It was 2,132 years of history coming to a close. 2,132 years, spanning from when Hannibal was made commander-in-chief of the Carthaginian army, a few years before the Second Punic War, until near the end of the Belle Epoque.
Chinese imperial rule lived for longer than Christianity has to date.
So I wonder what it must have been like to be Puyi, the Xuantong Emperor, in those last days before his abdication. He had just turned six. He couldn’t have understood, could he?
But he might have noticed that change was taking place. Even the young boy probably sensed the chaos from the Forbidden City, the tremendous tension in the air as the moment approached.
Not that life within the Inner Palace itself would change: Puyi would stay in the Forbidden City until a coup in 1924. The formal abdication in 1912 was a matter of nomenclature, of definition. Significant for its symbolism but not its real repercussions.
Maybe the young Emperor did not feel a thing one day to the next, perhaps he did not even know his title had been signed away.
That would have been truly iconoclastic: destroying millennia with a shrug, as if doing so was business as normal.
I almost hope that is how the last dynasty ended – its figurehead in tears, but only because his eunuchs had not been fast enough with his breakfast. No bang, no whimper, just some strange continuity.
