Princess der ling biography of barack
Home / Political Leaders & Public Figures / Princess der ling biography of barack
by S. Pinkus (page images at HathiTrust)
Find more by Princess Der Ling at your library, or elsewhere.
Der Ling’s first and most famous book, Two Years in the Forbidden City (1912), which appeared the year the Manchu dynasty fell, glitters with the glamour of a lost world, and served as an apologia not just for the ex-dynasty but for its most reviled ruler, the Empress Dowager Cixi (1835-1908), the woman Der Ling had served as court lady, translator and surrogate daughter from 1903-1905.
A favorite lady-in-waiting to the Empress Dowager Cixi, she became that hated woman’s greatest apologist and defender; and after moving to the United States in the late 1920’s, Der Ling sought through her seven books, numerous articles and lectures to create understanding of China and Chinese history, while at the same time showing that a true daughter of China could live western like the best of them.
Der Ling, as a personality more than as inside chronicler of one of the most secretive courts in history, has been floating at the margins of Qing dynasty history and historiography for some thirty years.
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.
In addition, Der Ling’s account of being a student in Isadora Duncan’s early dance classes in Paris form a strong part of the core of Peter Kurth’s acclaimed 2001 biography Isadora: A Sensational Life, and is in fact where I first discovered Der Ling the person and the writer.
With most of her books long out of print and her once ubiquitous face vanished from the news columns, Princess Der Ling [1885-1944] is known to few people today.
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.
When she was mortally injured by a hit and run driver outside the University of California, Berkeley in November, 1944, the police report gave her name as Mrs.
Elizabeth Antoinette White. Although not a member of the Qing royal family, Der Ling was given the title of "commandery princess" while serving as the lady-in-waiting for Empress Cixi. But her entertaining and insightful writings, as well as her desire to build bridges between east and west, still have much to teach the present about China’s past and its future.
A memoirist, ranconteur, and a European-educated, multi-lingual Asian woman who gleefully crossed all the lines of cultural expectations both oriental and occidental, Princess Der Ling was a unique character on the stage of late Qing and early Republican China.
(From Wikipedia)
More about Princess Der Ling:Associated authors:Books by Princess Der Ling:
- Der Ling, Princess: Imperial Incense (New York: Dodd, Mead and Co., 1934), illust. She was a writer of several memoirs, books, and magazine articles. Her father was the Chinese diplomat Yü Keng; and her mother was Louisa Pierson, who was herself the half-Chinese daughter of a Boston merchant working in Shanghai.
by Bertha Lumn (page images at HathiTrust)
- Der Ling, Princess: Kowtow (New York: Dodd, Mead and Co., 1929), illust. 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.
The Online Books Page
Lizzie Yu Der Ling (Chinese: 裕德齡; pinyin: Yù Délíng; Wade–Giles: Yü Tê-ling; 8 June 1881 – 22 November 1944), better known as "Princess" Der Ling, and also known as Elisabeth Antoinette White after her marriage to Thaddeus C.
White, was the first lady-in-waiting for Empress Dowager Cixi. 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.
PartI deals with Der Ling’s beginnings, from her birth in Peking in June 1885 to her upbringing by her diplomat father in Tokyo and Paris and her Western education; Part II covers Der Ling’s summons from Paris to the imperial Chinese court by the Empress Dowager Cixi and her experiences of learning to know, fear and love this much-misunderstood woman; and Part III deals with Der Ling’s authorship of her seven books and a critical appraisal thereof; her marriage to an American and move to America, where her mystique flowered in an atmosphere of fascination with all things oriental and then died out almost as totally as it had flourished.
Rare Historical Material: Princess Deling of Qing Dynasty Speaks in Full English
Origin of the article: solongletty.tripod.com
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
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.
But on her death certificate, her husband insisted on adding: “Also known as Princess Der Ling.” She died virtually forgotten – we may assume the clerk who had to make her Chinese name and title fit the tiny space on the California death certificate grumbled over the task. 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.
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.
With the disintegration of the Romanov empire five years later, and the dispersal of its uprooted aristocrats and intelligentsia through the world, a culture of the displaced celebrity launched this self-promoting Asian woman with the tissue-thin title (and an American grandfather she never acknowledged) on a flood of general fascination with throneless royalty and exotic pretenders.
My book is the first to deal with Der Ling as a phenomenon of the fragmented, delirious era in which she lived, putting her recollections to the test while maintaining my opinion that her memories of the last great Asian court and its society have much to teach us about the period, the people and East-West relations.
She has appeared in almost as many media as the empress dowager she tried to make the world understand: as a supporting character in Li Hanxiang’s 1976 film, The Last Tempest (speaking with a pronounced American accent), in Sterling Seagrave’s blockbuster 1992 biography of Cixi, Dragon Lady: The Life and Legend of the Last Empress of China (Knopf)-in which Seagrave makes an effort to rehabilitate not just Cixi but Der Ling-and most recently in a University of Edinburgh thesis by Dr.
Shiou-yun Fang, Images, Ideas, Reality (2005). Yet this writer and cross-cultural celebrity has as much to say about today’s congruence and collisions of East and West—in terms social, political, historical and cultural—as she did over 80 years ago.
Like that of Puyi, China’s last emperor, whom she first knew as an infant at the court of his imperial relative, Empress Dowager Cixi, and would later try to help when his creditors came calling, Der Ling’s life writ large touches on issues broader than even the vast Chinese landscape where she was born.