With the release of Bernardo Bertolucci's 1987 film The Last Emperor, a lavish if somewhat simplistic and contrived portrayal of the life and times of China's last emperor Puyi (1906–67), a wider public was introduced perhaps for the first time to the role played by his English-language tutor, Reginald Johnston (1874–1938). Shiona Airlie's book, however, is the first full-length study in English of this little-known British colonial official and China scholar (albeit an expanded version of an earlier study published by the National Museums of Scotland in 2001).

The son of an Edinburgh lawyer, Johnston joined the Hong Kong colonial service in 1898 and began his study of Chinese. In Hong Kong, he was eventually appointed assistant to the colonial secretary, James Stewart Lockhart (1858–1937), a fellow Scot who was to become a lifelong friend and patron. In 1904, Johnston took up the post of district officer in Weihaiwei (northern Shandong Province), Britain's leasehold territory (and not, strictly speaking, a “colony” as referred to by Airlie) recently acquired during the infamous “Scramble for Concessions” in 1898–99. As district officer in Weihaiwei, with a population of 150,000 and covering an area of nearly 400 square miles, Johnston—in his capacity as a Chinese-style magistrate—was responsible for dispensing judgments in numerous criminal and civil cases brought before him. In 1918, due to his personal acquaintance with a confidant of the then Republican president, Xu Shichang, Johnston was offered the post of tutor to the former boy emperor, barely six years old when the Qing dynasty was replaced by a Republic in 1912, who had been allowed to retain his title and continue residing (along with his personal entourage and eunuch officials) in the Qing imperial palace (the Forbidden City). Taking up residence just north of the palace, Johnston spent five years as Puyi's tutor before warlord forces in 1924 expelled Puyi from the Forbidden City. With Johnston's support and assistance, Puyi eventually found refuge in Tianjin's Japanese concession district. In 1927, Johnston returned to Weihaiwei as High Commissioner and oversaw the formal rendition of the leasehold territory to Chinese sovereignty in 1930. Returning to the U.K., Johnston was appointed Professor of Chinese at London University (School of Oriental Studies) in 1931, a post that did not evidently inspire in him much enthusiasm or commitment; he resigned in 1937, dying several months later.

Shiona Airlie's biography is to be commended for providing a solid account of Johnston's life and career, but in many ways it lacks analytical depth and nuance. The author, for example, does not engage at all with the secondary literature either on late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century China or on British imperialism (or “semi-colonialism”) in East Asia during this period; this means that the reader gets little sense of how Johnston's life and thought might illuminate the wider context of evolving British attitudes and policies in China. Furthermore, discussion of Johnston's career as a district officer in Weihaiwei, during which he was heavily involved in dispensing justice in the leasehold territory, is disappointingly vague and peremptory; virtually the only thing the reader learns from this Sino-British encounter is that Johnston “heard with monotonous regularity, day in and day out, one civil case after another” (p. 46). It is all very well for Airlie to cite Johnston's observation (bizarrely to demonstrate his apparent sense of humor) that the reason he heard so many civil cases was because “the number of hen-pecked husbands in the territory of Weihai is exceedingly large, and no insignificant portion of the magistrate's duty consists of taming village shrews” (p. 47), but this is not especially enlightening. Rather hackneyed and simplistic descriptions of Johnston's relationship with locals in Weihaiwei—such as that he had a “genuine fondness” for them, although at times angry with their “time-wasting follies and deceits,” and that he “cared deeply for them as people” (p. 68)—does not contribute to a more substantial understanding of Johnston's interaction with local communities and their concerns. Surprisingly, too, there is no discussion of the impact of the British World War I recruitment of Chinese labor in Weihaiwei, which was the principal port of embarkation for the workers on their way to Europe, and what Johnston might have thought about this extraordinary occurrence; instead Airlie simply remarks that during World War I Weihaiwei “slumbered on as though it were not part of the rest of the world” (p. 129).

Given the fact that Airlie has had to rely for the most part on letters Johnston wrote to James Stewart Lockhart (included amongst the Stewart Lockhart papers recently cataloged in the National Library of Scotland in Edinburgh) because Johnston's own papers (letters, travel notes, etc.) were all destroyed after his death, the book might have benefited from a more in-depth exploration of Johnston's published works. His 1910 study of British rule in Weihaiwei and the territory's folklore and history (Lion and Dragon in Northern China), for example, merely elicits the brief comment that it “presented a fully rounded description of the small territory” (p. 90). Johnston's most important work, an account of the time he spent as Puyi's tutor (Twilight in the Forbidden City, 1934) should have been analyzed in more detail to gauge his attitudes towards the momentous political and social changes unfolding in late Qing and early Republican China. It is clear from a reading of this account that Johnston was an enthusiastic cultural conservative. He neither approved of, nor possibly fully understood, the radical student movement of the May Fourth period, nor did he approve of the new Chinese Republic; ironically, Puyi's divorce from reality behind the walls of the Forbidden City, so well captured in Bertolucci's film, was mirrored by that of Johnston himself in his book. He goes into loving detail, for example, concerning the numerous (and pointless) ritual ceremonies that continued to be practiced in the Forbidden City, while also insisting that in the eyes of many Chinese, Puyi was still their “august sovereign.” In the conclusion to his account, Johnston, commenting on Puyi's enthronement in Manchukuo, predicted a “new dawn” for the monarchy. It also might be noted that despite Airlie's frequent and rather vague references to Johnston's suspicion of Japanese motives concerning Puyi, he, like other Western observers of the time, such as the British journalist H. G. W. Woodhead, admired what he perceived as Japan's forthright and bold policy in confronting the nationalist threat and hence protecting the interests of all the foreign powers in China.

None of these issues are broached in Airlie's biography. In the final analysis, the reader is left with the impression of a strangely distant and aloof individual—uncannily, and perhaps inadvertently, illustrated by the way he is portrayed by Peter O'Toole in Bertolucci's film.