Sadly, a lot of the early academic writings about China in the 20th century which were taken as fact turned out to be a catalogue of lies. The man responsible, particularly for his alleged accounts of the last years of the Qing dynasty, was Sir Edmund Backhouse, 2nd Bt, (1873-1944).
Whether Sir Edmund set out to deliberately mislead the academic world is still a matter of debate, but his most influential books, acclaimed as valuable sources for information, have turned out to be based on forged or non-existent documents.
When did Sir Edmund’s fascination with China begin? It wasn’t in his family background. He came from a wealthy Quaker family to which he never really had any genuine emotional connection. At Oxford University Edmund accumulated debts and spent more time on socialising with various homosexual aesthetes than his studies. However, he did find that he had a talent for languages and began studying various European languages privately.
On leaving Oxford with no degree Edmund was declared bankrupt and he travelled around the world for a while. By 1898 he was learning Chinese, probably with the intention of going to China, which he did at the end of that year.
By this time his family had broken off all contact with him. His homosexual exploits at Oxford and his bankruptcy had become an embarrassment to this Quaker family and it is said that they gave him an ultimatum – leave England for good. Edmund did, however, receive an allowance from his father, and after his father’s death in 1918 he inherited his title and was allowed to keep his family estates, even though he never set foot in England after 1898.
Edmund arrived in China hoping to get work in the customs service. Instead he found unpaid work as a translator for the prominent Times correspondent, George Morrison. Morrison spoke or wrote no Chinese so he relied on Edmund Backhouse to translate documents for him. This seems to have been the start of Edmund’s life of lies. He gave background information of life at the imperial court for news reports Morrison was sending to The Times. Most of this information wasn’t based on any personal experience of the court itself.
Through Morrison Edmund got to know another journalist, John Bland, with whom he published his first volume of forgeries, “China Under the Empress Dowager”, in 1910. What the book claimed to be was an accurate account of the life and death of Empress Tz’u Hsi, or Cixi, and the Chinese court following the anti-British Boxer Rebellion. The “insights” provided by Edmund Backhouse were supplemented by the personal diary of a court official which Edmund has discovered and translated.
“China Under the Empress Dowager” was an instant success with the academic world. However, suspicions over the authenticity of the official’s diary were raised by George Morrison, but Edmund’s reputation earned by this book was enough to have these suspicions overlooked. But many years later, long after Edmund Backhouse had died, Australian academics looked at the diaries more closely.
In 1991 Dr. Lo Hui-min of the Australian National University published proof that the diaries, and consequently most of “China Under the Empress Dowager”, were faked and that Edmund had created it himself.
From the positive reception his book received on its original publication Edmund Backhouse was encouraged to write another with John Bland, “Annals and Memoirs of the Court of Peking” (1914). Edmund hoped that his new-found reputation as a leading sinologist would be enough to secure a professorship at Oxford. To this end he began donating thousands of books and manuscripts to the Bodleian Library in Oxford. Even though the library greatly acknowledged these gifts the professorship in Chinese Studies was given to someone else.
By this time Edmund Backhouse had become a serial fraudster. He was employed as an agent for the British legation in Peking to sell battleships. He sold 6 non-existent battleships, and invented a whole flotilla of imaginary ships carrying imaginary military weapons, reporting on their transportation down the Chinese coast to the British Foreign Office. He invented contracts, and sold 650 million non-existent banknotes to the American Bank Note Company. When the ship magnates, banknote company and the Foreign Office came looking for their goods Edmund Backhouse had escaped to Canada.
Perhaps his most fantastical hoax came at the end of his life. In the late 1930s he sought refuge from the Sino-Japanese War with the Austrian legation in Peking. Now almost reclusive, Edmund was befriended by the Honorary Swiss Consul, Dr. Reinhard Hoeppli.
Sir Edmund regaled Hoeppli with tales of his supposed exploits, mostly about his supposed gay sexual exploits and the homosexual underworld in old imperial Peking. He even claimed to have had sex with the Dowager Empress herself. Hoeppli was captivated by these stories and persuaded the aging Sir Edmund to write his memoirs. What resulted was two volumes that were unpublished until this decade.
In the 1970s the British historian Hugh Trever-Roper, Lord Dacre, used the unpublished memoirs to help write a biography of Sir Edmund. Bear in mind that this is the same historian who verified the Hitler Diaries. Also, to Lord Dacre the memoirs were excessively homosexually pornographic for his own taste. Lord Dacre’s brother, by the way, was Patrick Trevor-Roper, the gay rights pioneer.
Lord Dacre’s biography was damning of Sir Edmund’s reputation as a scholar. Many of the stories recounted in the memoirs may well have been based on a little truth but it seems certain that the details had been elaborated and the famous individuals named by Sir Edmund as his sexual partners were not true.
With the final publication of the last part of Sir Edmund’s memoirs last year it seems certain that the public is fascinated by this man and his many falsehoods. Rather than dismiss him completely from academic studies of China academics can look again at this hoaxer and his influence on early 20th century scholarship and examine the nature of the use, accuracy and interpretation of source material.
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