author
Sir E. (Edmund) Backhouse
1873–1944
A brilliant and deeply controversial interpreter of late imperial China, he helped shape Western views of the Qing court for decades. His work later became just as famous for the scandals around forged sources and an extraordinary life lived largely in Beijing.
1 Audiobook
China under the Empress Dowager : Being the history of the life and times of Tzŭ Hsi
by J. O. P. (John Otway Percy) Bland, Sir E. (Edmund) Backhouse
About the author
Born in 1873, Edmund Trelawny Backhouse was a British scholar of China who settled in Beijing and became known in the West as an authority on the final years of the Qing dynasty. He wrote influential books on court politics and the Empress Dowager Cixi, and his command of languages and air of insider knowledge gave his work unusual authority for its time.
That reputation did not hold. After his death in 1944, scholars increasingly concluded that some of the documents behind his most famous claims were fabricated, and his name became tied to one of the best-known literary and historical frauds in modern China studies. Even so, his writings remain part of the story of how the late Qing court was imagined in the English-speaking world.
Backhouse is also remembered as a vivid, unsettling character in his own right: a baronet from an English banking family who spent much of his life far from Britain, cultivated mystery around himself, and left behind memoirs that added still more controversy to his legacy. He stands today as both an important historical influence and a cautionary example of how persuasive scholarship can go badly wrong.