Fourth wife of Chinese emperor dies

Li Yuqin, who was plucked from a girl’s school at age 15 to become the fourth wife of China’s last emperor, has died aged 73.

She died in the northeastern city of Changchun after a six-year battle with cirrhosis, said the official Xinhua News Agency.

Li was a member of the Manchu minority that ruled China for over 300 years. In 1942, she went to Beijing to attend a school run by the Manchukuo regime, set up by Japanese occupiers and headed by Aisingyoro Henry Puyi, the last emperor of China.

Puyi, who was deposed as emperor in the 1911 Chinese revolution, picked Li as his wife, but abandoned her after the Second World War, when Manchukuo fell amid Japan’s defeat.

Li remained in Beijing after Puyi was taken to Russia by Soviet troops. After the Communist Party seized power in China in 1949 she became a librarian in Changchun. In 1958, she formally divorced Puyi and later married an engineering technician.

Puyi, appointed emperor as a child in 1908, was interned in Russia and China for 14 years after the Second World War. He later worked as a gardener and remarried a Chinese woman.

He died childless in 1967.