No one is more emblematic of the Republic of China than Sun Yat-sen (孫逸仙), its first president and long featured on banknotes and staring down at you in many a government reception room.
But his life wasn’t always easy. During the Qing Dynasty he was considered a dangerous revolutionary, and in 1896 he was captured by Chinese operatives in London and held prisoner in the Chinese Legation, destined to be shipped out to the Far East as a “mental case” and, without much doubt, beheaded on arrival in Shanghai.
He wrote a book about the experience, Kidnapped in London: Being the Story of my capture by, detention at, and release from the Chinese Legation, London, published in 1897.
The story, like so much else involving China and its politics, features in the memoirs of Edmund Trelawny Backhouse, who lived in Beijing from 1898 until his death in 1944. The Dead Past and Decadence Mandchoue were written towards the end of his life, in the early 1940s.
CONTROVERSIAL FIGURE
Backhouse is nothing if not a controversial figure. When the manuscripts of his memoirs fell into the hands of Oxford historian Hugh Trevor-Roper in 1973, he initially planned to publish them. But in the event he found them outrageously pornographic, and came to suspect they were full of lies to boot. So he began to research Backhouse, and eventually came up with a book, Hermit of Peking (1976), that made him out to be a cheat and fabricator on an enormous scale.
The books, therefore, remained unpublished — until, that is, Earnshaw Books in Hong Kong brought out an edition of Decadence Mandchoue, magnificently edited by Derek Sandhaus, in 2011 [reviewed in the Taipei Times on Oct. 17, 2013].
This changed everything. Decadence Mandchoue reads like a very credible account, albeit of some extraordinary events. All that was needed then was an edition of The Dead Past, lying unpublished in Oxford’s Bodleian Library. Now this has appeared, as an ebook from Alchemie Books.
Trevor-Roper didn’t specifically fault Backhouse on his claim to have had a role in Sun Yat-sen’s release from the Chinese Legation. What Backhouse says in The Dead Past is that he facilitated the passing of information about the situation, and the danger Sun was in, to the prime-minister of the day, Lord Salisbury.
There is plenty else in The Dead Past, however, that commentators, taking their lead from Trevor-Roper, have found reason to question. Backhouse claims, for example, to have been taught French for one term at a school in Ascot, west of London, by the French poet Paul Verlaine. Nothing was previously known of Verlaine teaching while in England, and the school concerned doesn’t have records for the period. But the possibility that Verlaine kept quiet about his teaching because he wanted to conceal his very modest assets from his creditors has been suggested.
Astonishment at who Backhouse, while still a boy of 14, met in Paris when taken there by Verlaine for Easter 1886, is understandable. They included novelist Joris-Karl Huysmans, poet Stephane Mallarme, writer Auguste Villiers de L’Isle Adam and even the poet Arthur Rimbaud, though Backhouse later admitted he may, in his youthfulness, have confused the name with that of an artisan called Rimbot, thinking he was meeting someone more illustrious than in fact he was.
Backhouse also writes about knowing playwright Oscar Wilde, academic and aesthete Walter Pater and artist Aubrey Beardsley. This is entirely possible for a sexually precocious teenager involved at Oxford in raising money for Wilde’s defense in his 1895 trial. His conversations with Pater, who was a tutor at Oxford’s Brasenose College, are particularly extensive, covering topics such as the beauty of Greek homosexuality and what the world would have been like had Greek humanism, rather than Christianity, come to preeminence and power. Pater is nowhere as explicit in his published works.
The other person Backhouse talked with at length was Beardsley. We learn that Beardsley distrusted Wilde. Backhouse also writes of how Beardsley planned to leave him one particular drawing, but that he destroyed it at the last minute, considering it as simply too obscene.
It is of immense importance to finally have The Dead Past available. The pity is that as an edition it’s little short of deplorable. Typos litter the text: “bands” where it should be “hands,” “an” for “on,” “bad” for “had,” “over” for “often,” “Mallerme” for “Mallarme” and “Peter” where it should have been “Pater.” A famous quotation from Henry IV of France, “Paris vaut bien une messe” (Paris is worth a mass), applied here to Backhouse and Peking, is translated as “Peking wants a mess.”
Many have doubted Backhouse’s reliability. Some details, such as his having had a sexual relationship with the one-time UK prime-minister Lord Rosebery, claimed in The Dead Past, seem too fantastic. But the former Swiss Honorary Consul in Beijing, Reinhard Hoeppli, who urged Backhouse to set his memories down on paper, and received these manuscripts on his death, considered the two books to be “fundamentally based on facts,” albeit possibly affected by a confused memory and an active imagination.
TALENTED LINGUIST
Backhouse donated some 30,000 Chinese books and manuscripts to the Bodleian Library, the biggest donation that illustrious library has ever received. He was an extraordinarily fluent linguist, knowing Mandarin, Manchu and Mongol, plus some Tibetan, and a range of European languages enabling him to curse his mother in over a dozen tongues as her body was lowered into its grave. London University, he claims, entirely credibly, offered him its Professorship of Chinese in 1913.
Such men have little motive to make things up. His sexual appetite was certainly large, and though he was by nature gay it’s not impossible that, as he insists, he was, with the aid of a special stimulant supplied by the palace, a regular lover of the Empress Dowager, Empress Dowager Cixi (慈禧太后), on account of his linguistic proficiency and generous sexual equipment.
Of these two books of memoirs, Decadence Mandchoue, dealing with Backhouse’s years in China, is certainly the better. But The Dead Past, treating his youth, is an important complement to it. And now, despite the best efforts of Hugh Trevor-Roper to keep it from public view, it’s finally and freely available.
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