▶ Subscribe to the YouTube channel: one month of the paid tools on sylogs.com, free Log in at sylogs.com and comment "Subscribed on YouTube" on the video page to claim it. On 14 November 1908, before dark, the emperor died. He was thirty-eight. The next afternoon the Empress Dowager died. She was seventy-four. Same city, less than a day apart. This episode begins with those two funerals and works backwards. He had been a prisoner for ten years. The first place was Yingtai, an island ringed by water inside Zhongnanhai; in winter the water froze. After the coup of 1898 his second place of confinement was Yulantang in the Summer Palace — the record says the back door was bricked up. That bricked-up back door is still there; visitors can walk right up to it. The court did consider replacing him. In January 1900 an edict issued in the emperor's name made Pujun "the Great Prince" — Da A'ge — and there are records that a new reign name, Baoqing, had been drafted. A crown prince concedes the emperor is stepping down; a Great Prince gave a posthumous heir to the previous emperor instead, which left the emperor's own title intact. Such a long detour, for a matter of names that could not be gone around. One person at court could not be gone around either: Li Lianying, a eunuch of the second rank. On the flight from the palace in 1900 he reportedly took his own bedding to the emperor and sat wrapped in his clothes until morning; in the hairdressing room he is said to have gathered the Empress Dowager's loose hairs into his sleeve. These are recollections of contemporaries, not settled fact; this film labels them as such. The money is set out here. The Boxer indemnity came to 450 million Haiguan taels at four percent over thirty-nine years — about 982 million taels principal and interest combined, apportioned down to the villages, where people called it the "foreign levy". What a measure of rice cost, what a newspaper cost, what a day's labour earned — the figures are on screen. The one project with a saving to show was the Beijing–Zhangjiakou railway: begun 1905, completed 1909, chief engineer Zhan Tianyou. One year's instalment of the indemnity would have built roughly four of that railway. Why did the court suddenly want a constitution? The answer lies in somebody else's war. In 1905 Japan destroyed the Russian fleet at Tsushima, and Chinese newspapers read that war as one conclusion: a small constitutional country had beaten a large autocratic one. In 1906 the court announced "preparation for a constitution". The examinations were gone; schools had arrived. As for how he died, there are four accounts, and this film gives all four with their sources. In 1980 archaeologists opened his tomb and examined the remains: no clear sign of poisoning. After 2003 a research group took a different approach — measuring his hair and burial garments — and in 2008 published its finding: arsenic consistent with acute arsenic poisoning. The evidence changed, and so did the answer. What can still be visited today: Chongling at the Western Qing Tombs, where you can walk down into the underground chamber; the bricked-up back door at Yulantang; the Well of Pearl Consort and the Hall of Mental Cultivation in the Forbidden City; Jingshan, which is open and can be climbed. Yingtai and Yiluan Hall are inside a government compound and are not open to visitors. Full text and source list at sylogs.com.