Saint Joan from a Chinese Perspective: Shaw and the Last Emperor, Henry Pu-Yi Aisin-Gioro

In Saint Joan, Shaw gives us a vision of his Superman, but at the end this Superman is rejected. In this essay, I will offer an explanation for this rejection by reading the play from a Chinese perspective; that is, examining it within a Chinese context by looking at whether Shaw's Joan and the Dauphin could have lived in real life. I will do this by referring to the last Chinese emperor, Henry Pu-yi Aisin-Gioro (1906–1967), and his English tutor, Sir Reginald Fleming Johnston (1874–1938), famously played by John Lone and Peter O'Toole in Bernardo Bertolucci's The Last Emperor (1987). In many ways, Johnston's influence on Pu-yi in real life runs parallel to Joan's influence on the Dauphin in Saint Joan, and Pu-yi develops into something of a Shavian figure. In addition, the plight of the last emperor gives an idea of the possibilities and dangers behind Shaw's Superman, and throws light on why Joan is rejected at the end of the play.¹

Examining the play from this perspective is fruitful in many ways. The cross-cultural comparison between the play and real-life examples shows that similar kinds of questions are raised both in Shaw's plays and in the history of Pu-yi. The way Pu-yi developed in real life throws light on the complexities behind Shaw's ideas of the Life Force, Superman, and Creative Evolution and their applicability in real life. The Chinese challenge to Shaw's Saint Joan also explains the ending of the play, giving additional reasons why the world remains unprepared to accept Joan. Furthermore, the inadequacy of Shavian teachings to solve an emperor's problems in China explains why young Chinese intellectuals at the turn of the twentieth century looked to Shaw for inspiration to resolve China's problems, only to resort to China itself in their search for a new identity for modern China.

Contemporaneity bridges fiction and life, West and East, as Shaw's play and the real-life example of Johnston and Pu-yi raise similar issues. Shaw's writing of Saint Joan and the teaching relationship between Johnston and Pu-yi took place at nearly the same time. Saint Joan was written in 1923. Johnston took up his position as English Tutor to the Chinese Emperor on 3 March 1919,² continuing until 5 November 1924, when the Imperial Family was ordered to leave the Forbidden City, the palace in Beijing, and Pu-yi went to the Northern Mansion, the home of his father, Prince Chun. Shortly afterward, he fled to the Japanese Legation in Beijing and began his association with the Japanese. Despite the distance between Shaw and Pu-yi, accentuated by the latter's seclusion, the problems Shaw raises in Saint Joan are also problems Pu-yi faced in real life, such as the conflicts between the individual and the institution, tradition and change, and the Life Force and the rationality needed to give it direction.

In my book Bernard Shaw and China: Cross-Cultural Encounters,³ I examine Shaw's significant influence on modern China. Can this influence reach the last emperor of China? The question is intriguing: Pu-yi became emperor under the Qing Dynasty (1644–1911) at the age of three; he abdicated on 12 February 1912, when he had just turned six years old. Under the Articles of Favorable Treatment made between the republican government and the Qing court, Pu-yi remained the titular Chinese emperor and was treated as a foreign head of state. The boy emperor was still living in the Forbidden City when Shaw's works were first introduced into China and Johnston became his English tutor. But Shaw's works were not readily available. As a titular head, Pu-yi led a nominal Chinese court anxious to maintain Chinese traditions and heritage, while Shaw's works were introduced to counter these values. Furthermore, Pu-yi was literally separated from the rest of Beijing by a thirty-two-foot-high palace wall and...