author
Sir E. (Edmund) Backhouse
1873–1944
A brilliant and deeply controversial scholar of late imperial China, this British baronet spent decades in Beijing and helped shape Western views of the Qing court. His books were once hugely influential, but later historians found that some of the documents behind them were fabricated.
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, Sir Edmund Trelawny Backhouse was a British orientalist, linguist, and writer who became known for his studies of the final decades of the Qing dynasty. He lived for many years in Beijing, and his work gave many English-language readers a vivid picture of court politics in a period of enormous change.
Backhouse’s reputation, however, did not remain secure. Although his writings were influential in their time, later scholarship concluded that important sources connected with his best-known work were forged or unreliable. That mix of real learning, literary skill, and deception has made him a strikingly unusual figure in modern historical writing.
He died in Beijing in 1944. Today he is remembered less as a straightforward authority than as a fascinating, complicated character whose life sits somewhere between scholarship, scandal, and self-invention.