Puyi rarely left the Forbidden City, knew nothing of the lives of ordinary Chinese people, and was somewhat misled by Johnston, who told him that the vast majority of the Chinese wanted a Qing restoration. Johnston, a Sinophile scholar and a romantic conservative with an instinctive preference for monarchies, believed that China needed a benevolent autocrat to guide the country forward. He was enough of a traditionalist to respect that all major events in the Forbidden City were determined by the court astrologers. Johnston disparaged the superficially Westernized Chinese republican elite who dressed in top hats, frock coats, and business suits as inauthentically Chinese and praised to Puyi the Confucian scholars with their traditional robes as the ones who were authentically Chinese.