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BEIJING: The brother of China's last emperor - who was pushed off the throne in 1912, ending the Qing dynasty - has died in Beijing at the age of 96, state media reported.
Puren was the youngest sibling of the final Qing monarch Puyi, a child-ruler portrayed in the Bernardo Bertolucci film "The Last Emperor".
Puren died on Friday (Apr 10), the state-run China News Service cited family members as saying. Sometimes known as "The Last Imperial Younger Brother", Puren was taken to hospital because of pneumonia in February, it said.
Puren - who took the Chinese name Jin Youzhi - was born six years after the rule of his brother Puyi was ended by the "Xinhai Revolution".
Puyi, from the ethnically Manchu Qing dynasty, became emperor in 1908 when he was just two years and ten months old. His abdication was an epoch-shattering event, ending the rule of the Qing which began in 1644.
The government which took power in 1912 required Puyi and his close family to live within the walls of the Forbidden City, where they retained imperial traditions and were tended to by eunuchs. They were expelled from the palace complex in 1917.
Puren established a primary school with the help of his father in the 1940s and continued to teach until he retired in the late 1960s, the Guangzhou Daily newspaper reported. He reportedly had three sons and two daughters.
The Communist party which took power in 1949 also reportedly gave him a place on the local Beijing branch of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference, a mostly symbolic body. He made headlines in 2006 when at the age of 88 he filed a lawsuit claiming that a photo exhibit about Puyi in the Forbidden City had violated copyright laws. A Beijing court dismissed the case.
The Legal Evening News said Puren had in recent years suffered from poor health and memory loss.
"He was almost deaf and even couldn't hold a pen ... he couldn't recognise people," it cited one of his sons as saying.
A memorial for Puren will be held at the Babaoshan Cemetery in Beijing, which houses the remains of prominent Chinese revolutionaries and former Communist party leaders, the China News Service said.
- AFP/ek