One of the most popular and controversial Chinese history books ever written, this account explores the Forbidden City during the reign of Empress Dowager Cixi (1861–1908). Entertaining and enlightening, this record examines a world of power-thirsty eunuchs, concubines, and Mandarins. Filled with intrigue, bitter antagonism, and ruthless reprisals and predicting the fall of the Qing dynasty, this history is heavily based on Chinese source materials, some of which may have been fabricated.

China Under the Empress Dowager: The History of the Life and Times of Tzu Hsi

Biographies & Memoirs

Bland, J. O. P.

Trelawny Backhouse, Edmund

Historical

Earnshaw Books

In 1898 a young Englishman walked into a homosexual brothel in Peking and began a journey that he claims took him all the way to the bedchamber of imperial China’s last great ruler, the Empress Dowager Tz’u Hsi. Published now for the first time, the controversial memoirs of Sinologist Sir Edmund Backhouse provide a unique and shocking glimpse into the hidden world of China’s imperial palace, with its rampant corruption, grand conspiracies, and uninhibited sexuality. Backhouse was made notorious by Hugh Trevor-Roper’s 1976 bestseller Hermit of Peking, which accused Backhouse of fraudulence and forgery. This work, written shortly before Backhouse’s death in 1943, lay for decades forgotten and unpublished in the Bodleian Library at Oxford University, dismissed by Trevor-Roper as nothing more than “a pornographic novelette.” But Décadence Mandchoue is much more than that. Alternately shocking and lyrical, it is the masterwork of a linguistic genius—a tremendous literary achievement and a sensational account of the inner workings of the Manchu dynasty in the years before its collapse in 1911. If true, Backhouse’s chronicle completely reshapes contemporary historians’ understanding of the era and provides an account of the Empress Dowager and her inner circle that can only be described as intimate.

Décadence Mandchoue: The China Memoirs of Sir Edmund Trelawny Backhouse

Community & Culture

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Books by Trelawny Backhouse, Edmund