The Last Emperor: Puyi's China

In 1908 the dying Empress Dowager Cixi names the two-year-old Puyi emperor, and in the film's most famous image the little boy runs out of the Hall of Supreme Harmony, under a billowing yellow canopy, to see the crowd assembled in the vast courtyard. He remains here, a ruler only inside the palace walls, until soldiers expel him in 1924. Bertolucci shot the first 90 minutes of the film and its ending here; the palace, built between 1406 and 1420, is now the Palace Museum.

Visitor guidance: Palace Museum tickets are booked online in advance with ID; entry is through the Meridian Gate.

Thrown out of Beijing, Puyi moved in February 1925 to the Japanese concession of Tianjin, first into the Zhang Garden and in 1929 into a Spanish-style villa he renamed Jingyuan, the "Garden of Serenity" — waiting quietly for his chance. The film shows him here as a decadent playboy and Anglophile; in 1931 his secondary consort Wenxiu walked out and divorced him. That November he slipped away to Manchuria hidden in the boot of a car. The film's Tientsin interiors were shot in Salsomaggiore, Italy.

Visitor guidance: Jingyuan, at 70 Anshan Road, was restored and opened to visitors in 2007; the Zhang Garden is a short walk along the same street.

Japan's army made Puyi head of its new puppet state of Manchukuo, with Changchun as capital: Chief Executive on 1 March 1932, then crowned Emperor Kangde on 1 March 1934. There was no real palace, so he lived in the former offices of the Salt Gabelle, the salt tax administration — hence the nickname "Salt Palace". He stayed until 1945, a figurehead while Japan held the real power — in the film, all ceremony and no say. The complex is now the Museum of the Imperial Palace of Manchukuo.

Visitor guidance: The museum is at 5 Guangfu North Road in Changchun; admission is charged.

The film begins at the end of the story's first life: "Manchuria, 1950". A train of prisoners pulls into a station, Puyi among them, bound for a prison where he soon tries to kill himself. In reality he had been captured by the Soviet Red Army in August 1945 as he tried to flee, and was held in Chita and Khabarovsk in Siberia until the Soviet Union handed him to the new People's Republic in 1950. The opening was filmed at Changchun's main railway station.

Puyi spent nine years at Fushun, apart from a spell in Harbin during the Korean War. The prison, built by the Japanese in 1936, held nearly a thousand Japanese prisoners alongside Manchukuo and Kuomintang officials, and set out to re-educate rather than punish them. In the film the warden Jin Yuan slowly breaks Puyi's pride; the real Jin Yuan appears in a cameo, handing over the pardon. Puyi was released as reformed in 1959. The prison courtyard on screen was built in Rome; the older part of the real prison is a museum.

Free again, the former emperor took a job as a gardener at the Beijing Botanical Garden in the Western Hills, published an autobiography and later worked as a researcher for the state. The film shows him here in 1967, an old man among the plants. In its final scene he visits the Forbidden City as a tourist, climbs to the throne he sat on as a child and vanishes, leaving a cricket behind. Puyi died in Beijing on 17 October 1967. The garden is now the north section of the China National Botanical Garden.

Visitor guidance: The garden lies between Fragrant Hills Park and Jade Spring Hill in north-west Beijing; admission is charged.