It was a China wracked by war, famine and exile, but the Emperor of Manchukuo rarely got up before midday, ate his dinner at midnight and was addicted to drugs.
'People thought that, with my nocturnal lifestyle, I was smoking opium. This was a misunderstanding. No, I was addicted to drugs, both Western and Chinese - external, internal and injections, I took them all. I loved the drugs of Bayer.'
So reads the celebrated 'autobiography' of Pu Yi, the head of the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo between 1932 and 1945 and China's last emperor. From Emperor to Citizen was always said to have been written from his prison cell in the 1950s. Last month, the Masses Publishing House re-issued its 'grey copy' - a version it first produced in January 1960 for limited circulation among political and legal cadres and historians.
The standard version was published in Putonghua in March 1964 and went on to be translated into many languages, selling nearly two million copies. It is a startling account of how the emperor of the world's largest nation turned into a man in a blue padded jacket weeding vegetables in a Beijing garden.
But now it has come to light that this version was not written by Pu Yi but by an editor at MPH, part of the Ministry of Public Security. It was then subjected to a rigorous revision and censorship process by dozens of scholars and officials. They removed 100,000 words from the original version to meet the political needs of the time and the demands of Pu Yi himself, mainly material relating to his personal life, Japanese spy organisations in China and his testimony at the International Military Tribunal for the Far East from 1946-1948.
The 'grey copy' is said to be the closest to Pu Yi's original text.