Annals & Memoirs of the Court of Peking (from the 16th to the 20th century)
Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1914. First American edition. Hardcover. 8vo. Pp. x, 531, index. 25 b/w illustrations. Top edges stained yellow. Errata slip tipped-in. Yellow cloth lettered and illustrated in black. Some soiling to boards and spine else a Near Fine copy. Near Fine. Item #9742
A look at China from the Ming Dynasty to the early 20th century. Backhouse, the subject of Hugh Trevor-Roper's The Hermit of Peking, had special access to the Imperial Court in the Forbidden Palace; his claims of garnering great riches of Chinese art and artifacts for the British Museum (or was it Oxford?), of having warships for sale to the Chinese navy, of intimate relations with the Empress Dowager, reveal a sinophile of high order, but of whom the epithet "flim-flam man" may well have applied.
Price: $200.00