The Soviets took Puyi to the Siberian town of Chita. He lived in a sanatorium, then later in Khabarovsk near the Chinese border, where he was treated well and allowed to keep some of his servants. As a prisoner, Puyi spent his days praying and expected the prisoners to treat him as an emperor and slapped the faces of his servants when they displeased him. He knew about the civil war in China from Chinese-language broadcasts on Soviet radio but seemed not to care. The Soviet government refused the Republic of China's repeated requests to extradite Puyi; the Kuomintang government had indicted him on charges of high treason, and the Soviet refusal to extradite him almost certainly saved his life, as Chiang Kai-shek had often spoken of his desire to have Puyi shot. The Kuomintang captured Puyi's cousin Eastern Jewel and publicly executed her in Beijing in 1948 after she was convicted of high treason. Not wishing to return to China, Puyi wrote to Joseph Stalin several times asking for asylum in the Soviet Union, and that he be given one of the former tsarist palaces to live out his days.