People who knew Backhouse described him variously as gelatinous, deranged and the most remarkable scoundrel ever known in the Far East, which is saying a lot. ... At the age of 26, Backhouse turned up in China. Before he was through he would sign on as an agent for a major English shipping firm, promising to sell battleships to the Chinese; a secret agent of the British Legation, presumed to be negotiating the sale and delivery of some 200,000 rifles and machine-guns from Chinese to English hands during World War I; the middleman in a deal between a large American printing firm that was to sell and print hundreds of thousands of banknotes for the Chinese; the donor of a vast library of rare Chinese books to the Bodleian Library in Oxford; and the co-author, with an English journalist named J.O.P. Bland, of two books about the imperial Manchu court.
Posted on: Sun, 30 Mar 2014 18:33:55 +0000
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