The final minutes of the film show a flash-forward to 1967 during the rise of Mao Zedong's cult of personality and the beginning of the Cultural Revolution. By now, Puyi has become a simple gardener who lives a peasant proletarian existence. On his way home from work, he happens upon a Red Guard parade, complete with children playing pentatonic music on accordions "en masse" and dancers who dance the rejection of landlordism by the communists. His prison camp commander, who helped him greatly during his rehabilitation, is one of the political prisoners now punished as an anti-revolutionary in the parade, forced to wear a dunce cap and a sandwich board bearing punitive slogans.