The Japanese version of The Later Half of the Last Emperor's Life is a bestseller in Japan, attracting great attention and garnering enormous popularity.
The lane 7th has the old residence of Feng Deying (Chinese: 馮德英), the author of Bitter Cauliflower, and Zhang Ting (Puyi sent him to study overseas in Japan) also lived here once.
When Jia was still a kid, he always saw an old eunuch who was running the Ruixingcheng Oil & Salt Shop telling royal palace stories, sitting on the steps.
After entering junior high school, Jia Yinghua learned that one of his classmates had a neighbor named Yu Rongling who was a former female court official of Empress Dowager Cixi.
As Jia once attended a learning group in that courtyard, he could still remember that Rongling had pretty pale skin, white hair but looked young and fairly glamorous.
Afterwards, Jia and Li Shuxian got ready to write The Later Half of the Last Emperor's Life under invitation from Zhou Lei, the then director of the editing department of Social Sciences Frontline.
Jia went to a couple of hospitals and solicited the medical treatment records of Puyi and digested relevant content and wrote the outline and interview framework, altogether more than 50,000 Chinese characters.
During this painstaking period of time, his footprints were seen in Changchun in the north, Guangdong in the south, Penglai in the east, and he even consulted historic files written by Johnston in the British Library during his visit to the United Kingdom.
At that time Jia Yinghua was working in Beijing Thermal Power Plant located in Bawangfen (the 8th Princess’ Tomb) and had only one day off in a week, so he utilized evenings and all his holidays making interviews.
When the old man learned that Jia Yinghua just went to grade 1 of junior high school and was a worker in a thermal power plant, he sniffed, "There are a lot of scholars in the literature history museum waiting to write books.
At noon, Jia ate steamed buns and drank two mouthfuls of tap water and had a short break lying on a wooden board cushioned with two pieces of newspapers, and resumed interviews in the afternoon.
The most miserable case was that one day in order to find a witness, Jia set out at 6:00 A.M. and rode bicycle from Bawangfen to Summer Palace, and to Xiang Mountain, and returned to Shichahai in downtown Beijing.
When he finally caught that witness, it was over 20:00 P.M Liu Bao'an (Chinese: 劉寶安) was a coworker of Puyi in Beijing Botanical Garden.
He audio taped some figures since the late Qing dynasty for hundreds of hours at his own expenses, and shot a huge amount of documentary films of historic figures since the same period of time, such as, The Last Eunuch Traveling in The Imperial Palace, The Last Eunuch Recalling His Life, Documentary of The Life of The Last Royal Family, etc., attracting great eyesight from both inside and outside China.
Around Feb. 12th, 2012, major portal sites, like www.sina.com.cn, www.yahoo.com successively presented a video program Decoding The Last Imperial Decree lectured by Jia Yinghua.
Jia Yinghua exposed a lot of cultural relics he had collected over years in the process of filming Decoding The Last Imperial Decree video series, such as the Puyi Abdication Decree and the Preferential Conditions for The Qing Royal Family printed by the Department of Colonial Affairs 100 years ago, and a great amount of precious photographs taken in old times which were exposed for the first time to public.