The Last Emperor him and his father to the palace on the Empress Dowager's summons. The next section of the film continues the series of chronological flashbacks showing Puyi's early life intermixed with his imprisonment in the 1950s. His upbringing is confined entirely to the imperial palace, which he is not allowed to leave. When he is about ten, he is visited by his younger brother, Pujie, who tells him he is no longer Emperor and that China is a republic; that same day, Ar Mo is made to leave him. In 1919, the kindly Scotsman Reginald Johnston is appointed as Puyi's tutor
The Last Emperor vast, medieval complex covering some 250 acres and containing 9,999 rooms (only heaven, the Chinese believed, had 10,000 rooms). It probably is unforgivably bourgeois to admire a film because of its locations, but in the case of "The Last Emperor" the narrative cannot be separated from the awesome presence of the Forbidden City, and from Bertolucci's astonishing use of locations, authentic costumes and thousands of extras to create the everyday reality of this strange little boy." Jonathan Rosenbaum, comparing "The Last Emperor" favourably to Steven Spielberg's "Empire of the Sun", claimed that "[a]t best, apart from a few snapshots, Empire