From Emperor to Citizen

This article is about the memoir. For the TV series that is eponymous in Chinese, see The First Half of My Life.

From Emperor to Citizen: The Autobiography of Aisin-Gioro Pu Yi (Chinese: 我的前半生, literally translated as The First Half of My Life) is the autobiography of Puyi, the last emperor of China. The Bernardo Bertolucci film The Last Emperor is based on this book.

Former emperor Puyi, c. 1930–40

The book has three editions:

• First Edition (1960): Written by Pujie, the little brother of Puyi. The account and narration in the book ends in 1957, and the book was published by Xinhua Bookstore in January, 1961.
• Second Edition (1964): Written by Wen-Da Li (Chinese: 李文達) and was thought of as the final version. Published by Qunzhong publishing house in 1964. Due to the social environment and political atmosphere at the time of publishment, around 160,000 words were deleted from this manuscript.^{[citation needed]}
• Full version (2007): the full version restored 160,000 words deleted from the second edition.

Bibliography

• 愛新覺羅·溥儀，《我的前半生》，群眾出版社, 1960年，2冊，621頁
• 愛新覺羅·溥儀，《我的前半生》，群眾出版社, 1964年，304頁
• 愛新覺羅·溥儀，《我的前半生》，群眾出版社, 2007年，509頁 ISBN 7-5014-3557-X
• 羅雪揮，《“全本”溥儀：〈我的前半生〉版本流變》，《中國新聞周刊》2006年第47期。