ed_grover's Full Review: Sterling Seagrave and Peggy Seagrave - Dragon Lady...
My first reading about the last Empress of China was in the early 1980s after I returned from Florida. I went to visit a friend who owned a resale shop for men's clothing because I needed something other than jeans and khaki shorts to wear on job interviews. One day I noticed a bright yellow book lying on his desk and I picked it up. As we have the same taste in reading materials as well as in some other areas, I asked if I could read it and put it in a bag along with some things I had just gotten. That book on the last Empress of China was fascinating. It was said that she manipulated the court by sheer will and devious plotting. She was pictured as one nasty character with a frightening reputation. I loved reading about all the palace intrigues within the court. It seems that the eunuchs and concubines were major players in this life drama.
I wanted to read the yellow book again, but my friend had his copy packed away. I got on line and looked around, and found Dragon Lady: The Life and Legend of the Last Empress of China. Sterling Seagrave, an investigative journalist whose family has lived in Asia for over two centuries, wrote his book to correct the tarnished image that two British journalists had falsely created about the Empress. He wanted to set the record straight. I found the book detailed and fascinating to read, especially after my experience of reading the earlier version, which I found totally wicked and fascinating.
The court had given Tsu Hsi the affectionate nickname of Old Buddha in her old age. The term was flattering and not meant as an incarnation of the divinity. That was rather nice to find out after reading about the hatchet job Sir Edmund Backhouse did on her. He, alone, was most responsible for painting a slanderous picture of her as an iron-willed, over sexed concubine who was not only a murderer, but also a single-minded tyrant who was nothing more than a monster. It is the correction of the lies and setting the record straight that takes up most of this book.
The British colony referred to the dowager Empress as "that awful old harridan" and "that odious woman." In the first chapter, at the close of the 19th century, they are pictured in all their decadent glory at a weekly garden party thrown by Sir Robert Hart, the Inspector General of Chinese Customs. It was they that were responsible for the Opium Wars and the Boxer Rebellion, not Tsu Hsi. In a chapter titled "Foreign Devils," Seagrave tells us: "when all the myths are stripped away, it was the deliberate mischief of a handful of Englishmen that led to the humiliation and death of Emperor Tao Kuang and his son, Emperor Hsien Feng, so that for the first time in more than a thousand years China's throne passed into the hands of a woman."
One of these mischievous Englishmen was Dr. George Ernest Morrison, a physician who became the Peking correspondent of the Times of London. He was responsible for all the articles published about China. "As journalism's first China watcher, Morrison was responsible for many of the slanders and half-truths that continue to be believed to this day." Unfortunately his mastery of the language wasn't very accomplished and he was at the mercy of those who did speak it. His stories contained distortions and inventions provided by his Chinese-speaking assistants. One thing we can be grateful for is the private diary he kept that listed the males and females of the colony who had syphilis or gonorrhea. He was amused by the way the infections were passed around . . . and so are we.
It is at the garden party that we get our first glimpse of Edmund Backhouse, a recent arrival on the scene. We find out that as a young man he was considered a "bad seed," to the despair of his parents. It seems he blew his inheritance trying to enter the homosexual circles of the Oscar Wilde set. Backhouse left England bankrupt only to appear in China in 1899. He applied for work as a translator in Chinese Customs and was turned down. He translated Chinese newspaper articles for the English press; that's how he came to Morrison's attention and the rest is history.
Backhouse was a bitter and unhappy homosexual of the type who gives the rest of us a bad name. He hated his mother and saved his stored up venom for women for his ultimate portrayal of the Dowager Empress of China (Tsu Hsi, 1835-1908). I'm sure everyone is aware of what the press can do to a person's reputation when they decide to put a negative spin on things. Sir Edmund Backhouse and J.P.O Bland (a toady from the Times of London) produced China Under the Dowager Empress (1910). This book was only one of what was thought to be a balanced, scholarly and well-informed inside look at her life. In 1947 Backhouse was revealed as a counterfeiter, a con man and a complete fraud when The Hermit of Peking: The Hidden Life of Sir Edmund Backhouse was published by Professor Hugh Trevor-Roper. That book is coming up next.
The listing of the attendees at the garden party is revealing. The group of 500 people attending consisted mostly of European ministers and missionaries with a sprinkling of court officials. At the party, Morrison stayed close to Backhouse and Bland, who were busily discussing the Empress Dowager and it's here that we get our first look at Sir Edmund Backhouse and the damage he did to her reputation.
Spurious stories seem to have been Edmund Backhouse's forte. His portrayal of Tsu Hsi were just barely pornographic and the collection of rare and ancient Chinese manuscripts he took the information from became the basis of the Oxford Bodelian Library. It's also interesting to note that at one time he supported himself by writing homosexual porn for the English speaking market in the style of Baron Corvo. Backhouse and others "supported themselves in grand style by forging and selling Chinese masterpieces, including the court papers and court diaries" that were used to write much of what he reported about the Empress. She was pictured as the wicked witch if the East. It was said she had those who challenged her control poisoned, strangled, beheaded or forced to commit suicide, and that was just for the people she didn't like.
Granted, there were those self-styled reformers at court, who after they were exiled to Japan, spread untrue stories about the Empress. They lied about her embezzlement of the treasury and her sexual dalliances, but it was Backhouse who began translating Chinese newspaper articles and gradually became Morrison's unofficial editor and started feeding untrue stories to the English speaking world. Backhouse and Bland pictured the Empress as "a tyrant, an iron-willed, over-sexed Manchu concubine who usurped power in 1861 to rule China with perversion, corruption and intrigue for half a century . . ."
It seems that after the Boxer uprising a group of female writers who were generally uncritical of the Empress wrote a number of books and magazine articles. They ranged from the "ladies" of the British colony to American artist Susan Karl, who was commissioned to paint a portrait of the Empress. All the materials were appraised by male reviewers of the period as being "uninformed." I find it interesting that Pearl S. Buck (The Good Earth) wrote an account of the Empress that was clearly labeled as fiction.
Now, I find out that an author named Anchee Min has penned another fictional account of the Empress's life as part of a forthcoming trilogy. The book is called Empress Orchid and has been reviewed by inthelilypond, a fine new writer in the Epinions Book section. When I told her that I, too, was reading about the last Empress, our intrepid reviewer e-mailed me to tell me that there was a rumor of a pending movie to be made from the book she reviewed. All I can say is that if it’s anything as visually glorious as The Last Emperor by Bernando Bertoluicci, it's okay with me as long as they make sure to tell us it's historical fiction.
One of the last acts of the Dowager Empress was to put the child, Pu Yi, on the throne as Emperor. Pu Yi, was Emperor Kuang Hsu's nephew and unfortunately the Chinese Communists were just around the corner. The visual changes in the story and visual look in the movie are stunning. After all that’s done I'd like to review Martin Scorcese's Movie Kundun, which takes a look at the Chinese Communists and the Dali Lama. That should take care of my Oriental phase for a while.
At the beginning of this book there is a "Cast of Characters" with short, a one-sentence description for each of them. Everything is listed in double columns and goes on for five pages. For more information you can check out the Index at the back of the book. It runs for 25 pages with two columns on each page. The book totals a whopping 601 pages and the last 136 of them are devoted to nearly 100 pages of notes and a lengthy bibliography. This is clearly not a book to curl up with; it's a book to read and study, it's filled with the authentic portrait of a fascinating woman, not the monster she was portrayed as by the Foreign Devils. (A Borzoi Book, Alfred A. Knopf (1992), ISBN: 0-679-40230-6).
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