Description
He was a gay Englishman who in the late 1800s used his connections to the Chinese imperial palace to enter the House of Chaste Pleasures, an exclusive male chamber in Peking. His reputation took a beating in Hugh Trevor-Roper’s 1970 biography, The Hermit of Peking, which dismissed Backhouse’s work on China as “an obscene novelette”. Meanwhile, Backhouse’s original memoir, Decadence Mandchoue, sat in obscurity in Oxford University’s Bodleian Library. The story it tells, and how editor-in-chief Derek Sandhaus-Earnshaw Books brought it to life, is a remarkable one.
