Scottish Mandarin: The Life and Times of Sir Reginald Johnston, the seventeenth book in the Royal Asiatic Society’s Hong Kong Studies Series, is the biography of the man who was tutor and advisor to the last Emperor of China. Shiona Airlie guides us along Reginald Johnston’s path and recreates the life of a man who sought adventure, solitude and recognition and found all, though not always at the time, or in the proportions, he desired.

Sir Reginald Johnston’s heart was firmly in China, and he became a mandarin in the service of the deposed Emperor of China, as well as...

In 1919, a thirteen-year-old boy lived in considerable luxury in a walled palace complex in the centre of Beijing. His home was the Forbidden City, and the boy, Puyi, resided there like an emperor, even though China was by then a republic. The Forbidden City was a miniature town like no other in the world. Its high walls, some almost fifty feet wide, separated its 178 acres from the rest of Beijing. Within the walls lay twenty palaces which accommodated the emperor and his court—in all almost 9,000 rooms, with courtyards large enough to hold 20,000 people. Every building...

The Hong Kong in which Johnston arrived on Christmas Day in 1898 was a centre of British imperial might. Barely fifty years earlier, Britain had colonised what had been, until then, little more than a barren island. By the end of the century, it was a bustling commercial centre, and one of the mainstays of imperial trade. In fifty years the island of Hong Kong had been transformed by impressive stone buildings in the European style. From its beginnings as rather a rough port, and certainly not one fit for ladies to live in, it had become a thriving city...

The territory that took Johnston away from Hong Kong was Weihai. Unlike Hong Kong, Weihai was a fairly recent addition to the British Empire, and had been leased by Britain from China at the same time as the New Territories, in 1898. Situated in Shandong Province, this far-flung outpost of Britain’s empire had been acquired primarily as a naval base. The territory contained a sheltered, deep-water harbour which was an excellent base for the British navy; for the first four years of British rule, a military administration held sway there. In 1901, the British Government decided that Weihai would never...

Johnston began his journey in January 1906 to explore several of the more remote parts of China. His desire for this type of travel—often solitary and sometimes downright dangerous—had been fuelled by the trip to the Shan States in 1902. The leave he had accrued by 1906 now enabled him to undertake a far more arduous expedition which took him From Peking to Mandalay, as he was to entitle the book he later wrote about the journey. The expedition also marks the beginning of a remarkable correspondence from himself to Stewart Lockhart, which survives to this day in...

Initially, much of Johnston’s time as district officer was spent establishing his authority over the headmen and their villagers: a task that was not without its problems. Barely three months after he moved to Fan Jian Bu, the headmen in his charge sent a list of grievances to Stewart Lockhart, who asked Johnston to investigate. Johnston discovered that a village teacher had forged the headmen’s names and the petition. He questioned the forger and discovered that the man was trying to create trouble in protest against police surveillance. Johnston was furious. The teacher, also a village headman, was a police...

Even when he was writing at a tremendous pace, Johnston could not afford to neglect his official duties. He was extremely conscientious in this respect. No matter how tedious the work, how boring the memoranda which passed before him, he studied everything with great care. His attention to detail was in marked contrast to the somewhat slapdash approach of Walter, his opposite number in the territory. Johnston cared little for him, and at times his exasperation flared up. One such occasion was in 1909, when the government of Hong Kong sent the officers in Weihai a copy of Clementi’s Transliteration...

At the end of the summer of 1912, Johnston moved back to his base in the countryside. Safely settled in Wenchuantang, he worked like a man possessed. Stewart Lockhart was to write with some admiration that Johnston was ‘still as enthusiastic a student as ever’, adding that he was also of immeasurable help in the work of the administration.¹ There were few distractions. Heavy rains from time to time continued to flood his home, but even five inches of rain falling in three days, as happened in 1912, failed to deflect him from his book on the sacred hills. The...

Weihai was sufficiently quiet for Johnston to apply for, and be given, a short leave in 1915. Stewart Lockhart pleaded his case to the Colonial Office on the grounds that Johnston had had to return from his last leave early, and also because he had recently been ill. His illness had in fact been so serious that he had to be brought in to Port Edward from Wenchuantang to receive nursing. For the second time in less than a year, Mary Stewart Lockhart took charge of him while the local doctor, Muat, attended to him. The cause of the illness...

Johnston’s proposed appointment as imperial tutor caused a flurry of activity in British diplomatic circles in both Beijing and London. The British Colonial Office vacillated as to whether or not the posting was a good idea, whereas the Foreign Office was enthusiastic from the outset. They believed there was every chance the emperor would eventually be fully restored to the throne, in which case it would be ‘of the greatest advantage’ for a British official to be so close to him.¹ The long struggle to defeat Germany had used up a large part of Britain’s resources; in the process, influence...

When Johnston left Weihai, Stewart Lockhart obviously missed him badly. If anything, the place seemed to grow sleepier with Johnston’s absence. Consular officers were seconded to assist the commissioner, and the question of Weihai’s rendition once more raised its head during the negotiations at Versailles after the Great War. Other than that, the place continued in its own slow rhythm. Stewart Lockhart had been in the territory for almost twenty years, having first arrived in China when Johnston was not quite five years old. Even he was aware that the time had come to retire: he finally decided he would...

With no eunuchs to fight, Puyi turned his attention to a reform of the Imperial Household Department. He already knew something of its excesses. His court was far smaller than in imperial days, yet his annual expenditure figures ‘were higher than they had even been in the time of the empress dowager’.¹ Puyi could only assume—correctly—that this was due to the rampant inefficiency and corruption within the department: ‘Johnston of course regarded the Department as a bloodsucking monster, and this view of his strengthened my resolution to clean it up.’² Knowing that Johnston had no teaching to do...

Johnston sailed back to China carrying fonder thoughts of Britain than he had done for decades. Perhaps the excitement of the return to Weihai had mellowed him, for he certainly ‘found England a much pleasanter place than I had expected, perhaps because China has recently become so dreadful’.¹ He was in high spirits. As he was not expected to begin work in Weihai until the beginning of April, he visited Hong Kong on his way back to north China. There, he stayed in the considerable splendour of Government House as a guest of his old friend Cecil Clementi. Clementi had...

Johnston had always hoped that when he left Weihai he would have the opportunity to visit Cherry Glen one last time, but his wish was not granted. Instead, from Shanghai he immediately joined the Empress of Japan, which reached Britain at the end of November. He had two pressing reasons to return without delay. The first was that Eileen Power had agreed to marry him; the second was that he had decided to apply for the Chair of Chinese at the School of Oriental Studies in London.

This post had first been proposed to him in 1928. Two years later,...

Before he made the journey to Manchuria, Johnston spent his spring and summer holidays at Eilean Righ. In April 1935, one of his guests was Mrs Elizabeth Sparshott, who was making her first visit to the island with her daughter, Jessica. Johnston mentioned to Stewart Lockhart that he was playing host to them, describing Mrs Sparshott as a widow. It was the first, but not the last, lie he was to tell for the woman who was the final love of his life.

Elizabeth Sparshott was a Londoner, born Elizabeth Tebbitt in 1893. At twenty-four, in the middle of the...