Background Reading

‘The Last Empress, The She-Dragon of China’, by Keith Laidler. John Wiley & Sons. 2003. A very engaging run through a most extraordinary period in China’s long history.

‘From Yunnan-Fu to Peking Along The Tibetan And Mongolian Borders’, by H. Gordon Thompson. The Geographic Journal. January 1926.

‘Dragon Lady, The Life And Legend of the Last Empress of China’, by Sterling Seagrave. Vintage Books 1992.

‘The Mystery of 31 New Inn’, by R. Austin Freeman. A lesser-known British detective-story ‘rival’ to Arthur Conan Doyle. Many of R.A.F’s Dr. Thorndyke stories employ genuine, if arcane, points of scientific knowledge, from tropical medicine, metallurgy and toxicology.

‘With The Empress Dowager of China’, by Katherine A. Carl. First published 1906. An American paintress’s eye on the wonders of the Imperial Court in ‘see-no-evil’ vein but charming and filled with meticulous observations such as the Imperial legend of the Double Dragon and the Flaming Pearl.

‘The Much Maligned Empress Dowager Tz’u-hsi’. Modern Asian Studies 13:2 (1979), 177-196.

Comparative study of territoriality and habitat use in syntopic Jungle Crow (Corvus macrorhynchos) and Carrion Crow (C. corone). Hajime Matsubara. Also seehttps://corvidresearch.wordpress.com/2015/05/01/corvid-of-the-month-the-jungle-crow/

‘Conjuring Asia. Magic, Orientalism And The Making Of The Modern World.’ Chris Goto-Jones. Cambridge University Press 2016. Excellent chapter on Chinese magic.

Professor Sue Fawn Chung, University of Nevada. Dissertation quoted in ‘The Image of the Empress Dowager Tz’u-hsi’, in ‘Reform in Nineteenth Century China’, eds. Paul Cohen and John Schrecker, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976, and ‘The Much Maligned Empress Dowager Tz’u-hsi’, Modern Asian Studies 13:2 (1979).

‘The Diaries Of Sir Ernest Satow, British Envoy In Peking (1904-1906)’. Volume Two.

‘An English Lady In Chinese Turkestan’, by Lady Catherine Macartney. First published by Ernest Benn, 1931.

‘The Land Of The Blue Gown’, by Alicia E. Neva Little. First published 1902. Travels of a doughty anti-foot-binding campaigner, a mistress of description.

‘The Last Of The Empresses’, by Daniele Varè. John Murray, 1936. Subtitled ‘and the passing from the Old China to the New’.

‘Foreign Devils On The Silk Road’, by Peter Hopkirk. Oxford University Press, 1984.

‘Crime’s Strangest Cases’, by Peter Seddon. Anova Books Company 2012.

‘Yuán Shih-k’ai’, by Jerome Ch’en. Stanford University Press 1961.

‘Chinese Shakespeares’, by Alexander C. Y. Huang. A history of Shakespeare in China. Columbia University Press New York.

‘To-Morrow In The East’, by Douglas Story. George Bell & Sons, 1907 (reproduced by Bibliolife).

‘The Great Game’, by Peter Hopkirk. Oxford University Press, 1991.

‘The Forbidden City’, by Geremie R. Barme. Profile Books, 2008.

‘Treason By The Book’, by Jonathan Spence. Penguin Books, 2006.

‘Two Years In The Forbidden City’, by Princess Der Ling.

‘Hermit Of Peking’, by Hugh Trevor-Roper. Alfred A. Knoff, inc. 1977. An entertaining account of the life of a quite extraordinary rapscallion sinologist, Sir Edmund Backhouse.

‘The Crime Laboratory’, by Paul L. Kirk and Lowell W. Bradford. Charles C. Thomas. 2nd printing 1972.

‘The Real Sherlock Holmes’, by Joe Riggs. Subtitled, ‘The mysterious methods and curious history of a true mental specialist’. Andrews UK, revised 2012.

‘The Scientific Sherlock Holmes: Cracking the Case with Science and Forensics’. James O’Brien. Oxford University Press, 2013. Holmes as a pioneer of forensics.

‘Poisonous Plants in Great Britain’, by Frederick Gillam. Wooden Books Ltd. 2008. Neat little book, not to be used for unusual kitchen recipes.

‘Bird Sense, What It’s Like To Be A Bird’, by Professor Tim Birkhead. Bloomsbury, 2012.

‘Sherlock Holmes: Father of Scientific Crime and Detection’, by Stanton O. Berg. Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology Vol. 61 Issue 3. 1970.

‘Toxicology in the Sherlockian Canon’, paper delivered in 2000 by Steven Seifert, Arizona Poison and Drug Information Center, Tucson, Arizona.

‘A Mosaic Of The Hundred Days’, by Luke S. K. Kwong. Council On East Asian Studies, Harvard. 1984.

‘The Opium War’, by Julia Lovell. Picador 2011. Includes a truly astonishing account of the causes of the first Opium War.

‘Shakespeare and Democracy’, by Gabriel Chanan, ‘The Self-Renewing Politics of a Global Playwright. Troubador 2015. Gabriel Chanan argues that even though the Bard could know nothing of modern democracy, he played a fundamental role in building the culture that underlies it.

‘My Life In Magic’, Howard Thurston. 1929.

‘Conjuring Asia. Magic Orientalism and the Making of the Modern World.’ Chris Goto-Jones. Cambridge University Press. 2016.

‘Changing Clothes in China’, by Antonia Finnane. 2007. Excellent reference for details on how elite men’s fashion changed at the start of the 20th Century.

‘My Dear Holmes, a Study In Sherlock’, by Gavin Brend. George Allen & Unwin, 1951.