The Last Emperor

He was a very small boy, but the village elders remember him distinctly because his family was descended from a mandarin, the most famous citizen of the humble settlement of Paifangcun until, well, until the very small boy came along. The eminent ancestor had passed the torturous series of civil examinations to prove he was a master of the Confucian classics and thus fit to serve the Emperor in faraway Beijing. And the boy's forefather did just that, at the very height of empire, when the Sons of Heaven, as the Emperors were called, could afford to sneer at the Western barbarians begging to trade with their Celestial Kingdom.

By the time the boy was born, in 1904, the empire was moribund, preyed upon by the very foreigners it despised. But the boy was remembered not just because he was a good student like his ancestor but because he liked to turn somersaults. He would roll out of his family compound, into footpaths and away into the countryside and then back home again, turning and turning and turning. And his life would be one of many somersaults: away from home, never to return, over the seas, into politics, into war, in and out of danger, in and out of power, and finally into the role of emperor of a nation that could once again afford to sneer.

His name, in the beginning, was not Deng Xiaoping. The eldest son of the county sheriff was given a two-character name that meant "first saint," perhaps a reference to his father's Buddhist piety. Only later, in France, did Deng Xiansheng become Deng Xiaoping, the two new syllables a prescient nom de guerre, literally meaning "little peace," an augury of both tumult and relief. In 1920, at the age of 16, Deng left his rural home deep inland in Sichuan for the port of Shanghai. There he learned basic French and won a scholarship for a work-study program in France. "We felt that China was weak, and we wanted her to be strong," he later said of his generation of students. "So we went to the West to learn."

In France he learned to love the game of bridge, developed a passion for croissants and became a soccer fan; he once pawned an overcoat to buy a ticket for a match. But Deng had landed in a France mired in a deep postwar recession, with few opportunities for a student to support himself with part-time work. He spent most of the next five years working at various menial jobs: arms-factory worker, waiter, train conductor and rubber-overshoe assembler.