ISAAC TAYLOR HEADLAND'S THREE BOOKS THAT "LINK EAST AND WEST"
Court Life in China: The Capital Its Officials and People.
The Chinese Boy and Girl
Chinese Mother Goose Rhymes
COURT LIFE IN CHINA
THE CAPITAL
ITS OFFICIALS AND PEOPLE
By ISAAC TAYLOR HEADLAND Professor in the Peking University
PREFACE
Until within the past ten years a study of Chinese court life
would have been an impossibility. The Emperor, the Empress
Dowager, and the court ladies were shut up within the Forbidden
City, away from a world they were anxious to see, and which was
equally anxious to see them. Then the Emperor instituted reform,
the Empress Dowager came out from behind the screen, and the
court entered into social relations with Europeans.
For twenty years and more Mrs. Headland has been physician to the
family of the Empress Dowager's mother, the Empress' sister, and
many of the princesses and high official ladies in Peking. She
has visited them in a social as well as a professional way, has
taken with her her friends, to whom the princesses have shown
many favours, and they have themselves been constant callers at
our home. It is to my wife, therefore, that I am indebted for
much of the information contained in this book.
There are many who have thought that the Empress Dowager has been
misrepresented. The world has based its judgment of her character
upon her greatest mistake, her participation in the Boxer
movement, which seems unjust, and has closed its eyes to the
tremendous reforms which only her mind could conceive and her
hand carry out
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