It was the morning of November 15, 1908 in a reception room of the Imperial Palace in Beijing. The Empress Dowager was meeting two senior officials, one of them a senior military officer, Yuan Shikai .
The two asked her to abdicate and appoint them as regents to the young emperor. Incandescent with rage, she ordered the two to be dismissed, tried and executed for treason. Yuan took out a six-chambered revolver and shot her three times in the stomach. As she bled profusely, she called for the two men to be beheaded and breathed her last. The eunuchs around her screamed their grief.
This remarkable account of the death of the most powerful person in the empire comes from a book, Decadence Mandchoue - the China memoirs of Sir Edmund Trelawny Backhouse, to be published in Hong Kong on Wednesday.
Born into a noble family in England in 1873, Backhouse moved to Beijing in 1898 and spent most of the rest of his life there, until his death in 1944. He wrote the memoir in the first half of 1943, at the suggestion of a Swiss doctor, Reinhard Hoeppli; the doctor had it typed out and gave one copy each to four libraries - the Bodleian in Oxford, the British Museum, Harvard College and the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris. Backhouse asked that it be published after the death of Hoeppli, which was in 1973.
The memoirs have never been published. They were shown to an eminent Oxford University historian, Hugh Trevor-Roper, who chose not to publish them but instead to write Backhouse's biography, in 1976. He described Backhouse's life story and virtually all of his scholarship as a fraud. In 1983, however, Trevor-Roper's sense of judgment was put into question when he authenticated diaries by Adolf Hitler, later found to be forgeries.
Trevor-Roper's judgment discredited Backhouse in the eyes of scholars but Earnshaw Books and New Century Press have chosen to publish them, in English and Chinese respectively, believing that, even if they are not completely accurate, they contain valuable and unique historical material. Bao Pu, publisher of New Century Press, said: 'It is time for a wider audience to make their own decision about the value of this material.