Sir Edmund Trelawny Backhouse, 2nd Baronet (1873-1944) – who insisted his surname was pronounced ‘Bacchus’ – was at Win:Coll: from 1885 to 1890, before going up to Merton College, Oxford. He never completed his degree, however, having accumulated massive debts and suffered a breakdown, and fled the country, arriving in Peking in 1899. An extraordinary linguist, he worked for the Times correspondent as a translator, and established his own reputation as a serious Sinologist. Holding out – in vain – for a professorship at the university from which he had escaped, he donated over 17,000 manuscripts to the Bodleian, and, in 1910, published “China Under the Empress Dowager: Being the History of the Life and Times of Tzŭ Hsi.” This extraordinary exposé of life in a secretive court in a distant kingdom sealed Backhouse’s reputation as a great China expert.
In 1903, he was appointed professor of law and literature at Peking University, and within a year was also working for the British Foreign Office. During the First World War, he is said to have become a secret agent for the British legation, managing an arms deal between Chinese sources and the UK.
At the same time, Sir Edmund was living it up. In a later autobiography (The Dead Past), he describes (in the 1890s) having been the lover of Oscar Wilde [who seems to have had a thing for OWs – see our essayette on Bosie], Paul Verlaine, a British Prime Minister, and an Ottoman Princess. In Décadence Mandchoue, he claims to have had an affair with Empress Dowager Cixi (Tz’u Hsi), the last great (and somewhat despotic) Manchu ruler of China.
But Hugh Trevor-Roper was excoriating in his biography A Hidden Life: The Enigma of Sir Edmund Backhouse. He claims Backhouse was a fraud, a forger and a fantasist, unable to distinguish between fact and fiction. He describes the life and times of Tz’u Hsi as “pornographic novelette”, and, with barely concealed homophobia, writes: “No verve in the writing can redeem their pathological obscenity.” They should be considered, he added, nothing more than the salacious imaginings of a closeted homosexual, the “last explosion of repressed and distorted sexuality.” He also claims that Backhouse repeatedly tricked people into fraudulent business ventures, ranging from the sale of (non-existent) imperial jewellery, to covert international arms transactions using (fictitious) weapons shipped on (imaginary) boats.
Backhouse’s contemporaries, however, described him as eccentric, soft-spoken, polite and exceedingly humble. He was a charming and engaging conversationalist, yet he was also a recluse…. One description states: “In 1939, a mysterious old man moved to the Foreign Legation Quarter of Japanese-occupied Peking. Dressed in an ankle-length robe with a long white beard and a brimless cap adorned with a large red gemstone, he could easily have been mistaken for an aging Chinese gentleman. He spoke the northern dialect beautifully and addressed the local servants with a familiarity that must have seemed shocking to the foreign residents of the Legation Quarter meeting him for the first time. But the man was not Chinese, he was an Englishman.”