Edmund Trelawny Backhouse

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. The man was Sir Edmund Backhouse, and his controversial memoirs, DÉcadence Mandchoue, were published for the first time by Earnshaw Books in 2011. This edition, renamed Manchu Decadence, is abridged and unexpurgated, meaning that it focuses on the most extraordinary and valuable elements of Backhouse’s narrative. Backhouse was a talented sinologist, and his book provides a unique and shocking glimpse into the hidden world of China’s imperial palace, with its rampant corruption, grand conspiracies and uninhibited sexuality.

One of the most popular and controversial Chinese history books ever written, China under the Empress Dowager is also one of the best. Authors Bland and Backhouse take you inside the Forbidden City during the reign of Empress Dowager Cixi (1861-1908), a world of power-thirsty eunuchs, concubines and Mandarins, intrigue, bitter antagonism and ruthless reprisals. The book was unique for its time in its reliance on Chinese source materials, some of which may have been fabricated. As entertaining as it is enlightening, the book that presaged the fall of the Qing dynasty is as readable today as it ever was.