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The original sexpat: Sir Edmund Trelawny Backhouse
Truth or fiction, Backhouse's trysts with Qing dynasty prostitutes, eunuchs and Empress Cixi in 'Decadence Mandchoue' are definitely strange
There are lots of great lines in Sir Edmund Trelawny Backhouse’s “Decadence Mandchoue.”
Derek Sandhaus, the book’s editor, says one of his favorites is the description of a palace eunuch named Lien whose “eyes were luminous: lust and passion radiated from them like twin candles shedding their beams in a naughty world.”
Shedding beams on a naughty world is also a fair description of Backhouse’s book, which launches this weekend in Shanghai. The author tells detailed stories of his own liaisons with gay prostitutes, court officials and the Empress Dowager Cixi. How much of that world was observed by Backhouse living in late Qing Dynasty Beijing and how much he simply made up is the source of ongoing debate.
Sir Edmund Trelawny Backhouse: Not the type of guy you'd picture frequenting Datong Mill.
Fact from fiction
Reviewers for “The New York Times” and “The Telegraph” have written that the book probably includes fictional elements, and Shanghai-based historian Paul French calls it “perhaps quite the maddest book on China ever written by a foreigner.”
There are some aspects of Backhouse’s life, however, that we know to be true.
He arrived in Beijing in 1898 and quickly became fluent in Chinese. He worked as a translator for “The Times,” assisted the British Foreign Service and, in 1903, became a professor of law and literature at the Imperial Capital University, today’s Peking University.
In 1910, he co-authored a book called “China Under the Empress Dowager,” which was widely read and established his reputation as an expert on China. However, the same book later tarnished his reputation when Backhouse’s biographer, Hugh Trevor-Roper, claimed one of its key sources, the diary of Ching Shan, had been forged by Backhouse.
Trevor-Roper came across “Decadence Mandchoue” during while researching Backhouse, but he dismissed it as a “pornographic novelette”. After rediscovering the text in Oxford’s Bodleian library, Sandhaus, the Chief Editor of Earnshaw Books, thought that assessment was worth revisiting.
Bringing history to life
Some of the book’s episodes do seem unlikely.
Perhaps the hardest to believe is Backhouse’s tryst with Empress Cixi, which begins when she invites him to the Summer Palace, feeds him a powerful aphrodisiac and so makes the then 32-year-old, self-identified gay man sexually interested in a 69-year-old woman.
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The text also contains some non-sequiturs and implausible motivations that read like the contrivances of a porn video. At one point Cixi travels in disguise to a bathhouse where she demands to see various homosexual acts performed, supposedly for her edification.
There are a few parts that are important from a historical perspective, but not for advancing the plot. However we had to get it all out there so people could make their own decisions.— Derek Sandhaus, editor of "Decadence Mandchoue"
Yet the accuracy of individual events isn’t the only reason to read “Decadence Mandchoue.”
Backhouse lived in China for more than 40 years before writing the book and he offers a wealth of unusual information. His command of Chinese is impressive, and he clearly enjoys relating the poetic Chinese terms for both anatomy and sex acts.
In the first chapter, Backhouse visits the Hall of Chaste Pleasures, a brothel where a range of deeds like “flute savoring” and “turning the bun” are described, and their prices are given.
“There’s definitely information in the book that’s useful to a historian,” says Sandhaus. "For one thing, Backhouse preserved a large portion of this naughty vocabulary that’s slipped out of use."
A third way to read the book, as neither a historical narrative nor a source of historical details, is purely as entertainment. Backhouse’s writing can be florid or outmoded, and he often switches gratuitously between languages.
One pivotal sentence includes English, Chinese, French, Japanese and Latin. Yet there’s real energy and humor in “Decadence Mandchoue.”
“I think it would be worthwhile as a work of fiction,” Sandhaus says, “but I’d definitely publish it in a different way, shorten it by a couple of chapters. There are a few parts that are important from a historical perspective but not for advancing the plot. But we had to get it all out there so people could make their own decisions.”
The decisions readers might want to make include both how much of the book to believe and how important that belief is to their enjoyment of the book.
The book cover to look for in Shanghai starting this weekend.
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