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Title details for Manchu Decadence by Edmund Trelawny Backhouse - Available

Manchu Decadence

by Edmund Trelawny Backhouse
Derek Sandhaus
ebook
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In 1898 a young Englishman walked into a homosexual brothel in Peking and began a journey that he claims took him all the way to the bedchamber of imperial China's last great ruler, the Empress Dowager Tz'u Hsi. The man was Sir Edmund Backhouse, and his controversial memoirs, Décadence Mandchoue, were published for the first time by Earnshaw Books in 2011. This edition, renamed Manchu Decadence, is abridged and unexpurgated, meaning that it focuses on the most extraordinary and valuable elements of Backhouse's narrative. Backhouse was a talented sinologist, and his book provides a unique and shocking glimpse into the hidden world of China's imperial palace, with its rampant corruption, grand conspiracies and uninhibited sexuality. This book, written shortly before the author's death, lay for decades forgotten and unpublished in the Bodleian Library at Oxford University. Shocking, lyrical and highly controversial, it is the masterwork of a linguistic genius, a tremendous literary achievement as well as a sensational account of the inner workings of the Manchu court in the years before its collapse in 1911.

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Series: China History Publisher: Earnshaw Books

OverDrive Read

  • ISBN: 9789881998200
  • File size: 12700 KB
  • Release date: October 1, 2015

EPUB ebook

  • ISBN: 9789881998200
  • File size: 12700 KB
  • Release date: October 1, 2015

Formats

OverDrive Read
EPUB ebook

subjects

Biography & Autobiography History Nonfiction

Languages

English

In 1898 a young Englishman walked into a homosexual brothel in Peking and began a journey that he claims took him all the way to the bedchamber of imperial China's last great ruler, the Empress Dowager Tz'u Hsi. The man was Sir Edmund Backhouse, and his controversial memoirs, Décadence Mandchoue, were published for the first time by Earnshaw Books in 2011. This edition, renamed Manchu Decadence, is abridged and unexpurgated, meaning that it focuses on the most extraordinary and valuable elements of Backhouse's narrative. Backhouse was a talented sinologist, and his book provides a unique and shocking glimpse into the hidden world of China's imperial palace, with its rampant corruption, grand conspiracies and uninhibited sexuality. This book, written shortly before the author's death, lay for decades forgotten and unpublished in the Bodleian Library at Oxford University. Shocking, lyrical and highly controversial, it is the masterwork of a linguistic genius, a tremendous literary achievement as well as a sensational account of the inner workings of the Manchu court in the years before its collapse in 1911.

Expand title description text
Biography & Autobiography History Nonfiction
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