The Hermit Of Peking - The Hidden Life Of Sir Edmund Backhouse

Hugh Trevor-Roper’s The Hermit of Peking is one of those gloriously dangerous books that begins looking like a respectable historical biography and gradually turns into a full-scale demolition job conducted with tweezers, footnotes and a faint air of Oxbridge disbelief. Somewhere between imperial China, forged memoirs, diplomatic gossip and outright fantasy, Sir Edmund Backhouse emerges not merely as an eccentric scholar, but as the sort of man who appears to have treated reality itself as an optional administrative inconvenience.

Backhouse was, depending on which paragraph you happen to be reading, a linguistic genius, a shameless fraud, an Edwardian fantasist, a political fixer, a pornographer, a recluse, or possibly the greatest bluffer ever to wander through the final years of the Qing dynasty. Trevor-Roper circles him like a patient detective at a crime scene littered with forged documents, suspicious anecdotes and scandalous claims that become steadily more unbelievable and, somehow, harder to dismiss entirely. It is part biography, part literary autopsy and part cautionary tale about what happens when Victorian confidence collides with a man who simply refuses to stop inventing himself.

The result is unexpectedly addictive. You arrive expecting “historical scholarship” and end up with secret memoirs, improbable seductions, imperial collapse, diplomatic theatre and one deeply strange Englishman haunting Peking like a tweed-clad ghost with a filing cabinet full of questionable manuscripts. Trevor-Roper writes with the kind of elegant intellectual sharpness that makes even the footnotes feel faintly judgemental. One can almost hear him sighing heavily across the decades while another Backhouse story collapses under scrutiny.

There is also something wonderfully old-fashioned about the entire affair. This is history from the era when academics still occasionally pursued subjects out of sheer horrified fascination. Modern publishing would probably market it as “a true story too unbelievable to invent”, which is ironic given that invention is rather the central problem here.

A fascinating copy for readers of Chinese history, imperial oddballs, literary frauds, Edwardian eccentrics, unreliable narrators and anyone who suspects that the British Empire may at times have been held together by deeply strange men confidently making things up.

Condition: Good. Sold by Crappy Old Books, where dubious memoirs, imperial scandals and collapsing historical credibility remain firmly in stock.

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