The Museum of the Imperial Palace of Manchukuo occupies the complex where Puyi — the last Qing emperor, made famous in the West by Bernardo Bertolucci's film — lived and nominally ruled the Japanese puppet state from 1932 to 1945. The buildings are grand in the hybrid Japanese-Chinese neoclassical style that characterized Manchukuo's official architecture: ceremonial halls, state rooms, residential quarters, and the various offices from which the bureaucratic machinery of a colonial fiction was maintained.
The museum is one of the more honest colonial history museums in China. The exhibits document both the theatre of imperial pretension — the uniforms, the ceremonies, the diplomatic pomp — and the reality of Japanese control, using photographs, documents, and artefacts that do not spare either party. Puyi's daily humiliations and his eventual collaboration with the Communist government after his capture by the Soviets are presented with unusual directness.
The site requires several hours to see properly. The residential sections give a vivid sense of the bizarre limbo Puyi occupied: imperial trappings without imperial power, a sovereign without sovereignty. Allow at least three hours, more if you are reading the exhibition panels in detail.