By Edmund Backhouse
In 1898 a tender Englishman walked right into a gay brothel in Peking and started a trip that he claims took him the entire option to the bedchamber of imperial China’s final nice ruler, the Empress Dowager Tz’u Hsi. the fellow was once Sir Edmund Backhouse, and his debatable memoirs, Décadence Mandchoue, have been released for the 1st time by means of Earnshaw Books in 2011. This version, renamed Manchu Decadence, is abridged and unexpurgated, that means that it makes a speciality of the main remarkable and precious parts of Backhouse’s narrative. Backhouse used to be a skilled sinologist, and his booklet presents a special and surprising glimpse into the hidden international of China’s imperial palace, with its rampant corruption, grand conspiracies and uninhibited sexuality.
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Extra info for Manchu Decadence: The China Memoirs of Sir Edmund Trelawny Backhouse (Abridged and Unexpurgated)
Sample text
Xunzi’s explanation may have reflected his own interpretation of the burial customs of his time. Yet his understanding of the meaning of the shengqi, the objects of life, as real objects that were made incomplete cannot cover the whole story. Many tombs found by archaeologists, the Mawangdui tombs for example, show that the “objects of life”—the clothes, the food, the utensils—were not “incomplete” but were functionally real objects. The use of surrogate objects presupposes a mentality that sees the netherworld as a place where the deceased lives a “spiritual” existence.
The underground tunnel, which most likely would have struck underground water, was obviously seen as a symbol of the netherworld. Exactly what existed in the Yellow Spring, however, is not specified in the existing evidence. The term “Dark City” first appears in the Chuci (Songs of the South), written by the famous Chu poet Qu Yuan 屈原 (ca. ). ”16 Here, the Dark City is ruled by Lord Earth (Tu Bo 土伯), a sinister-looking horned python. Such a description betrays a certain aversion toward the afterlife, as this Dark City was obviously not a desirable place to be for the souls of the dead.
Quibell, Nagada and Ballas (London: British School of Archaeology in Egypt, 1896); M. Raphael, Prehistoric Pottery and Civilization in Egypt (New York: Pantheon Books, 1947). Similar situations can be found in ancient Mesopotamia, see “Grabbeigabe” and “Grabgefäss,” in Reallexikon der Assyriologie. , eds. (Berlin and Leipzig: Walter de Gruyter, 1957–1971), 3:581–593, 605–609. 50. Liji zhushu, ed. Shisanjing zhushu 8:5–6; for the translation, cf. James Legge, The Li Ki, in The Sacred Books of the East, ed.