Decadence Mandchoue: The China Memoirs of Sir Edmund Trelawny Backhouse edited by Derek Sandhaus Earnshaw Books
Among the many preferences enjoyed by the empress dowager was a partiality towards eating at midnight. She ate little during the day, but attendants at the Qing dynasty's last court had to make sure that whatever had been prepared for her, it still had to be edible come the hour of the rat, in case she felt like a nibble.
Cixi could order your head chopped off if you displeased her, so it was probably a matter of life and death for those in her immediate circle to keep her happy. One of these, by his own account, was a minor British baronet called Sir Edmund Trelawny Backhouse, a brilliant linguist and a homosexual who arrived in Beijing in 1898.
Backhouse's observations about the empress' eating habits are recounted in one of several spellbinding chapters of Decadence Mandchoue, written almost 60 years ago but published for the first time recently in circumstances as interesting as any of the tales it recounts. Her midnight snacking is one of many of the insights into the Empress Cixi we owe to Decadence Mandchoue. It may be one of this book's more frivolous observations, but no less interesting for that, because of the corroborative quality of such details, particularly in a history whose authenticity has been called into doubt.
According to the man who commissioned the book back in 1943, a Swiss doctor named Reinhard Hoeppli, the merit of the stories is not so much in the exactness of their detail, but in the quality of their telling. As Hoeppli writes in a postscript: 'There can be no doubt that nature had given Sir Edmund a prodigious memory but also an extraordinary power of imagination. This last made his stories particularly vivid and fascinating, but obviously represented to a certain extent a danger to their truthfulness.'
The advice about the empress dowager's eating habits was provided to Backhouse by a court official, chief eunuch Li Lienying, after Backhouse was summoned to meet her for a seduction, as described in a chapter titled 'Summer Palace Nocturne: The Pastimes of Messalina'. The empress desired to seduce him, he was told, and who would he be to refuse such an imperial command?