In early March 1948 the Chinese press reported that the Manchu Princess Aisin Gioro Xianyu (1906–1948? 1978?) had been executed as a traitor to China. She was well known to ordinary Chinese through a media profile that crafted her as a dangerous, cross-dressing monster and femme fatale. One of dozens of trials investigating traitors held in the aftermath of the War of Resistance against Japan, Xianyu's generated huge popular attention and mobs forced their way into the Beiping (now Beijing) courtroom just to catch a glimpse of this evil, royal beauty. The mysterious woman they saw in the docks was dressed as a man illustrating her fame for skillful disguise. The legal case and media reports confirmed her treachery by studiously using her Chinese or Japanese names, Jin Bihui and Kawashima Yoshiko, rather than her Manchu name. The court ruled that Xianyu was guilty of spying for Japan, but she regarded herself as fighting to establish a Manchu state independent of China – a Manchu nationalist rather than a traitor to China. Xianyu's very public life and death encapsulate the dangers for individuals of mobile identity and ethnicity when wars change ‘national’ borders and complicate post-war memorialising.

From her earliest childhood in the palaces of the declining Qing court, Xianyu was trained to assume a leadership role within the Aisin Gioro imperial line that had ruled China since 1644. With the collapse of the Qing dynasty in 1912 Xianyu was sent to Japan, a child of barely 7 years, as a member of an exiled imperial line seeking territory to rule. Her task was to become equipped with the linguistic, military, political and cultural skills to bring a new Manchu nation into being – and in March 1932 with the formation of the Japanese-controlled state of Manchukuo in the traditional homelands of her people, this goal seemed realisable. When Xianyu returned to China in 1927, aged in her early twenties, it was to live a dramatic life filled with cross-dressing, espionage, soldiering and myriad sexual liaisons with a domestic media profile to match.Outside of China also her fame grew and she became known variously as ‘the Joan of Arc of the Orient’ or ‘the Mata Hari of the East’ – the latter in reference to the Dutch ‘exotic dancer’ executed by the French as a German spy in 1917.