by Linda Jaivin
To quote Lebensztejn’s rendering of another line from the same stanza, ‘Obscur et toujours plus obscur.’ Which recalls Alice in Wonderland: Curiouser and curiouser. I did wonder into what sort of rabbit hole I was being led. Then I saw the signature and my jaw, obeying the cliché, dropped.
Unless I was mistaken, my correspondent was a contemporary and intimate of Sir Edmund Backhouse – and to the best of my knowledge had been dead for over forty years.
Either I had the name mixed up or it was a joke. A hoax. It had to be. And yet, what hoaxer was capable of writing a letter like that? Erudite in two languages, for one thing. If it was a hoax, only one man could have done such a thing and that was Backhouse himself. And he had died, without doubt, in 1944.
The combination of the ‘central heating’, an unenthusiastic emanation from just beneath the poorly insulated windows that faced into the courtyard, and the hardworking stand-alone heater gave my room a patchwork temperature, a tepid bath of air pocked with cold patches and radiant here and there with warmth – a confounding microclimate that could have been cooked up in a microwave oven. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw one of the thin curtains over the window flutter. I shivered. If there was ever a moment for believing in ghosts, this was it.
Surely, I was in error. It had been a long time since I’d read Hermit of Peking, which is where I’d learned about Reinhard Hoeppli, the professor–doctor who encouraged Backhouse to write his scandalous ‘memoirs’. Sliding off the ta, I shoved my feet into my fluffy slippers and shuffled over to the bookshelf. I ran a finger along the spines of my books, my fingertip collecting dust, until I found what I was looking for. The cream-coloured cover was plain, an old-fashioned red and black typographic design, framed within parallel lines, and a broken stain from a coffee cup circled the name of the author. It was a 1993 edition, published by Eland and much-thumbed by me; my original copy, a first edition from 1976, had disappeared in the course of my nomadic migrations, but I’d purchased it again, and this copy’s dog-eared state testified to my enduring fascination with Backhouse.
The Gallimard-like austerity of the book’s wrapping had always called to my mind the fantasy librarian who only has to remove her glasses and let down her hair to reveal the vamp inside. Open this plain tome and a world of lurid secrets, espionage, fraud, conspiracy and extravagant sexual intrigue spills out – making it in some ways not unlike Backhouse’s own biography of the Empress Dowager. I flicked through the familiar text, recalling with a jolt that Edmund Trelawny Backhouse was born in Darlington, my mother’s hometown. I’d noticed that before, but didn’t think too much of it. Had I missed some clue? His Quaker family belonged to the lowest class of the hereditary British aristocracy, entitling him to be called ‘Sir’ or ‘Baronet’. In 1882, at the age of nine, he went to St. George’s, Ascot, where the disciplinary attentions of the Reverend Herbert Sneyd-Kynnersley instilled in Backhouse a taste for the lash on bare buttocks. From there Backhouse went to Winchester, another British educational institution renowned for its punishment regimes.
After Winchester, Backhouse read classics at Merton College, Oxford, privately pursuing the study of Chinese, Japanese, Russian and other languages – and chastening me, re-reading about it now, for thinking I was pretty good for knowing Chinese and French. At Oxford he was known as a talented linguist and an eccentric, part of a circle devoted to, as the contemporary euphemism had it, ‘the Greek way of life’. He dropped out for a time because of a ‘nervous breakdown’. His lavish spending, which included buying gifts for the actress Ellen Terry, whom he worshipped, and donations to Oscar Wilde’s defence fund, left him bankrupt and with a debt of £23,000 by the age of twenty-two.
Backhouse slunk away from Oxford under obscure circumstances and without completing his studies. Another clue? Or just a coincidence? The next few years of his life are shrouded in mystery. He showed up in Peking in 1898, hoping to find work as an official translator for the Imperial Maritime Customs Service. Things didn’t go quite as he had hoped, but he managed to piece together a living (much as I do, it now occurred to me).
Sir Edmund, or Trelawny as he liked to be known, largely shunned foreign society, dressing himself in the robes of a Chinese scholar and living apart from the Legation Quarter that was the hub of expatriate life in the city. There are more than a few things about my life in China that echo his, though I’ve never gone so far as to shield my eyes with my handkerchief from the sight of other foreigners (even if, like every China studies tragic, I’ve sometimes felt the urge). When he did socialise, Backhouse seems to have charmed everyone he met with his old-world courtesies and apparent humility. His mastery of languages, which came to include Mongolian, was legendary.
He was always short of money, yet he refused payment for the translations of the Imperial Gazette and other sources for journalists like the Australian George Morrison, who relied on them for his reports for the London Times, as did Morrison’s colleague in Shanghai, J.O.P. Bland, later Backhouse’s co-author of China Under the Empress Dowager. In the early years of their acquaintance, Morrison was so impressed by Backhouse he called him ‘the greatest genius it has ever been my privilege to know’. Backhouse lived off a modest lecturer’s salary supplemented by the sale of valuable Chinese-language books and manuscripts, for which he had a great eye, as well as from an extraordinarily inventive and brazen series of scams, hoaxes and forgeries. Although my purpose in revisiting Trevor Roper’s biography of Backhouse was to search out references to my correspondent, I left myself in suspense as I revised Backhouse’s riveting history of scandal.
There was the sale of Chinese weapons to the British during World War I – shipments of guns and ammunition that always seemed to be caught up in some bureaucratic tangle or held up by bandits, never quite arriving – and the peddling of equally imaginary British warships to the Chinese. The detail was convincing: he didn’t just offer to procure guns for the War Office; he would get them one hundred and fifteen Skoda rapid-fire field guns that had been manufactured in 1911, together with their carriages, ammunition wagons and limbers, at £600 each. The mortification of the bamboozled generally ensured their silence. When challenged, Backhouse tended to go to ground, travel, feign illness.
Morrison was among the first to raise doubts about the authenticity of the Ching Shan diary that lay at the heart of China Under the Empress Dowager, though he could not prove any fraud. In his 1992 biography of Cixi, Dragon Lady, Sterling Seagrave speculates that the Australian may not have pressed the matter because he feared that a number of the rare Chinese manuscripts Backhouse had sold him over the years would turn out to be forgeries as well. (Morrison came to regard Backhouse as ‘wonderfully clever but morally unsound’.) In 1936, William Lewisohn, a journalist and China scholar, showed the diary to be an ingenious pastiche of published Chinese sources and unattributed paraphrases of Talleyrand and others whose words Ching Shan could not possibly have encountered.
Trevor-Roper wrote that when confronted with Lewisohn’s article, ‘Backhouse replied with Olympian urbanity’: thanking Lewisohn, he said the scholar–journalist’s investigation would make ‘a valuable addition to my library’. Backhouse then wrote to his vexed co-author, Bland, who had relied on Backhouse’s word that the diary was genuine, with an elaborate description of how he had found the journal in Ching Shan’s house in 1900. Again, his account was seductively detailed, to wit: Ching Shan had died three days earlier. Backhouse discovered his widow lying on her bed moaning with grief while her children urged her to eat. Gingerly entering the dead man’s study, Backhouse found it to be ‘inches deep’ in papers, books and manuscripts. He had always said that the rest of the diary, the parts that he hadn’t translated for China Under the Empress Dowager, would confirm the authenticity of the whole. But, asked to produce the supporting documents, he lamented that a ‘higher and more immediate interest, viz., BREAD AND BUTTER interest and RES ANGUSTA DOMI’ (i.e. the need ‘to keep the wolf from my door’) had led him to se
ll them. What’s more, he had done this with the help of his servant, friend and comprador Chang Ho-chai – and Chang himself was savagely murdered before he could let Backhouse know to whom the manuscript had gone. It was an unlikely story on the face of it, but given the fact that Chang had in truth been murdered, under murky circumstances, it was also impossible to disprove. As for any other evidence, he claimed it went up in flames when the Japanese raided his home. Backhouse, in short, without ever having published a novel, was a greater writer of fiction than I could ever hope to be.
The great drama of Backhouse’s life was already well into the final act when – and at last we get to him – the professor and medical doctor Hoeppli appeared on the scene. Hoeppli was a physician on the staff of Peking Union Medical College from 1930, a specialist in parasites, a ‘bon bourgeois’, bachelor and honorary Swiss consul in Peking from 1942. An acquaintance described him to Trevor-Roper as ‘a stiff, tight-lipped, old-maidish person, with an ambiguous expression and a secretive manner’.
Dr Hoeppli met ‘Sir Edmund’, as he always referred to him, when Backhouse was advanced in years and suffering from a variety of ailments. The doctor–professor appeared to have no knowledge of his new friend and patient’s scandalous past. He found Sir Edmund to be ‘a distinguished-looking old scholarly gentleman’ with womanly hands and ‘a definite charm’, who ‘spoke and behaved with exquisite, slightly old-style politeness’. But he also said something that none of Backhouse’s closest friends in China had come even close to saying before: that he was ‘the very picture of an old satyr’. This is where their story – and I suppose, by extension, mine – gets interesting. This is where the story starts getting pornographic. Which, if I were aiming to write a bestseller in one of those notebooks of mine, would be about bloody time.
Perhaps Backhouse, as ill-health drew him closer to death, just didn’t care to dissemble anymore. Or perhaps he wished to do so in a more flamboyant fashion than he had ever done in his life. Maybe, having made the surprising decision late in life to convert to Catholicism, he required a confessor. Whatever his motivation, over the two years of their acquaintance Backhouse regaled Dr Hoeppli with explicit tales of singular salaciousness concerning romps with British prime ministers, famous French poets, Chinese eunuchs, male prostitutes and more. He swore to the doctor that they were ‘veracious (however artless) from alpha to omega’.
Yet thirty years earlier, Backhouse had been so tested by the supposed indecency of a few mildly titillating passages about the lives of eunuchs and concubines in the manuscript of the Empress Dowager’s biography – passages he himself had supplied – that he begged Bland to cut them before publication. Bland insisted they stay. If anything, most people who knew Backhouse, in China at least, took him for prim, asexual and strait-laced. He responded to rumours that he was homosexual with indignation. Some of his closest friends described him, in good faith, as having no vices whatsoever.
I now pulled the book Décadence Mandchoue from my bookshelf. This was the second volume of memoirs that Dr Hoeppli would eventually type up for Backhouse. My copy still had its dust jacket, a luxurious midnight blue over which a gorgeous painting of green-gold flowers, leaves and branches danced. It showed its wear on the inside – spine broken (a bad habit of mine: I’m a physically assertive reader); the inevitable coffee stains; the odd dog-eared page; post-it notes on which I’d transcribed sections of text (‘her vulva like a lily drenched with rain’, ‘The latter, in the excited paroxysms of his advanced eroticism, had developed vampire habits’, ‘lascivious stroking of the anal cavity’ – that sort of thing) poking up willy-nilly from the book’s pages; and the odd underlined passage (‘Lien-ying took the view that, while men were available, there was no cause to have recourse towards animals’). Opening it at the first chapter, I found myself in the middle of a romp in the marvellously named Hall of Chaste Joys, a male brothel on Shitou Hutong in the old entertainment district of Tianqiao, south of Qianmen, with an exquisitely formed Chinese male prostitute called Cassia Flower. Orgasm, here and in the lingo of the time, referred to erection:
Then Cassia, whose orgasm surpassed my wildest imaginings, ordered me to recline face downwards upon the couch and in the gentlest, most effortless fashion proceeded to the pedicatio. Thanks to his timeous salve which lubricated and had analgesic properties, there was no difficulty about penetration, which was comparatively speaking sans secousse ou douleur; so that his very long, nay colossal (elephantine is the best epithet at my disposition), penis suffered little delay in entering my rectum up to the hilt. I had no sensation other than pleasurable, while he uttered a series of joyful exclamations, ‘this is heaven’, ‘what joy is this’, ‘how comforting’ …
‘Comforting’ – shufu . The first time we made love, Q asked me if I’d been ‘comforted’ – shufe le ma ? I thought he was making a joke and laughed. I didn’t realise back then that the common phrase for ‘comfort’ or ‘comfortable’ had another meaning in Chinese: Have you come?
There was no doubt in the case of Cassia Flower:
‘… he resumed his forcible action and after something like a quarter of an hour ejaculated in an abounding overflow like a salmon river in spate.’
Backhouse’s adventures, as detailed in Décadence Mandchoue, included trysts with the most supple of eunuchs and heterosexual of young noblemen. The wildest and most incredible of Backhouse’s stories, however, which he first shared with Dr Hoeppli, concerned the Empress Dowager Cixi herself. To untangle that twisted tale, however, we need to return to one of the most incendiary episodes in Chinese and indeed world history at the time: the Boxer Rebellion.
By the end of the nineteenth century, almost a century of incursions and insults to China’s sovereignty that began with the Opium Wars had left China’s key ports and resources in foreign hands. Even ‘little Japan’, having inflicted a painful defeat on China in the Sino–Japanese War of 1894–95, had carved up some of China’s sovereign territory for itself. Cixi quashed the Hundred Day Reforms of 1898, which might have helped to set the country on a fresh course. Drought and famine plagued the land. The government was incapable of either facing up to the foreign threat or helping its own people in crisis. Starving, alarmed, people watched as, in the country’s northeast, foreign engineers and entrepreneurs drove stakes into the ground for the transmission of ‘electrical reports’ (telegraphs) and laid down tracks over which their ‘fire cars’ (trains) could roar, in both cases breaking the rules of fengshui and snapping the spines of the dragons who lived beneath the earth. Foreign missionaries urged people to worship their one god, of whom there could be no images and who defied physical description, along with his son, said to be born of a virgin birth, while criticising Buddhist, Daoist and Confucian practices, including ancestor worship, as idolatry and superstition.
(I know. I’m a terrible history nerd. Can’t help myself. But stay with me. There’s a payoff.)
A band of peasant warriors arose to combat these evils. They called themselves the Regiment for Righteousness and Harmony, Yihetuan. In English, they were known as the Boxers. Whereas previous peasant rebellions from the start of the Qing advocated a return to native, Han Chinese, rule, the Boxers were pro-Manchu and pro-Qing. Believing that Christians drank the blood of Chinese babies, they attacked missionaries and their Chinese converts in the villages, hacking to death foreign men, women and children, murdering Chinese Christians and burning down their churches.
The year after Backhouse got to Peking, Boxers began filtering into the capital. Swaggering in red turbans and red girdles, flashing their amulets and swords, the Boxers put Peking’s foreign residents on edge. At court, opinion was divided, with one influential prince in support, and another opposed.
In the summer of 1900, the storm broke. Boxers surged into the city en masse, torching the racecourse; attacking the churches where Chinese Christians were sheltering, murdering priests and converts; burning down the homes and shops of Chinese citizens who dared use fore
ign inventions like paraffin lamps, and finally laying siege to the Legation Quarter with the help of some imperial troops. Despite his aversion to foreign society, Backhouse, now in his early thirties, sheltered there, surviving along with the others on the supplies of the Legation stores, the meat of horses and donkeys, and gifts of fruit and rice sent, somewhat bizarrely, by Cixi.
Fifty-five days later, foreign troops arrived and beat off the besiegers. The British, American, German, Japanese and Russian armies then rampaged through the city, raping, killing and looting. The sixty-five-year-old Cixi and her court, disguised as peasants, fled their advance. The foreign soldiers, closely followed by the rescued residents, poured into the Forbidden City, where imperial treasures now lay unguarded. The British minister Sir Claude MacDonald and his wife, according to Morrison, made off with no less than one hundred and eighty-five crates of loot. The Germans stole the huge astronomical instruments, made by Jesuits in the Ming dynasty, from atop the Observatory Tower of the city wall – and Backhouse, in Ching Shan’s house, found the man’s diaries, or so he would claim.
What he now told Hoeppli, however, added a sensational twist to an old tale. Professing himself sickened by the outrages and violence perpetrated on this most civilised of cities, he averred that, with the help of ‘trusty Manchus’, he managed to smuggle out of the Summer Palace ‘bronzes, jades, porcelain, ivories, paintings, calligraphy, cloisonné, lacquer, tapestries, carpets (some 600 pieces in all) and about 25,000 volumes’ of precious books and manuscripts, taking them to a ‘place of safety’ before the marauding representatives of what he’d come to think of as ‘the counterfeit Caucasian civilisation’ could get their sticky hands on them.
Two years later, he said, he had the opportunity to return these to the court. The Empress Dowager, he told Hoeppli, was so grateful for what he had done that she rewarded him with an honorary official position that allowed him access to the palace. The position came with court robes, a sable coat, gifts of rare books and gold – and even permission to ride on horseback within the Forbidden City. What’s more, she granted him an audience. When they met, he said, they spoke of many things. She interrogated him about Queen Victoria’s relations with her Mr Brown and rumours concerning Catherine the Great’s sexual appetite. She embarrassed him by asking what he thought of her ‘share’ in the Boxer rebellion, and as he fumbled for an answer, she shrugged. ‘I know: it was my guilt. I am to blame.’ On the other hand, she said that she didn’t really have much choice and that the foreigners had brought it on themselves. ‘Then she asked me what the reaction of the besieged had been to her gifts of watermelons, ice and cakes. Now that was awkward.’
