Hermit of Peking
Author: Hugh Redwald Trevor-Roper
Publisher: Fromm International
Published: 1986
Total Pages: 344
ISBN-13: 9780880640633
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Hermit of Peking
Author: Hugh R. Trevor-Roper
Publisher: Eland & Sickle Moon Books
Published: 1993
Total Pages: 405
ISBN-13: 9780907871323
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →The trail of discovery began when Hugh Trevor-Roper received in somewhat unusual circumstances the voluminous memoirs of Sir Edmund Backhouse, the celebrated Chinese scholar and co-author of two standard works on Chinese history. The memoirs describe a very different person from the one who had apparently lived such a respectable life until his death in 1944. Backhouse claimed that he had been intimate with many notable characters including Verlaine and Lord Rosebery, and that his many lovers (of both sexes) had included the Dowager Empress of China. It gradually became clear that the detailed, plausible and very obscene memoirs were a work of fantasy - yet a fantasy interwoven with detailed fact. Intrigued, Hugh Trevor-Roper set out to discover as much as he could about Sir Edmund Backhouse, and unearthed the story of one of the most outrageous confidence tricksters of this century.
A Hidden Life
Author: Hugh Redwald Trevor-Roper
Publisher: MacMillan
Published: 1976
Total Pages: 336
ISBN-13:
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Verslag van het schimmige leven van deze Engelse homoseksuele edelman en sinoloog (1873-1944) in Peking.
History and the Enlightenment
Author: Hugh Trevor-Roper
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2010-06-29
Total Pages: 341
ISBN-13: 0300139349
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →The historical philosophy of the Enlightenment -- The Scottish Enlightenment -- Pietro Giannone and Great Britain -- Dimitrie Cantemir's Ottoman history and its reception in England -- From deism to history: Conyers Middleton -- David Hume, historian -- The idea of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire -- Gibbon and the publication of the Decline and fall of the Roman Empire 1776-1976 -- Gibbon's last project -- The romantic movement and the study of history -- Lord Macaulay: the history of England -- Thomas Carlyle's historical philosophy -- Jacob Burckhardt.
City of Lingering Splendor
Author: John Blofeld
Publisher: Shambhala Publications
Published: 2001-05-01
Total Pages: 281
ISBN-13: 1570626375
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →In his early twenties, John Blofeld spent what he describes as "three exquisitely happy years" in Peking during the era of the last emperor, when the breathtaking greatness of China's ancient traditions was still everywhere evident. Arriving in 1934, he found a city imbued with the atmosphere of the recent imperial past and haunted by the powerful spirit of the late Dowager Empress Tzu Hsi. He entered a world of magnificent palaces and temples of the Forbidden City, of lotus-covered lakes and lush pleasure-gardens, of bustling bazaars and peaceful bathhouses, and of "flower houses" with their beautiful young courtesans versed in the arts of pleasing men. With a novelists' command of detail and dialogue, Blofeld vividly re-creates the magic of these years and conveys to the reader his appreciation and nostalgia for a way of life long vanished.
Décadence Mandchoue
Author: Sir Edmund Backhouse
Publisher:
Published: 2011
Total Pages: 0
ISBN-13: 9789881944511
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →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 Décadence 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.
Annals & Memoirs of the Court of Peking
Author: Sir Edmund Backhouse
Publisher:
Published: 1914
Total Pages: 602
ISBN-13:
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →The enduring interest displayed by many readers in the character of China's great Empress Dowager Tzŭ Hsi, and the generous appreciation accorded to our work on her life and reign, have prompted the belief that the present work, covering a wider stretch of space and time, should prove interesting, and of some value, to those who desire to study the causes, immediate and remote, of recent and current events in the Far East. Until we understand something of the mainsprings of thought and action which determine the governance and daily life of a people-something of their atavistic memories and instincts, of their social, religious and economic systems, it is not possible to sympathise with them in their perils and crises of change, or to render them the assistance which appreciation of their motives and intelligent anticipation of their needs might supply. -- Introduction.
The Professor and the Parson
Author: Adam Sisman
Publisher: Catapult
Published: 2020-02-04
Total Pages: 257
ISBN-13: 1640093281
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →This “amusing and elegantly written” romp takes readers on a wild ride through the life of Robert Parkin Peters (The New York Times Book Review)—a liar, bigamist, and fraudulent priest who tricked some of the brightest minds of his generation. One day in November 1958, the celebrated historian Hugh Trevor–Roper received a curious letter. It was an appeal for help, written on behalf of a student at Magdalen College, with the unlikely claim that he was being persecuted by the Bishop of Oxford. Curiosity piqued, Trevor–Roper agreed to a meeting. It was to be his first encounter with Robert Parkin Peters: plagiarist, bigamist, fraudulent priest, and imposter extraordinaire. The Professor and the Parson is a witty and charming portrait of eccentricity, extraordinary narcissism, and a life as wild and unlikely as any in fiction. Motivated not by money but by a desire for prestige, Peters lied, stole, and cheated his way to academic positions and religious posts from Cambridge to New York. Frequently deported, and even more frequently discovered, he left a trail of destruction including seven marriages (three of which were bigamous) and an investigation by the FBI. "I was captivated from start to finish by this utterly mad, and wholly delightful story of chicanery and fantasy, and which involves a man who relentlessly duped our most cherished institutions of godly pursuit and higher learning. Plus I learned how to defrock a priest, always good to have on hand in these troubling times." —Simon Winchester, author of The Perfectionists
The Shortest History of China: From the Ancient Dynasties to a Modern Superpower - A Retelling for Our Times (Shortest History)
Author: Linda Jaivin
Publisher: The Experiment, LLC
Published: 2021-09-28
Total Pages: 288
ISBN-13: 1615198210
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Journey across epic China—through millennia of early innovation to modern dominance. The Shortest History books deliver thousands of years of history in one riveting, fast-paced read. As we enter the “Asian century,” China demands our attention for being an economic powerhouse, a beacon of rapid modernization, and an assertive geopolitical player. To understand the nation behind the headlines, we must take in its vibrant, tumultuous past—a story of “larger-than-life characters, philosophical arguments and political intrigues, military conflicts and social upheavals, artistic invention and technological innovation.” The Shortest History of China charts a path from China’s tribal origins through its storied imperial era and up to the modern Communist Party under Xi Jinping—including the rarely told story of women in China and the specters of corruption and disunity that continue to haunt the People’s Republic today. A master storyteller and exacting historian, Linda Jaivin distills this vast history into a short, riveting account that today’s globally minded readers will find indispensable.
The Man from Beijing
Author: Henning Mankell
Publisher: Knopf Canada
Published: 2010-02-16
Total Pages: 522
ISBN-13: 030737405X
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →From the internationally acclaimed author of the Kurt Wallander mysteries comes an extraordinary stand-alone novel - both a mystery and a sweeping drama - that traces the legacy of the nineteenth-century slave trade between China and America. January 2006. In the small Swedish hamlet of Hesjövallen, a horrific scene is discovered: nineteen people have been tortured and massacred an the only clue is a red silk ribbon found at the scene. Judge Birgitta Roslin has a particular reason to be shocked by the crime: her mother's adoptive parents, the Andréns, are among the victims. Investigating further, she learns that an Andrén family living in Nevada has also been murdered. Travelling to Hesjövallen, she finds a diary, kept by a gangmaster on the railway built across America in the 1860s, full of vivid descriptions of the brutality with which the Chinese and other slave workers were treated. She discovers that the red silk ribbon found at the crime scene came from a local Chinese restaurant, and she learns that a Chinese man, a stranger to the town, was staying at a local boarding house at the time of the atrocity. The police insist that only a lunatic could have committed such a horrific crime, but Birgitta suspects that there is much more to it, and she is determined to uncover the truth. Her search takes her from Sweden to Beijing and back, but Mankell's narrative also takes us 150 years into the past: to China and America when the hatred that fuelled the massacre was born, a hatred transformed and complicated over time and that will catch up to Birgitta as she draws ever closer to discovering who is behind the Hesjövallen murders.
