Imperial Masquerade – The Legend of Princess Der Ling - Tapa dura

Imperial Masquerade; The Legend of Princess Der Ling

Hardcover. Condición: Very good. Estado de la sobrecubierta: Very good. Presumed First Edition, First printing. xxviii, 389, [3] pages. Illustrations. Legacy. Notes. Family Tree. Bibliography. Index. Inscribed by the author on the title page. Inscription reads 29 May 2008. To Shan'l -kua--With best regards. Grand Hayter-Menzies. Stamp and facsimile signature of Princess Der Ling on half-title page. Decorative endpaper. Foreword by Pamela Kyle Crossley. For over a decade, Grant Hayter-Menzies has specialized in biographies of extraordinary women, publishing the first full length lives of stage and screen stars Charlotte Greenwood and Billie Burke, Chinese-American author Princess Der Ling, diarist Sarah Pike Conger, wife of the American ambassador to China and friend to the controversial Empress Dowager Cixi of China, Pauline Benton, the American-born master of Chinese shadow theatre, and Lillian Carter, mother of President Jimmy Carter. In 2015, Grant published a biography of Rags, the mascot terrier of the First Division in France during WWI, and his biography of Dorothy Brooke, the Englishwoman who in 1930 Cairo, Egypt discovered and saved thousands of elderly and abused warhorses, mules and donkeys abandoned by the British at the end of WWI, was published in the US and UK. His biography of Woo, the Javanese monkey companion of Canadian artist and writer Emily Carr; 'The North Door: Echoes of Slavery in a New England Family' is Grant's memoir of discovering his ancestral legacy of three centuries of slavery. Grant has contributed to numerous collections and anthologies. He is also literary executor of William Luce (1931-2019), award-winning author of 'The Belle of Amherst'. 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, a victim of the hallucinogenic effects of too much publicity, much of it prompted by Der Ling herself, and a figure whose life provides a glimpse into one Eurasian woman's experience of living not just between two cultures, that of China and the West, but among many different worlds social, religious, moral, political. Imperial Masquerade The Legend of Princess Der Ling, the first biography of one of the twentieth century's most intriguing cross-cultural personalities, traces not only the life of Princess Der Ling, in all its various transformations, but offers a fresh look at the woman she lionized and, ultimately, betrayed, the Empress Dowager Cixi, to whom, like Der Ling, many legends have been affixed over the past century. The book includes photographs, some never before seen, taken by Der Ling's talented photographer brother, Xunling, and now in the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., clarifying Der Ling's very real affection for the ruler feared before the Boxer Uprising and hated after it, and showing a side of Cixi that many who approach her with preconceived opinions may find intriguing if not revelatory. 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. Nº de ref. del artículo: 84918

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