Sir Reginald Johnston, a respected British scholar and diplomat, arrived in the Forbidden City as Puyi's tutor on 3 March 1919. President Xu Shichang believed the monarchy would eventually be restored, and to prepare Puyi for the challenges of the modern world had hired Johnston to teach Puyi "subjects such as political science, constitutional history and English". Johnston was allowed only five texts in English to give Puyi to read: "Alice in Wonderland" and translations into English of the "Four Great Books" of Confucianism; the "Analects", the "Mencius", the "Great Learning" and the "Doctrine of the Mean". But he disregarded the rules, and taught Puyi about world history with a special focus on British history. Besides history, Johnston taught Puyi philosophy and about what he saw as the superiority of monarchies to republics. Puyi remembered that his tutor's piercing blue eyes "made me feel uneasy ... I found him very intimidating and studied English with him like a good boy, not daring to talk about other things when I got bored ... as I did with my other Chinese tutors".