Volume 24, Number 6 · April 14, 1977
The Confidence Man
By John K. Fairbank
Hermit of Peking: The Hidden Life of Sir Edmund Backhouse
by Hugh Trevor-Roper
Knopf, 316 pp., $10.00
Peking charmed its Western residents early in this century because it had been a capital city of non-Chinese conquerors and Chinese collaborators for most of a thousand years. Founded in 947 as a capital of the Khitan Mongols' Liao dynasty, it had been used similarly by the Tungusic Chin dynasty 1122-1234, then by the Mongols to 1368, and finally by the Manchus since 1644. When Anglo-French troops marched down its broad avenues in 1860, they were a new phenomenon only in their outlandish appearance. The Chinese servants and tradesmen of the ancient capital accepted the British and other Westerners as they had accepted their predecessors. Soon the Manchu and Chinese bureaucrats had the British helping them to defeat the rebels around Shanghai, just as they had a young Ulsterman, Robert Hart, helping with his Irish sensibility to give them new revenues from the foreign trade. Thus while Britain sought enthusiastically to legitimize, protect, and profit from her commercial expansion, China's rulers made use of British aims and abilities for their own ends within China. The China wing of the British empire was taken faute de mieux into the management, incorporated into the Ch'ing dynasty's shaky power structure.
Review, 2838 words
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