Edmund Backhouse
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 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.
In 1913 Backhouse began to donate many Chinese manuscripts to the Bodleian Library in Oxford, hoping to receive a professorship in return. He delivered a total of eight tons of manuscripts to the Bodleian between 1913 and 1923. The provenance of several of the manuscripts was later cast into serious doubt. Nevertheless, he donated over 17,000 items, some of which "were a real treasure", including half a dozen volumes of the rare Yongle Encyclopedia of the early 1400s.[2]
- "The acquisition of the Backhouse collection, one of the finest and most generous gifts in the Library's history, between 1913 and 1922, greatly enriched the Bodleian's Chinese collections."[3]
- 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
- ↑ http://campcatatonia.org/article/1184/hugh-trevor-roper-on-sir-edmund-backhouse Camp Catatonia
- ↑ http://www.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/bodley/library/special/oriental_rarebooks/china_asia "History and scope of the Chinese collections" - Bodleian Library website.
