The Extraordinary Life of The Last Emperor of China in Puyi's autobiography "From Emperor to Citizen", and instead focuses on disclosing untold stories of Puyi in a multi-layered fashion. The book also contains historic documents of more than 300,000 Chinese characters related to Puyi's life. In addition to old photographs, Jia also publicised many cultural relics about Puyi for the first time in his book. The relics include: Puyi's abdication decree written in the Mongolian language and Chinese issued by the Colonial Affairs Department in 1911; the preferential conditions for the Qing imperial family; the Hongxian porcelain tray customised for Yuan Shikai; letters written by Puyi to farmers and
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