BLAND, John Otway Percy, & Edmund Backhouse.

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China under the Empress Dowager. First Beijing edition of the "the most successful, and most disputed, contribution to modern Chinese history" (ODNB), Heinemann's file copy, their stamp on the frontispiece verso. Printed for Vetch in Shanghai by the North-China Daily News, it was revised from both the first edition of 1910 and the abridged edition of 1914.China Under the Empress Dowager consist "largely of documents translated by [Edmund] Backhouse, and polished by Bland, who constructed around them a vivid narrative of the latter days of the Qing dynasty and the Boxer uprising of 1900. The centrepiece of the volume was the purported diary of Jingshan, the Manchu official in whose house Backhouse was billeted in the aftermath of the rising. Backhouse claimed to have found the diary on entering the house, but is now known to have been, if not its forger, then certainly a close party to the forgery" (ODNB). The book's problematic underpinnings, and the broader Bland-Backhouse drama, was exposed in Hugh Trevor-Roper's Hermit of Peking (1976).

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