ABSTRACT
it is not only into the life-stories of people who lived centuries ago that legends and conflicting rumours have crept. The distant past and China’s yesterday were alike subject to the tongues of gossips and writers of memoirs who had an axe to grind. 1 And the intrigues that went on within the secluded courtyards of the Forbidden City in the last decades of the nineteenth century are never likely to be placed entirely beyond conjecture.
