That shut him up.
“Kowtow again,” I said.
AFTERWORD
Students of Chinese history will be aware of a problem: What was really going on in the court during the long years of Cixi’s effective rule? The confusion has been made worse by one man in particular. I refer of course to Edmund Backhouse. His accounts of the court and his scandalous memoirs make vivid reading, and were used in popular histories for decades. But are they total inventions of his imagination, gossip from the city street, or partly reliable? Nobody knows. He was an extraordinary linguist and bibliophile, certainly. Some of his stories I personally do not believe. But as a novelist with a sense of duty to history, what was I to do?
My solution was technical: I employed a third person, my character Lacquer Nail, to be the narrator of the Forbidden City and Summer Palace sections of the story. A narrator who had his own distinctive point of view and who might or might not be totally reliable. I had fun with this most useful character, and I hope that both general readers and students of China’s history will feel that my efforts were worthwhile.
And since Edmund Backhouse was indeed present during the siege of the legations, I gave him a part to play as well, based on things he actually did, together with a few imagined interactions with my fictional characters. I also could not resist giving him a small, entirely fictitious part in my final chapter. After all, I thought, if he can invent things, then I can invent things, too!
There remain a pair of mysteries. How did the emperor, Cixi’s nephew, die? There seems to be a general consensus nowadays that he was probably poisoned by palace eunuchs. I have allowed my fictional eunuch, Lacquer Nail, to claim the honor for himself.
And what of Cixi during her final years: Had she a plan? What was she trying to achieve? There has been some controversy recently, following the publication of Jung Chang’s biography of Cixi. Through the mouth of my narrator, Lacquer Nail, I have offered my own best guess, for what it is worth.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Edward Rutherfurd is the internationally bestselling author of eight novels, including Paris, London, The Princes of Ireland, The Rebels of Ireland, and New York.
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