Many of the marks attached to the phonetic rendering of the Chinese words in this volume differ from those assigned to them in the dictionaries. These apparent discrepencies are intentional, the tones being given as they are applied, or appear to the ear of the compiler to be applied, by the natives of Peking.

Many of the marks attached to the phonetic rendering of the Chinese words in this volume differ from those assigned to them in the dictionaries. These apparent discrepencies are intentional, the tones being given as they are applied, or appear to the ear of the compiler to be applied, by the natives of Peking.

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, DEcadence 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.

One of the most popular and controversial Chinese history books ever written, China under the Empress Dowager is also one of the best. Authors Bland and Backhouse take you inside the Forbidden City during the reign of Empress Dowager Cixi (1861-1908), a world of power-thirsty eunuchs, concubines and Mandarins, intrigue, bitter antagonism and ruthless reprisals. The book was unique for its time in its reliance on Chinese source materials, some of which may have been fabricated. As entertaining as it is enlightening, the book that presaged the fall of the Qing dynasty is as readable today as it ever was.

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. Published now for the first time, the controversial memoirs of Sinologist Sir Edmund Backhouse provide a unique and shocking glimpse into the hidden world of China's imperial palace, with its rampant corruption, grand conspiracies, and uninhibited sexuality. Backhouse was made notorious by Hugh Trevor-Roper's 1976 bestseller "Hermit of Peking," which accused Backhouse of fraudulence and forgery. This work, written shortly before Backhouse's death in 1943, lay for decades forgotten and unpublished in the Bodleian Library at Oxford University, dismissed by Trevor-Roper as nothing more than "a pornographic novelette." But "Decadence Mandchoue" is much more than that. Alternately shocking and lyrical, it is the masterwork of a linguistic genius--a tremendous literary achievement and a sensational account of the inner workings of the Manchu dynasty in the years before its collapse in 1911. If true, Backhouse's chronicle completely reshapes contemporary historians' understanding of the era and provides an account of the Empress Dowager and her inner circle that can only be described as intimate.