Edmund Backhouse
Sir Edmund Backhouse(Sir Edmund Trelawny Backhouse, 2nd Baronet, 1873–1944) was an expert on Chinese history and suspected forger.
Backhouse was born in Darlington to a Quaker family. He inherited the baronetcy in 1918 from his father, Sir Jonathan Backhouse, a director of Backhouse's Bank, Darlington, and later of Barclays Bank. He was educated at Winchester College, and went on to Merton College, Oxford, but left Oxford without a degree, fleeing the country to escape from his creditors.[1]
In 1899 he arrived in Peking (now Beijing) having learnt Chinese and other languages. He remained in China for most of his life, mainly working as a translator and intermediary for Western businesses. From around 1910 he collaborated with the journalist J O P Bland on two books about Chinese history, China Under the Empress Dowager and Annals and Memoirs of the Court of Peking, with Backhouse providing the source materials and Bland converting them to readable manuscripts. However doubt was soon cast on the accuracy of the work. In particular China Under the Empress Dowager was claimed to be based on so-called Diary of His Excellency Ching-Shan, which was subsequently found to be a forgery.
- This article is a stub. You can help the UK LGBT History Project by expanding it.
References
- ↑ http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/30513 Robert Bickers, "Backhouse, Sir Edmund Trelawny, second baronet (1873–1944)", Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004
