Famous Liars of Beijing

In and around the end of the last dynasty in 1912, Beijing became a breeding ground for liars and cheats. Decadent and corrupt government structures combined with poverty and desperation created the perfect atmosphere for such people to emerge. We have chosen three thrifty liars that all have the one thing in common, that it is still discussed to this day to what extent the accounts they have left us with can be trusted.

Zhang Daqian 张大千

In the chaos that surrounded the fall of the last dynasty, everyone from eunuchs to former emperors were smuggling artistic masterpieces out of the back door of Beijing’s palaces. The antiques trade in Beijing exploded - but not all paintings sold were genuine. The painter Zhang Datian, who stayed in the capital in the 1920s, made forgery an artform. Leading international museums were fooled into paying huge sums for what they perceived to be priceless antiques, but which were in fact contemporary fakes. The Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, for instance, bought a painting that they were convinced was by the 10th century artist Guan Tong. The work was later revealed to be a fake painted by Zhang Daqian. Even today, the Metropolitan Museum of Art hold a piece in their collection allegedly made by Guan Tong called “The Riverbank”. The art historian James Cahill stubbornly believes this painting is yet another of Zhang Daqian’s forgeries. 

Detail from the alleged Song dynasty painting "Riverbank" at the Metropolitan Museum of Art that James Cahill believes is a forgery made by Zhang Daqian.

Zhang Daqian was not only forging other people’s work - he was also an accomplished artist in his own right. Ironically, his work achieved such fame that others turned to forging his works – in this way the master forger had become the victim of forgery himself!

Sai Jinhua 赛金花

Sai Jinhua, Beijing’s most famous prostitute, did not actually create a web of lies herself - they were almost organically spun around her. Sai Jinhua was the concubine of the former Chinese ambassador to Germany Hong Jun – she followed him to Berlin, where she learnt some German. Shortly after the pair returned to China, Hong Jun died, and Sai Jinhua found herself subsequently ousted from the family (according to her, over a money dispute).  

Sai Jinhua with her third husband Wei Sijiong

When Beijing was occupied by foreign powers in 1900, Sai Jinhua’s ability to speak a foreign tongue elevated her to almost saintly status. Acting as a translator, stories say that she protected her countrymen from execution at the hands of the foreign forces. At this time, her reputation began to swell - it was soon rumored that she was a friend of the German emperor, was engaged in a love affair with the supreme commander of the foreign army, and even that she had effectively settled a peace deal with the foreign devils all on her own. Sai Jinhua was profiting greatly from these stories, as the prices in her brothel soared. In the 1930s the nationalist stories about her bravery took on a whole new meaning in the face of the threat of the Japanese occupation. Some of the most recognized Chinese intellectuals wrote literature about her as an act of defiance against the Japanese, and a Beida professor even interviewed her for a biography. In this book she did little to dispel the myths that surrounded her, instinctively realizing that the illusion of Sai Jinhua as the savior of the city of Beijing was her greatest and most valuable asset.

Edmund Backhouse

It is almost impossible to decide where to start when discussing the lies of Edmund Backhouse. Born in 1873, Backhouse never finished university and fled the U.K with huge, unsettled debts. His family was so embarrassed by his behavior that they paid for him to stay in China, far from the respectable British society. There can be no doubt that Backhouse was an incredibly talented individual – he learned Chinese and Japanese to a level that meant that during his time in Beijing, governments and companies relied on him as an intermediary in huge business deals. London newspaper The Times’ first Beijing correspondent, George Ernest Morrison, used him as one of his main informers. However, Backhouse was also a fraudster. He published books in which he claimed to have very intimate relations deep inside the Qing court, based on papers he allegedly found in the house of a Chinese official who had died in the Boxer Uprising. 

The memoirs of Backhouse has been published in both English and Chinese

In his memoirs, he even claimed to have had a love affair with empress dowager Cixi. Some of these publications became bestsellers and deeply influenced the way the West saw China in the early 20th century. It says a lot about Backhouse’s charismatic persona that so many people believed him – his biographer, Hugh Trevor-Roper, described him as “a confidence man with few equals” who over the course of his life managed to successful dupe the British government, Oxford University, and several international companies. The immediate aim of his lies was not always clear, and it is possible that the greatest victim of his deceit was in fact himself.