Li Shuxian, widow of China's last emperor, who began life as the son of heaven and ended it as a gardener to the communists, has died of lung cancer in Beijing, the official Xinhua news agency said on Tuesday.
Li died on Monday, Xinhua said. She was 73.Li married Aisin Gioro Pu Yi in 1962. Pu Yi was the last emperor of China's Manchu Qing dynasty that ended in 1911 with the founding of a republic.
She met Pu Yi, who was known as the Emperor Xuan Tong when he ascended the dragon throne in 1908 at the age of 21/2, while she was working as his nurse in a Beijing hospital after the 1949 communist takeover.
They wed on May 1, 1962, in a marriage that Pu Yi described in his autobiography as the start of a new life.
"On May 1, I and my bride Li Shuxian started our own little home, and this ordinary home was, to me, something extraordinary," Pu Yi wrote in his autobiography "From Emperor to Citizen."
Pu Yi died of cancer in 1967 at the age of 60, and official Chinese reports said his death at the height of the radical 1966-76 Cultural Revolution came while under persecution from the ultra-leftists who launched the movement.
The couple had no children, and Li once said in an interview that her formerly imperial husband was impotent.
After Pu Yi's death, his widow led a quiet life, virtually retiring from public view.
She appeared briefly in April 1995, looking pale, thin and nervous, to bury the ashes of her late husband in a new graveyard among the huge tombs of his imperial Manchu ancestors on the outskirts of Beijing.