Sir Edmund Backhouse, 2nd Baronet

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Sir Edmund Trelawny Backhouse, 2nd Baronet (20 October 1873 – 8 January 1944) was a British would-be-oriental scholar, brilliant linguist and "black sheep" of the Backhouse family whose work was very influential for the western view of the last decades of the Chinese Empire but is currently famous mostly for having forged most of his alleged sources.

[edit] Life

Backhouse was born into a Quaker family in Darlington; his relatives included many churchmen and scholars and he probably tried to rise to their stature. His youngest brother was Sir Roger Backhouse, First Sea Lord of the Royal Navy in 1938. He attended Winchester College and Merton College, Oxford, though not finishing his course at the latter when he flew the UK in 1895 because of the huge debt he had accumulated.

In 1899 he arrived in Beijing where he quickly hooked up with the influential Times correspondent Dr. George Ernest Morrison, aiding him with translation work. At this time he had already absorbed several modern foreign languages, including Russian, Japanese and increasingly Chinese, too. Later he became a professor of law and literature in the University of Peking. In 1918 he inherited the family baronetcy from his father, Sir Jonathan Backhouse, 1st Baronet. He spent most of the rest of his life in Beijing, in the employment of various companies and individuals, providing either his language skills or alleged connections to the Chinese imperial court using them to negotiate favourable business deals to western companies, which apparently never worked out, though.

In 1910 he published a history book China Under the Empress Dowager and in 1914 Annals and Memoirs of the Court of Peking, both with British journalist J.O.P. Bland. With these books he established his reputation as an oriental scholar. In 1913 Backhouse began to donate a great many Chinese manuscripts to the Bodleian Library, probably hoping to receive a status of professor in return, which didn't work out either. He delivered a total of eight tons of manuscripts to the Bodleian between 1913 and 1923. The provenance of the manuscripts is in serious doubt.

In 1916 he presented himself as a representative of the Imperial Court and negotiated two fraudulent deals with the American Bank Note Company and John Brown & Company, a British shipbuilder. Neither company received any confirmation from the court. When they tried to contact Backhouse, he had left the country. After he returned to Peking in 1922, he refused to speak about the deals. He spent the last 18 years of his life alone in China, and died in Beijing towards the end of the Second World War.

He also worked as a secret agent for the British legation during the First World War, managing an arms deal between Chinese sources and the UK, which also brought force no results at all.

Backhouse's work on Chinese history, and especially "China Under the Empress Dowager" with its core, the diary of the high court official Ching Shan (Pinyin: Jing Shan), which he had allegedly found in the house of its recently deceased author, when he occupied it after the Boxer rebellion of 1900, though often contested by scholars and notedly Dr. Morrison, was never actually discovered to be forged while he lived.

In fact, it wasn't until 1973 when British historian Hugh Trevor-Roper received a manuscript of Backhouse's memoirs. In those, Backhouse boasted of having had affairs with prominent people including Lord Rosebery, Verlaine, an Ottoman princess, Oscar Wilde and even the Empress Dowager Cixi of China. He also claimed to have visited Leo Tolstoy and played opposite to Sarah Bernhardt. Trevor-Roper described the diary as "pornographic" and investigated its claims. Eventually he declared that the supposed exploits were just a figment of Backhouse's own imagination.

Nowadays it is evident that most if not all of Backhouse's work and especially his 'Chinese sources' are in fact figments of his imaginations, having misled the learned world for decades. They are still not completely without value for today's scholars, though, for they give a detailed account of the life at the Empress Dowager's court as imagined by a contemporary who possessed profound skills in Chinese and lived in close contact to the court, though he never had the intimate knowledge of it he claimed in his memoirs.

Backhouse's fascinating life was led alternatingly between total reclusion and alienation from his Western origins on the one hand and work for companies and governments on the other. He remained an enigma to his contemporaries and goes on to provide a fascinating subject whose life provides insights into a turbulent period of Chinese and colonial history.

[edit] Trivia

He told The Literary Digest: "My name is pronounced back'us" (Charles Earle Funk, What's the Name, Please?, Funk & Wagnalls, 1936.)

[edit] See also

  • Sir Hugh Trevor-Roper: A Hidden Life - The Enigma of Sir Edmund Backhouse (Published in the USA as The Hermit of Peking) (1976)


Preceded by
Jonathan Edmund Backhouse		 Baronet
(of Uplands, Somerset)
1918–1944		 Succeeded by
John Backhouse

This page incorporates information from Leigh Rayment's Peerage Page.

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