China Under The Empress Dowager. Being The History Of The Life And Times Of Tzu Hsi. Compiled From State Papers And The Private Diary Of The Comptroller Of Her Household. Bland, John Otway Percy, & Edmund Backhouse.

First edition, later impression, presentation copy, inscribed on the half-title, "To Marjorie Mack, a belated thanks offering (as is most justly due). From J. O. P. Bland. 23 Oct. 1912". Given the book's extraordinary success, signed or inscribed printings are surprisingly elusive. A controversial publication first released in October 1910, China under the Empress Dowager is "the most successful, and most disputed, contribution to modern Chinese history" published in Britain. It consist "largely of documents translated by [Edmund] Backhouse, and polished by Bland, who constructed around them a vivid narrative of the latter days of the Qing dynasty and the Boxer uprising of 1900. The centrepiece of the volume was the purported diary of Jingshan, the Manchu official in whose house Backhouse was billeted in the aftermath of the rising. Backhouse claimed to have found the diary on entering the house, but is now known to have been, if not its forger, then certainly a close party to the forgery" (ODNB). The recipient is perhaps the Faber & Faber author of books about the British and French countryside - the reason for Bland's gift remains elusive. This eighth impression was printed in April 1912, just 18 months after the first. Large octavo. Original green cloth, spine lettered in gilt, front cover lettered in black with red Chinese seal, fore and bottom edge untrimmed. Tissue-guarded half-tone portrait frontispiece showing Ci Xi, 25 plates (2 colour), map in text. Spine sunned, extremities rubbed and bumped, contents and plates generally clean: a very good copy.