辣文合集 书包网:Sir Edmund Backhouse, lover of the last Chine...

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Sir Edmund Backhouse, lover of the last Chinese Empress Dowager Cixi.

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Sir Edmund Backhouse from 1943 (L) and China's last Empress Dowager Cixi (R)



There are things we know about Sir Edmund Trelawny Backhouse, 2nd Baronet, of England: He was one of few Europeans to live among the Chinese in the early 20th century, and his writings greatly influenced the way the West saw Peking. Then there are fuzzier facts, like his claim that he had affairs with both Oscar Wilde and the Empress Dowager Cixi.


At the peak of his career, Backhouse was a respected expert in the field of Orientalism. He worked for The Times of London as a researcher and translator, and his books on China were best sellers. Two works he wrote with the British journalist J.O.P. Bland, “Annals and Memoirs of the Court of Peking” (1914) and “China Under the Empress Dowager” (1910), shaped 20th-century views of the empress. But some of his sources and claims have since been proved fraudulent (he was roundly criticized after it was discovered that a diary he quoted turned out be a forgery), and historians are divided on the significance of his contribution to Western understanding of Chinese life — and whether it is significant at all.


Next week, two Hong Kong companies will release English and Chinese versions of a previously unpublished manuscript by Backhouse that purports to be a memoir. The sexually explicit “Décadence Mandchoue,” written in 1943, when Backhouse was 70 and dying, recounts his time as a young man as he explored Peking’s gay haunts and what he described as wanton practices within the Imperial Court.


Set largely from 1898 to 1908, the book starts in the ironically named House of Chaste Pleasures, where princes and other high-ranked officials buy the services of young men.


The memoir will primarily be distributed in Hong Kong, with a limited number of copies also available in the United States and Europe, but not widely in mainland China. Beijing has not explicitly banned the book, but the publishers are reluctant to do battle with censors.


Bao Pu, the head of New Century Press, which is publishing the Chinese translation, said there had been an attempt to contact mainland publishers.


“They were all fascinated, but they would have to cut out of the sex parts, and that’s a third of the book,” he said.


Backhouse (who claimed his name was pronounced “Bacchus”), however, is a footnote in history. The real figure of historical interest in “Décadence” is the Empress Dowager Cixi, the de facto ruler of the Middle Kingdom for 47 years.


According to Backhouse, he met the aging empress after he helped restore looted works to her palace. He was then called in for a private audience, during which the empress complained about the barbaric behaviors of foreign diplomats.


While there is documentation linking Backhouse to political life in Beijing, it is not known whether he actually returned treasure or had this conversation.


What seems really far-fetched is an alleged affair that began when Backhouse — or the Backhouse-like character in this book — was washed and perfumed by eunuchs and called up to the 69-year-old Empress’s bedchambers to perform like a slave girl in a harem. According to his manuscript, the liaison lasted until the Empress’s death in 1908 at the age of 73.


“Décadence Mandchoe” was written several months before Backhouse died. His Swiss physician, Reinhard Hoeppli, commissioned the memoir, but then never published it.


The manuscript was eventually passed to the British historian Hugh Trevor-Roper, who also chose not to publish. Instead, Trevor-Roper wrote his own biography, “Hermit of Peking: The Hidden Life of Sir Edmund Backhouse” (1976), which cast Backhouse as a fraud and which has, until now, been the last word on him.


Backhouse’s original texts from 1943 gathered dust on a shelf at the Bodleian library in Oxford until Derek Sandhaus, the chief editor of Earnshaw Books, which is producing the English-language edition of “Décadence,” found them while researching another book.


“There are two reasons the manuscript was never published,” Mr. Bao of New Century Press said. “The first is that Trevor-Roper destroyed his reputation. The second is because of the greasy paragraphs about sex.”


Trevor-Roper had called Backhouse’s memoirs “worthless historic documents,” as well as snobbish and pornographic.


In the first paragraph, Backhouse manages to drop in Shakespeare, Wilde and Verlaine. He is a writer who will never say “rickshaw” if “charrette chinoise” will do. The famously multilingual author uses a mish-mash of French, Latin and Chinese, rendering a few parts hard to read, even if one has a background in those languages.


As for its historical merit, even the new publishers admit that the book may not be entirely true. Instead, they say, its value comes in its details of that era.


“These descriptions are historically significant because these accounts are not found in other sources,” Mr. Sandhaus said. “While there may be some inconsistencies, it is fundamentally based on fact. Even if he didn’t experience everything personally, this book may have been a way for him to relay things he had heard.”


“No Chinese living then paid much attention to, or bothered to document, the details of daily life — certainly not like an outsider living among them,” Mr. Bao added. “On the other hand, no Westerner lived quite in Backhouse’s situation.”


Bret Hinsch, a history professor at Fo Guang University in Taiwan and the author of “Passions of the Cut Sleeve: The Male Homosexual Tradition in China,” added that documents about gay life in that period were scarce.


“Compared to Japan, where there are hundreds of books documenting homosexuality at this time, there’s very little such material from China,” he said. “Writing personally about sex was seen as improper, even shameful, especially if one was describing an emotional dependence with the socially inferior, which is what these relationships were between rich patrons and the young opera singers who worked at these places.”


Ultimately, “Décadence” does not clear up confusion over whether anything Backhouse wrote was believable.


“It’s not an easy book to classify,” Mr. Sandhaus admitted. “Is it autobiography, fiction or non-fiction?”


The same question could be asked of most of Backhouse’s work. When he was writing, there was little information about China available in the West. Backhouse, who was fluent in Mandarin, Manchurian, Mongolian and Japanese, had a certain amount of clout — and it was almost impossible for his readers to verify his claims.


The critical modern reader would probably see “Décadence” as a fictionized memoir, with accurate details drawn from real life, but an outrageous plot. Backhouse knew full well European stereotypes of China — as an exotic, and erotic, fantasy world of empresses and opium smoke — and he gave his readers exactly what they wanted.


“Why were Westerners so willing to believe these outrageous stories?” Mr. Hinsch said. “Would anyone believe a Chinese guy who said he went to England and had sex with Queen Victoria?”





NY Times
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