Imperial Masquerade – The Legend of Princess Der Ling

A resident of Sidney, British Columbia, Grant Hayter-Menzies has served as art and music critic for newspapers and magazines from the U.S. Pacific Northwest to the Eastern seaboard and in Western Canada. He is a former board member of the Northwest China Council in Portland, Oregon. Grant's first book, a long-awaited biography of American stage and screen comedienne Charlotte Greenwood, was published by McFarland & Company in May 2007.

The last years of the Qing dynasty were a time of rumors, adventures, and mysterious opportunities for the polyglot inhabitants of Beijing. The memoir written in 1911 by the self-styled 'Princess' Der Ling, lady-in-waiting to the Empress Dowager between 1903 and 1905, has always presented baffling problems concerning accuracy and interpretation. Imperial Masquerade is an ingenious rethinking of the available evidence, and presents an absorbing account of how Der Ling survived at Court, and what it must have been like to work for such a formidable ruler. -- Jonathan Spence The Search for Modern China and Return to Dragon Mountain