BOOK REVIEW Pomp and porn during the Qing Dynasty Decadence Mandchoue by Sir Edmund Trelawny Backhouse
Reviewed by Kent Ewing
HONG KONG - What are 21st-century sinologists supposed to do with Decadence
Mandchoue, the salacious and almost certainly invented memoirs of Sir
Edmund Trelawny Backhouse? In the earlier part of the 20th century, the English
baronet was regarded as one of the pre-eminent China scholars of his time, but
he has since been revealed as a habitual liar and fraud.
This is a man who claimed that, at the age of 32, even though by nature he was
homosexual - indeed, ravenously so - he became the favorite lover of the
Empress Dowager Cixi (1835-1908), then 69, whose oversized clitoris she would
deftly employ to his pathic delight. And, when Sir Edmund wasn't frolicking
with the "Old Buddha", as she was affectionately known, he was giving it to
just about any young, attractive eunuch in her service. Sex with
eunuchs - and with catamites in the "bathhouses" of Peking (now Beijing) - was
Backhouse's preferred form of eroticism.
As Decadence Mandchoue begins, it is an April afternoon in 1899, and
Backhouse is about to meet the love of his life - whom he dubs "Cassia Flower"
- in one of the city's male brothels, but their passionate love-making will be
cut short a year later by Boxer Rebellion riots that force the establishment to
shut down. Backhouse will never see Cassia Flower again, but the memory still
burns bright in the memoirs he wrote at the end of his life, 45 years later.
His
true heart may have been with Cassia Flower, but when the empress called,
Backhouse was nevertheless dutifully and erectly present, even if a powerful
aphrodisiac was required to get him through prolonged nights requiring three to
four orgasms with his insatiable, near-septuagenarian royal partner. This
exacting sexual schedule continued until shortly before Cixi's death, at 73, in
1908 - or so these memoirs attest.
By the way, did you know that Cixi, de facto ruler of China for 47 years, did
not die of natural causes, as history records? No, she was murdered - with
three brutal, point-blank shots to the abdomen - by none other than Yuan
Shikai, one of the eight regional viceroys during her reign who was later to
become second president of the Republic of China.
All that's according to Cixi's chief eunuch, Li Lien-ying, who happened to be
Backhouse's best friend and so gave him the exclusive scoop, not to mention his
personal diaries detailing all of his years of service to the empress.
Unfortunately, those diaries are nowhere to be found; nor can any of the other
corroborating "papers", claimed but conveniently "lost" by the author, be
located.
There is also no reason to believe in an affair Backhouse alludes to with the
famously gay Irish novelist, poet and playwright Oscar Wilde. Add to the long
list of tall tales the meeting he recounts with iconic Russian novelist Leo
Tolstoy.
What readers are left with is, quite probably, the steamy, self-aggrandizing
fiction of a lonely, dying old man - once celebrated for his scholarship and
linguistic genius - who wrote to comfort and distract himself during the final
year of his life, 1943-1944. Moreover, Backhouse's overwrought Victorian prose
- replete with frequent allusions to classical Western and Chinese literature
and studded with bon mots in French, Latin, Chinese and other languages (all of
this sometimes in the same maddeningly interminable sentence!) - was quaintly
antique at the time of his death but now seems downright absurd.
So why publish this stuff? Has Hong Kong's Earnshaw Books (and New Century
Press, which is publishing the Chinese translation) rescued a lost text of
historical significance or committed the foolhardy act of resurrecting an
oversexed fantasist who tricked people in his own time and now has the
opportunity to do it again? The answer, it seems, is a little of both.
In his time, Backhouse was highly regarded in Peking for his ability as a
researcher and translator. He worked for The Times of London and, in
collaboration with another Times correspondent, JOP Bland, wrote two
best-selling books on China: China Under the Empress Dowager (1910) and Annals
and Memoirs of the Court of Peking (1914). These two works were pivotal
in shaping Western perceptions of the Qing court under Cixi.
Backhouse was accused of forgery, however, by another Times correspondent, Dr
George Ernest Morrison, for his heavy reliance in China Under the Empress
Dowager on the diary of a high court official, Ching Shan, a source
later proved to be a fabrication.
The accusations against Backhouse were never fully substantiated during his
lifetime, but in 1976, 32 years after his death, British historian Hugh
Trevor-Roper wrote a damning biography, Hermit of Peking: The Hidden Life of Sir
Edmund Backhouse, which revealed the once-revered sinologist to be an
inveterate fraud, a licentious homosexual and, even worse, anti-British.
Trevor-Roper characterized Backhouse as a hermit because of his tendency to
avoid other foreigners in Peking and expressed disdain for his loss of faith in
British constitutional monarchy and his apparent attraction to the fascism that
had taken hold in Europe and Japan in the run-up to World War II.
As for his bawdy memoirs - which had been gathering dust on a shelf at Oxford
University's Bodleian Library since Backhouse's death - Trevor-Roper wrote: "No
verve in writing can redeem their pathological obscenity."
Yes, Trevor-Roper was a homophobic snob who himself would later be implicated
in the Hitler Diaries hoax. He may have been too quick to consign the
talented and eccentric Backhouse - among only a few Westerners in his time to
have intimate knowledge of and contact with the Chinese - to the dustbin of
history.
And so - thanks to the efforts of Earnshaw Books' chief editor Derek Sandhaus -
Sir Edmund, fraud that he was and remains, lives again in passages like this
one describing the first of his many romps with the aging Cixi in her boudoir
at the Summer Palace:
... I took in my hands her abnormally large clitoris, pressed it toward
my lips and performed a [s]low but steady friction which increased its size.
She graciously unveiled the mysteries of her swelling vulva, even as that of
Messalina, and I marvelled at the perennial youth which its abundance seemed to
indicate.
She allowed me to fondle her breasts which were those of a young married woman;
her skin was exquisitely scented with the violet to which I have made allusion;
her whole body, small and shapely, was redolent with la joie de vivre;
her shapely buttocks pearly and large were presented to my admiring
contemplation: I felt for her a real libidinous passion such as no woman has
ever inspired in my pervert homosexual mind before nor since.
Again,
we are asked to believe that Cixi was a ripe and ravishing 69 years old when
she thus "presented" herself to Backhouse. Even if this unlikely coupling ever
took place, it assuredly did not transpire as described by the author.
In other chapters, Backhouse describes a vampire prince, lightning-struck
lovers and oracles with crystal balls that recapture the past for the Empress
Dowager while also foretelling her future - quite wrongly, as it turns out.
Backhouse was, as he tells it, present for all of this and duly records what he
heard and saw, including rattling tables and revelatory messages from the
spirit world during a seance.
In one particularly bizarre chapter, Backhouse is enjoying the pleasures of
young male prostitutes in a Peking bathhouse when the Old Buddha crashes the
orgy dressed as a man and insists on watching. A eunuch and a well-endowed bath
attendant are bidden to perform for the empress and, as Backhouse reports, the
show is well received: "Everything went swimmingly (like a fish in midstream)
and in due course ejaculation into the pathic's rectum was faithfully
accomplished. This achieved, both parties rose and kowtowed to the Empress ..."
But, her curiosity not yet sated, Cixi then orders a young imperial duke to
also serve as pathic in the extended sexual fun and, after this, there follows
a display of "69" - which Backhouse points out (in case you didn't know) is
called "soixante neuf" in France and which (again, in case you didn't
know) "is only easy when the parties are of the same length".
After a while - unless you're a homophobic prude like Trevor-Roper - all this
starts to become interesting and amusing, and you can understand why a Swiss
doctor named Reinhard Hoeppli, who befriended and tended to Backhouse in his
declining years, urged the old man to write these crazy tales down.
And, now, finally, here they are, wrapped in Backhouse's bloated, ostentatious
prose. While their worth may be highly uncertain, one thing is sure: In the
annals of Sino-Anglo history, there is nothing else quite like Decadence
Mandchoue.
For that alone, Backhouse (or "Bacchus," as he liked to call himself) deserves
his uneasy resurrection.
Decadence Mandchoue by Sir Edmund Trelawny Backhouse.
Earnshaw Books (April 1, 2011). ISBN-10: 9881944511
List Price: $39.99. 336 pages.
Kent Ewing is a Hong Kong-based teacher and writer. He can be reached at
kewing@netvigator.com
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His
true heart may have been with Cassia Flower, but when the empress called,
Backhouse was nevertheless dutifully and erectly present, even if a powerful
aphrodisiac was required to get him through prolonged nights requiring three to
four orgasms with his insatiable, near-septuagenarian royal partner. This
exacting sexual schedule continued until shortly before Cixi's death, at 73, in
1908 - or so these memoirs attest.
