In 1899, Sir Edmund Trelawny Backhouse arrived in Peking with impeccable references from Prime Minister Salisbury and other British dignitaries. His superb command of the Chinese language earned him a job as a translator for Peking legends like Sir Robert Hart and Dr. George Morrison. With fellow-scholar J.O.P. Bland, he wrote 'China Under the Empress Dowager', in part based upon the recovered diary of Ching-shan, and the Annals and Memoirs of the Court of Peking, both of which were considered seminal works throughout his lifetime.

There was only one problem: he may have made it all up. Though an undoubtedly clever and knowledgeable man, he was a pathological liar and con-man. The diary he had found was allegedly a forgery and much of the material in his books was plagiarized. What's more, he used his supposed connections with Peking's Chinese elite to wrangle bogus government and business contracts. Backhouse 'went native', living a solitary life in the heart of the Chinese City and acquiring the nickname 'the Hermit of Peking'.

So well-kept were his secrets that it wasn't until the 1970's that historian Hugh Trevor-Roper discovered the full extent of his fabrications. Backhouse's uncovered memoirs, Decadence Mandchoue, were a largely salacious account of his travels and sexual exploits with important figures of his day ranging from Oscar Wilde to Empress Dowager Cixi, whose bed he claimed to have visited no less than 150 times.