixty years ago.

He opens the lid. The cricket crawls out. It is old, fragile, barely alive.

But it is free.

“This is the proof,” one critic wrote, “that he lived” .

The boy looks up, and when he looks down again, the old man has vanished. Only the cricket remains.

This scene is not realistic. Crickets do not live for sixty years. But realism is not the point. The cricket is a metaphor — not just for Puyi’s life, but for his liberation.

He was the cricket, trapped in the cage of his own identity. And now, at the very end, he has let himself out.

Bertolucci explained that he added the cricket after reading about how Chinese children kept crickets in tiny gourds. “I thought, ‘This is the perfect symbol,’” he said. “The emperor was like that cricket — living in a beautiful cage, but a cage nonetheless” .

Part Five: The Man Who Finally Let Go

What makes The Last Emperor endure is not its historical sweep, though that is impressive. What makes it endure is its intimacy.

Bertolucci does not reduce Puyi to a symbol of China’s suffering or a cautionary tale of tyranny. He shows us the small moments: the boy who just wanted to play, the teenager who fell in love with a woman he could not keep, the man who bought a ticket to his own home.

“The Last Emperor is a genuine rarity,” the Chicago Reader wrote at the time of its release, “a blockbuster that manages to be historically instructive and intensely personal at the same time” [citation:6].

And at its heart, the film is asking a question that applies to all of us: What happens when you lose the identity that has defined your entire life?

For Puyi, the answer was gardening. His last job was tending plants at the Beijing Botanical Garden. An IMDb reviewer notes: “He ended his days as a gardener — a quiet, unlikely end for a man who once ruled a quarter of the world’s population” .

But the film suggests that this humble end was not a defeat. It was a release. When Puyi stops trying to be the emperor, he finally becomes human.

The last shot of the film is not of Puyi. It is of the cricket, hopping across the floor of the empty throne room, bathed in golden sunlight.

He is out of the cage. At last.

Final Thoughts

The Last Emperor is often called an epic. It is three hours and forty-three minutes long in its fullest version [citation:5]. It spans two world wars, a revolution, and the fall of a dynasty.

But it is not, in its soul, an epic. It is a portrait of loneliness.

Puyi was, as his tutor Johnston observed, “the most lonely boy on earth” . Surrounded by thousands of servants, worshipped by millions of subjects, he never had a single friend who saw him as anything other than an emperor.

The film’s quiet power lies in its insistence on seeing him as a man. A flawed man. A foolish man. A man who made terrible choices and caused real suffering.

And yet — a man who, in the end, let go.

The cricket crawls out of the cage. The old man disappears into the crowd. The throne room stands empty, waiting for tourists.

And somewhere in the Forbidden City, if you listen closely, you can still hear the faint sound of chirping.

Have you seen The Last Emperor? What do you think the cricket represents? Let me know in the comments.

Tom De · The Movie Prince 🎬