Wikipedia does it pretty well:
--- Puyi's upbringing was hardly conducive to the raising of a healthy, well-balanced child. Overnight, he was treated as an emperor and unable to behave as a child. The adults in his life, except for his wet-nurse Wang Wen-Chao, were all strangers, remote, distant, and unable to discipline him. Wherever he went, grown men would kneel down in a ritual kowtow, averting their eyes until he passed. Soon the young Puyi discovered the absolute power he wielded over the eunuchs, and he frequently had them beaten for small transgressions. As an emperor, Puyi had his every whim catered to while no one ever said no to him, making him into a sadistic boy who loved to have his eunuchs flogged. The Anglo-French journalist Edward Behr wrote about Puyi's powers as emperor of China, which allowed him to fire his air-gun at anyone he liked:
"The Emperor was Divine. He could not be remonstrated with, or punished. He could only be deferentially advised against ill-treating innocent eunuchs, and if he chose to fire air-gun pellets at them, that was his prerogative."
— Edward Beh
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Puyi later commented about his childhood that: "Flogging eunuchs was part of my daily routine. My cruelty and love of wielding power were already too firmly set for persuasion to have any affect on me." The British historian Alex von Tunzelmann wrote that most people in the West know Puyi's story only from the 1987 film
The Last Emperor, which downplays Puyi's cruelty considerably, as the real boy-emperor was far more vicious than his cinematic counterpart, which creates misunderstandings that the young Puyi was merely very spoiled.
By the age of 7, Puyi had emerged with two sides to his personality; the sadistic emperor who loved to have his eunuchs flogged, expected everyone to kowtow to him and enjoyed puppet shows and dog fights, and the boy who slept at night with Wang, suckling her breasts, and content to be loved for just once in the day. Wang was the only person capable of controlling Puyi; once, Puyi decided to "reward" a eunuch for a well done puppet show by having a cake baked for him with iron filings in it, as Puyi said "I want to see what he looks like when he eats it". With much difficulty, Wang talked Puyi out of this plan. ---