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Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Manchu Decadence

Manchu Decadence

Paperback

Series: China History

Biographies GeneralChinese History

ISBN10: 988199828X
ISBN13: 9789881998286
Publisher: Earnshaw Books Ltd
Published: Feb 20 2022
Pages: 390
Weight: 1.05
Height: 1.10 Width: 5.70 Depth: 8.20
Language: 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 This book, written shortly before the author's death, lay for decades forgotten and unpublished in the Bodleian Library at Oxford University.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.

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Biographies General