author
Sir Reginald Fleming Johnston
1874–1938
Best known as the Scottish tutor and adviser to Puyi, the last emperor of China, he left behind one of the most vivid firsthand accounts of life inside the Forbidden City. His career also ranged through diplomacy, colonial administration, and the study of Chinese history and culture.
2 Audiobooks
Lion and Dragon in Northern China
by Sir Reginald Fleming Johnston
From Peking to Mandalay A Journey from North China to Burma through Tibetan Ssuch'uan and Yunnan
by Sir Reginald Fleming Johnston
About the author
Born in Edinburgh in 1874, Sir Reginald Fleming Johnston was a Scottish scholar, diplomat, and colonial official with a deep interest in China. He studied at Oxford and entered the British colonial service, building a career in East Asia that eventually made him one of the best-known Western interpreters of late imperial China.
He is most closely associated with his role as tutor and adviser to Puyi, the last emperor of China. In 1919 he was invited into the secluded world of the Forbidden City, becoming a rare foreign presence there and forming a relationship that later inspired his well-known memoir Twilight in the Forbidden City. That book remains an important eyewitness account of a court and a political order in decline.
Johnston later served as the last British commissioner of Weihaiwei and went on to teach Chinese at the School of Oriental Studies in London. He died in 1938, but his writing still attracts readers for the unusual position it offers: a thoughtful outsider watching the end of an empire from remarkably close at hand.