The Strange Life of Sir Edmund Backhouse

Sir Edmund Trelawny Backhouse, 2nd Baronet lived from 1873 to 1944 and spent more than half his life in Beijing. He lived such a fascinating life, full of frauds and deviancy, that in his last year of life he was urged by Dr. Reinhard Hoeppli to commit the story of his life to paper.  

The result was two memoirs, “The Dead Past”, about his days in Europe before 1898, and “Décadence Mandchoue”, Backhouse’s racy account of his years in China, mixing with all the Manchu royals and carrying on sexual relationships with the Empress Dowager Cixi and her eunuchs.

This playlist collects the CHP’s 3-part series on the life of Edmund Backhouse and is part of a larger collection of multi-part series on famous figures in Chinese history.