Chapter 9 05. Sinology research goes astray: a Beijing liar

Beijing attracted many Westerners to settle at the turn of the century because it had been the capital of foreign conquerors and Han Chinese collaborators for nearly 1,000 years.In 947 AD, the Khitan Mongols of the Liao Dynasty established Beijing as the capital; from 1122 to 1234, the Tunguska Jin Dynasty occupied Beijing; then, in 1368, the Mongols entered Beijing; after 1644, Beijing has been occupied by the Manchus. In 1800, the British and French allied forces marched straight in, and the officials and businessmen in the ancient capital of China accepted the British and other Westerners just as they had accepted foreigners in the past.Soon, the Manchu and Han bureaucrats asked the British to help them defeat the rioters around Shanghai, and asked Robert Hart, a young Ulster youth with Irish shrewdness, to help them obtain new sources of income from foreign trade.Therefore, when the British were keen to seek legal status and protect the interests of commercial expansion, the Chinese rulers used the plans and capabilities of the British to achieve their own goals.The Chinese faction within the British Empire was brought into the governing body and merged into the crumbling Qing ruling group.

After the Christian coalition forces (plus the Japanese) crushed the Boxer Rebellion in 1900, which tried to drive them out, the foreign settlers preferred Beijing.The period from 1901 until the arrival of the new conquerors in 1937 was a period of rare happiness for foreigners in Beijing, a time when foreigners enjoyed privileges and special freedoms, and they could penetrate into the Chinese without hindrance in life. At the beginning of the 20th century, foreigners in Beijing had a special identity, just like the Mongolian tribal leaders in the 13th century or the Manchu leaders in the 17th century, or the astronomical bureaus led by Cambrook and Fascal as Marco Polo saw them. (We now call it extraterritorial).Also, they live within their own cultural patterns, betting on horse races or believing in God.To the Chinese servants toiling in their homes and offices, the phenomenon of cultural symbiosis is like an old tale.Any Beijinger who speaks slang will confuse foreign friends who are trying to invade Chinese culture through language, but they can't do it.

In this cultural situation there emerged China scholars and sinologists who introduced China to the Western public, and whose proficiency in Chinese (as in the Chinese bureaucracy) brought them prominence and respect.The two roles are related but do not blend easily. "Time" reporter G. E. Morrison's comments on China are not limited by any knowledge of language. J. O. P. Brand knew only a little practical Chinese, but wrote a large number of widely circulated works.The two scholars often get some literature on China from China expert Edmund Teroni Backhouse. Looking back, we know that Beijing produced a group of foreign sinologists who studied Chinese writings and foreign scholars who introduced China to their own people.A scholar as energetic as Morrison could even become a famous scholar, a foreign advisor who could explain to the Chinese the strange way of life of the invaders.These people walk on thin ice between the two cultures, and sometimes they are deluded by their countrymen and believe that "the Chinese are a mess of disorganized sand" because cultural differences are rationally inexplicable.This difference can be scary at times and fascinating at other times.Only a sinologist of strong character can resist the temptation of his countrymen's prejudice against "Chinese".In fact, the behavior of the Chinese is complex and mysterious.The foresight of Chinese talkers is no stronger than it is now. Moreover, when they encounter unpredictable and profound questions that cannot be answered, they often cover them up with irrelevant details. This is a common trick of Chinese scholars.Compared with the news that people get in the Chinese circles in the west city, the street gossip widely circulated in Beijing clubs is just some simple facts.

Between 1901 and 1937, an Englishman with good social connections in Beijing could enjoy the maximum freedom to pursue personal goals and pleasures without being responsible for their consequences.Beijing is a hotbed for foreigners in romantic roles: the armed-guarded embassy district in the southeast of the city is populated by alcoholic dignitaries who live off remittances from home: gregarious widows with diplomatic backgrounds, retired pensioners A musician, a child-loving poet in distress, an art collector, an earnest scholar, a Catholic ex-missionary, a priest who is an archaeologist, and a few Maughamian characters, all of whom, though their motives vary, are I was fascinated by China's sights, noise, cuisine and customs of Beijing.They had the right to sponsor servants, merchants, Chinese teachers (mostly Manchus), stable boys, maids, cooks, guards, rickshaw pullers, cleaning coolies, flower sellers, street vendors, and anyone else who could help them get in touch with Chinese life.Foreign groups scrambled to live the experience: by the 1930s, however, a sinologist, Sir Edmund Backhouse, whom they only knew by name but had never met, left them all behind the factory, He lived in Xicheng and lived the life of a local.

Hugh Trevor, Professor of Modern History at Oxford University, believes that Backhouse is a great literary fraud. Year), which is a secret record of the late Qing court. "The Diary of Your Excellency Qishan" was provided by Backhouse and written by Brand. Good den found.The diary portrayed Rong Lu, a confidant of the Empress Dowager Cixi, as a moderate who opposed the excesses of the Boxers.Scholars have long pointed out that the diary could not have intelligently foreseen the event, and that it plagiarized later published material, but some, like Brand, insisted that Backhouse was innocent and that the fabrication The crime was imposed on him.

"The Hermit of Beijing" overturned this defense in one fell swoop.Sir Backhouse was a rare liar, he kept making financial transactions in the high court, but each time he subtly made it come to naught.Invention is just a means by which he astutely communicates his dream to the world as fact.The work of Mr. Trevor Robb unmasked Backhouse's fabrications.Backhouse's father was a director of Barclays Bank, and his brother was an admiral of the British Navy.He left Oxford due to insolvent debts and stayed abroad. He arrived in Beijing in 1899, when he was only 25 years old, living on domestic remittances, and at the same time he was already a seasoned liar.He brought Sir Robert Hart letters of introduction from the British Prime Minister, Lord Salisbury, the Duke of Devonshire, and Colonial Secretary Joseph Chamberlain.Shy, cute, and gifted with language skills, this all-powerful young man took the initiative to make friends with many people, and soon became the Chinese translator of Morrison and later Brand, and worked closely with them.

Backhouse's falsification of Qishan's diary was just the beginning. After 1910, he wrote a series of very attractive fictions based on the original materials.He claimed to have contacts with insiders at the upper echelon of Chinese culture. Minister Wang Wenshao, Eunuch Li Lianying, Governor Xu Shichang, Premier Duan Qirui, Minister of Posts and Communications Liang Shizhi, anyone he thought was suitable was his good friend.These high-ranking officials and dignitaries living in the same city are strangers to foreigners. Cultural, language, and social barriers make it difficult for foreigners to infiltrate the circle formed by these people, but there is no such thing as foreigners. question the friendship between them.He transcends cultural divides.

In 1910, he got acquainted with John Brown, the manager of the big shipping company, through deception. In 1916, through "negotiations" with the Chinese government, he asked the company to "provide the Chinese Navy with six 10,400-ton coastal defense warships" but that year he disappeared from Beijing and the deal fell through . At the same time, he also ran a major Chinese arms deal: in 1915, he became a secret agent for the British minister Sir Sir John Chatton, secretly buying weapons in China to fight the Germans in Europe.The buyers were the British War Office and Lord Kitchener (British Field Marshal).Given that Backhaus was so powerful in Britain and China, he took on this delicate mission as a matter of course (China is a neutral country, and Germany objects to Chinese arms sales).Soon, he reported that he had purchased hundreds of thousands of Mausers and rifles, hundreds of machine guns, and hundreds of field artillery, all of which were secretly purchased from local generals.He was busy negotiating and negotiating everywhere, saying that the weapons would be "shipped" by the Yangtze River. The deals were one after another, and the British paid for the merchant ships loaded with weapons to sail from Shanghai to Hong Kong.Sir Edward Gray of the British Foreign Office proposed that Japan send a cruiser escort.The ship stopped in Fuzhou, and was later stranded in Guangzhou due to diversion.

Charlton spent the most glorious time of his life in China, and he was the most influential and knowledgeable diplomat in China.He went directly to President Yuan Shikai, but Yuan Gao enigmatically "pretended to be completely ignorant of the whole transaction". His "Arabian Nights", it took a long time for the British Foreign Office to wake up.Charton asked Backhouse to tell Liang Shizhi, who was in charge of the government's finances, the whole story. Liang was shocked and said that he thought Backhouse had been cheated.Charlton reported: "Clearly there was a disagreement between Leung and the Backhouse gang." Backhouse was so eloquent!Charton gradually realized that this was a hoax at all, but fortunately no one knew about it.

At the same time, the creative Backhouse began his grand paper currency project.He "connected" a secret deal for the American Paper Money Company, intending to make it "the only foreign printing company that has printed Chinese paper money for 10 years."The amount of money printed is said to have increased rapidly. After Backhouse made four "private visits" to President Yuan, the number of money printed has reached 6.5 billion. At the end of 1916, Backhouse personally went to New York to report to the company.Back in Beijing, he submitted a contract in Chinese signed by the president and the prime minister, and received a commission of 5,600 pounds. Later, the transaction fell through.In the end, the company's representatives went to court, and he was imprisoned in British Columbia, and his family released him on bail.

The long-term secrecy of these and many similar events enabled Backhouse to engage in scholarly research. In 1913, he donated a collection of extremely valuable Chinese books to the Bodleian Library, including the precious six-volume "Yongle Dadian" in the early 15th century.This encyclopedia of 17,000 entries is truly priceless.The University of Oxford formally thanked him.He was also elected as Visiting Professor of Chinese at the Royal Academy, London.His second book, "Historical History of the Beijing Court" (1914), co-authored with Brand, caused a sensation after it was published. Later, he claimed poor health and eye problems, which ended his academic career.After the beginning of World War I, he resigned as a visiting professor at the Royal Academy and returned to Beijing.He has since excited the "famous court library" by promising to donate 58,000 volumes to the Bodleian Library.The books had to be transported 700 miles by horse-drawn cart to the railway station in western Gansu before being shipped from Tianjin.But the Bodleian Library never received the prepaid books. If anything more was needed to illustrate the deception, there is conclusive evidence in the two-volume rough memoirs Backhaus wrote for the Swiss minister in Peking, written before his death in Beijing in January 1944.These two volumes of memoirs again provide detailed materials to verify the authenticity of Qishan's diary.Backhouse records in detail the long-term homosexual life of Qishan and many great figures of that era in a pornographic style.Backhouse estimates that he has seen Qishan provide sexual services to Cixi about 150 to 200 times.These fanciful and speculative details were widely circulated along with this absurd story. "The Hermit of Beijing" is notable not only for its eccentric revelations, but also for its conception of a detective novel.Mr. Trevor Robb is a masterful narrator; he captivates the reader and brings events to life unexpectedly.In the end, he considered Backhouse's fanciful character "totally consistent and plausible."Successful deception "depends on personal charm...candid sincerity...outward truth...practice tenacity" and "extraordinary detail".Of course, a method of writing is also required that makes him the sole recorder. As for his motives, we can only speculate.Mr. Trevor Robb sees Backhouse as an arty pseudo-gentleman who loathes the Quaker middle class, influenced by "the 'aestheticism', sex-maniacs, and defiantly progressive minds of the 1890s". influences.Under this "emptiness" and "superior superiority", he deviated from his own culture and ran to China, and finally developed towards fascism.Professor Jonathan Spence's English review, A Mysterious Life (Times Literary Supplement, 29 October 1976), provides further evidence of his motives, including an unnoticed younger brother who was more Edmund was born a year later and died at the age of 3. Later, he gave birth to a pair of twin brothers, who took his name to commemorate him. The twin brothers born later were loved and accomplished a lot.In the opening paragraph above, I tried to demonstrate how the social environment in Beijing can cultivate the temperament of a vulgar young man - he can speak two languages, which can quickly make him into a dual culture with two cultures. Life. The Backhouse story is always interesting, with Mr Spence commenting on what characterizes Western imperialism in Backhouse's plans - the naivety, ignorance and "momentary confusion" of state power and business corporations.Although "The Hermit of Beijing" has found clues to understand many issues, the research on China is obviously not enough.As Trevor Robb pointed out, Kenneth Scott Lattoret's The Chinese was accused of misusing material from the Beijing Court History: Brand threatened to sue, Macmillan published "A Letter of Apology for Negligence" in the absence of Latourette. (This brings to mind that after the publication of The Chinese in the 1950s, Ross Cohen resolutely omitted the same material in The Chinese Activist.) Brand and Backhouse's contributions to history require Reassessment and comprehensive understanding. Sinology is, of course, a picky man's paradise. A man called "Mr. Post Office" sounds suspiciously like "Mr. Post Office Mr. Zhang", which was obviously misinterpreted by Lord French.Furthermore, although Qishan's diary is said to be "very difficult to recognize 'cursive script'", the part shown in the basics is more like the more recognizable running script.To what extent did Backhouse refer to the extensive erotic literature of the late Qing court?To what extent was he relying on information obtained solely from the Chinese?Is there any connection between him and Rong Lu's family? Trevor Robb describes his sources in general terms, and also lists 75 "source notes", fortunately not Ph.D.-style footnotes.No doubt eager readers will ask him for more guidance.So he might be able to start Backhouse Industries.In fact, the controversy has already begun. Mr. Trevor, Mr. Rob started his research on Backhouse when he got two volumes of memoirs at Basel Airport when he went to the Bodleian Library to check the books in 1973.Dr. Reinhard Houbli, the Swiss minister who helped Backhaus during the war and commissioned him to write his memoirs, was a famous parasitologist at Peking Union Medical College Hospital in the 1930s. (My wife Wilma edited some articles for him there in 1933.) Before his death in 1973, he prepared to publish his memoirs and wrote an afterword himself, assessing the merits of the memoirs and documenting his co-authorship. relation.In six issues of the Times Literary Supplement, from November to January, Mr Richard Elmon and Mr Trevor Robb of the New College debated whether Hobley had been duped by Backhouse. In the first debate, Elmon defended Hobley.Both authors quoted Hobley's postscript, which is difficult for ordinary readers to see in the Bodleian Library.If words could hurt, they would both be in the hospital, and Mr. Elmon would certainly be critically ill.All indications are that Sir Edmund will go down forever. This review is of Hugh Trevor Robb, The Hermit of Peking: The Mysterious Life of Sir Edmund Backhouse (New York, Knope Press, 1977), published April 1977 The New York Review of Books on the 14th, entitled "Liars."