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Imperial Masquerade
The Legend of Princess Der Ling
Grant Hayter-Menzies
Foreword by Pamela Kyle Crossley
Daughter of a Manchu aristocrat, granddaughter of a Boston merchant, educated like a boy in the Confucian classics, a baptized Catholic blessed by the hand of Pope Leo XIII, a woman who donned chic Western fashions in China and her ceremonial court robes in the United States, and wife of an American soldier of fortune, Princess Der Ling was a fascinating human battleground of warring identities. Imperial Masquerade is the first biography of one of the twentieth century's most intriguing cross-cultural personalities, traces not only the life of Princess Der Ling but offers a fresh look at the woman she lionized and, ultimately, betrayed - the Empress Dowager Cixi.
The book also depicts the changing worlds of Paris, Tokyo and the other international stages of Der Ling's development as woman and as mystery, and deals with the many teachers who made her who she was: Isadora Duncan, Sarah Bernhardt, the Empress of Japan, her own broad-minded father, American society figures like Barbara Hutton, and most of all, the Empress Dowager Cixi, who knew all about being several different people at once.
"This is a fine book, full of historical surprises. Grant Hayter-Menzies has taken a strange and much-abused figure and brought her back to life with grace and flair. He shows that 'Princess' Der Ling really was a lady-in-waiting to China's Empress Dowager Tzu-Hsi, and really was a member of the Manchu nobility. Outside China, the real Der Ling led a fabulous life as a diplomat's daughter in Paris, in the company of world-famous celebrities, and then ended in tragedy in America, as sympathetically reconstructed in this charming book." - Sterling Seagrave, author of Dragon Lady: The Life and Legend of the Last Empress of China
A resident of Sidney, British Columbia, Grant Hayter-Menzies has served as art and music critic for newspapers and magazines in the U.S. and Canada.
Hear Grant Hayter-Menzies discuss Princess Der Ling and Imperial Masquerade on China Radio International, http://english.cri.cn/4026/2008/04/10/191@344050.htm
Quotes:
"The last years of the Qing dynasty were a time of rumours, adventures, and mysterious opportunities for the polyglot inhabitants of Beijing. The Memoir written in 1911 by the self-styled "Princess" Der Ling, Lady -in-waiting to the Empress Dowager between 1903 and 1905, has always presented baffling problems concerning accuracy and interpretation. "Imperial Masquerade" is an ingenious rethinking of the available evidence, and presents an absorbing account of how Der Ling survived at Court, and what it must have been like to work for such a formidable ruler." - Jonathan Spence, Sterling Professor of History, Yale University
"An intriguing, insightful portrait of a woman born at the boundary between two cultures who, in her restless yearning for celebrity, crossed and re-crossed another boundary - that between reality and fantasy - in an extraordinary life that took her from the Forbidden City of Beijing to the pleasure palaces of America's Jazz Age." -Diana Preston
Reviews:
"Imperial Masquerade is a well-researched and written biography, attractively designed. . . . It provides a fascinating and often entertaining peek inside the court of the Empress Dowager and her ill-fated emperor nephew, and gracefully recounts an odd and interesting life." -Asian Review of Books
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Pub Date:
March 2008
ISBN:
CLOTH:
962-209-881-9
978-962-209-881-7
Price:
Cloth: $35.00s
Subject Listing:
Asian Studies, Biography
Bibliographic information:
350 pp., 6 x 9 in.
Distributed for:
Hong Kong University Press
Territorial rights:
North American rights only
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