RARE 1911 CHINA UNDER EMPRESS DOWAGER BACKHOUSE MAPS #1

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RARE 1911 CHINA UNDER EMPRESS DOWAGER BACKHOUSE MAPS #1 Description: Sir Edmund Trelawny Backhouse, 2nd Baronet (20 October 1873 – 8 January 1944) was a British oriental scholar, linguist and "black sheep" of the Backhouse family whose work was very influential for the Western view of the last decades of the Chinese Empire but is most remembered for having forged most of his alleged sources.WE ARE OFFERING the first edition, from 1911, of his classic work, China under the Empress Dowager, being the History of the Life and Times of Tzu Hsi. Compiled from State Papers and the Private Diary of the Comptroller of her Household, by J.O.P. Bland and E. Backhouse, Illustrated. Published in Philadelphia by J.B. Lippincott Co., but printed in the UK. This is the British first edition with a US title page for export. 525 pages, bound in yellow cloth with Chinese symbols and titles in red. Sized 10x6 and a half inches. A solid copy, a little soiling, inevitable with a yellow cloth binding. With a bookplate, Jeremiah W. Jenks, and an inscription, J.W. Jenks, given by Mae or Max (hard to tell) Jenks Buell, Dec. 1911. Also, a bookstore label from Brentano's, New York. Backhouse was born into a Quaker family in Darlington; his relatives included many churchmen and scholars and he probably tried to rise to their stature. His youngest brother was Sir Roger Backhouse, First Sea Lord of the Royal Navy in 1938. He attended Winchester College and Merton College, Oxford, though he did not take his degree and fled from the UK in 1895 because of the huge debt he had accumulated.In 1899 he arrived in Peking w he soon began collaborating with the influential Times correspondent Dr. George Ernest Morrison, aiding him with translation work. At this time he had already absorbed several foreign languages, including Russian, Japanese and increasingly Chinese. Later he became a professor of law and literature in the University of Peking. In 1918 he inherited the family baronetcy from his father, Sir Jonathan Backhouse, 1st Baronet. He spent most of the rest of his life in Peking, in the employment of various companies and individuals, providing to them either his language skills or alleged connections to the Chinese imperial court for the negotiation of business deals. None of these deals was ever successful.In 1910 he published a history book China Under the Empress Dowager and in 1914 Annals and Memoirs of the Court of Peking, both with British journalist J.O.P. Bland. With these books he established his reputation as an oriental scholar. In 1913, Backhouse began to donate a great many Chinese manuscripts to the Bodleian Library, hoping to receive a status of professor in return. This endeavour was ultimately unsuccessful. He delivered a total of eight tons of manuscripts to the Bodleian between 1913 and 1923. The provenance of several of the manuscripts was later cast into serious doubt.In 1916 he presented himself as a representative of the Imperial Court and negotiated two fraudulent deals with the American Bank Note Company and John Brown & Company, a British shipbuilder. Neither company received any confirmation from the court. When they tried to contact Backhouse, he had left the country. After he returned to Peking in 1922, he refused to speak about the deals. He spent the last 18 years of his life alone in China, and died in Beijing towards the end of the Second World War.He also worked as a secret agent for the British legation during the First World War, managing an arms deal between Chinese sources and the UK, which also brought forth no results at all.He died unmarried and was succeeded in the Baronetcy by his nephew John Edmund Backhouse, son of Roger Backhouse.Accusations of forgery and fabricationBackhouse's China Under the Empress Dowager was based substantially on the diary of the high court official Ching Shan (Pinyin: Jing Shan) which he claimed to have found in the house of its recently deceased author when he occupied it after the Boxer rebellion ... read more

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