SOURCE: Fairbank, John K. “Born Too Late.” New York Review of Books 35, no. 2 (18 February 1988): 14–16.

In the following review, Fairbank discusses the literary origins of Bertolucci's The Last Emperor.

The Last Emperor is a spectacular film photographed in brilliant color. It is also a moral drama with controversial political overtones of great ambiguity. It spans sixty years of history, between the Manchu dynasty's final decrepitude and the disaster of the Cultural Revolution in the People's Republic. It leaves us with a question: Did Pu Yi, the last emperor of the Ch'ing dynasty (1644–1912) and the only emperor of Japan's puppet state of Manchukuo (1931–1945), really find a new life in Mao's China? Or was it simply a variation on his life's theme of puppetry? Was he not in fact the world's champion puppet—first under the Ch'ing court, then under the Japanese militarists, finally under the Chinese Communists? The answer is...