KOWTOW. de DER LING, Princess Elizabeth

New York [1929], Dodd. Green cloth, end paper illustrations, very solid, 322p., 6 b. w. illustrations by S. Pinkus, gold stamped decorations, 15 22.5 cm., clean copy. FIRST EDITION ** THE AUTHOR'S SIGNED PRESENTATION COPY ** . Some chapter titles: Memories of Sha-Ssu. The Solemn Courtyard, Foreign Devil-Doll, Through the teakwood panels, Those terrible Manchus, Green broadcloth, Yamen walls, War clouds, Audience with Prince Kung, Legation opening, China's great statesmen, On to Paris and others. * This is a primary account of the author's life. It also has fascinating insights to many famous people, including Sun Yat Sen, Isadora Duncan, Elizabeth Queen, the German Minister to Japan, President Loubet of France and several others. *** Essentially the personal reminiscences of the author’s life as a lady in waiting to the last Empress of China T'zu His of China. A very fascinating primary insight into real life in the Chinese court. *** Princess Der Ling [Dé Líng 1885-1944] was a member of an old Chinese royal family and first lady in waiting to China's Last Dowager Empress Cixi [aka.: T'zu-Hsi/Tzu Hsi, or Hsiao-ch'en] and write of eight best-selling books about China. She was married to an American, T.C. White, a mining expert. . We provide a photocopy of the newspaper article from September 1935, Los Angeles, California. This shows the author and her husband after 28 years of married life. This will be laid in the book. *** CONDITION: This copy is bound in the original Jade-green pictorial cloth, with gold-stamped pictorial cover and spine titles. The books is very clean and solid, with very little wear., a tiny small spot on the back cover, else excellent. This applies to the . THE AUTHOR'S SIGNED PRESENTATION COPY: The signed, presentation copy is done in ink. There is a 5 digit blue number neatly stamped on the verso of title page, and evidence of some old newspaper article placed inside the first fly lower half of the page, with the usual transfer, inside of the back endpaper there is a small box ca. 6 x 3.5 cm with fancy red ink square, blank inside, a tiny spot on the back cover, else very solid, clean and sharp copy. It our tendency to be overly critical, all in all a nice copy. *** REFERENCE: . From WIKIPEDIA: . 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, one of the twentieth century's most intriguing cross-cultural personalities, her life as Princess Der Ling, in all its various transformations, she lionized and, ultimately, betrayed -the Empress Dowager Cixi, to whom, like Der Ling, many legends have been affixed over the past century. . http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Princess_Der_Ling *** .