🏯 Headland’s Court Life in China

What you’ll learn

1. The door is a medical bagIdentify Court Life in China as a 1909 Revell book signed by Isaac Taylor Headland and stocked, on his own page, by Marian Headland's medical visits — not by a man's walk through the Wu Gate.The preface names the lock and the door. Smithsonian places the Methodist professor. Columbia later upgrades Marian to Cixi's physician. Headland does not.
2. The Cixi he wants you to meetRead the first seven chapters as a rehabilitation case, and keep Chao / 1834 / a beheaded father as Headland's extraction from a silence, not as a register.We never talk about that. He talks anyway. Lady Miao, eighteen painters, and a diamond of twigs show both a real amateur and a seal nobody corrects.
3. The prisoner on the islandPlace Guangxu after September 1898 as Headland's island prisoner, keep the six executions of 28 September, and use Mrs. Headland's hours in the hall plus the 1908 edicts as what the household could actually see.Drawbridge up. Six heads. No knee except the foreigner's. Two deaths, and Headland already frowns at the clock.
4. What a doctor's cart can carryUse Marian's notebook — red envelope, standing all day, pawned trousers — as the measure of what this court book can carry, then go ask who walked in.The teak room and the kang outside Ha-ta gate are in the same book. Tonight, look past the title page to the sickroom.

Questions this course answers

Grounded in trusted sources

• Isaac Taylor Headland, Court Life in China: The Capital, Its Officials and People, New York, Chicago, Toronto, London and Edinburgh: Fleming H. Revell Company, 1909. Title page: Professor in the Peking University. Preface: until within the past ten years a study of Chinese court life would have been an impossibility; for twenty years and more Mrs. Headland has been physician to the family of the Empress Dowager's mother, the Empress' sister, and many of the princesses and high official ladies in Peking; social as well as professional visits; they were constant callers at our home; I am indebted to my wife for much of the information; Cixi 'misrepresented' because the world judged her by the Boxer movement and closed its eyes to her reforms; Guangxu originator of reforms but lacking power to execute them. Twenty-two chapters, I–VII on Cixi (Early Life through As a Woman), VIII–X on Kuang Hsu, then Prince Chun, the Forbidden City, ladies, schools, officials, Peking, the 1908 deaths, and the new education. Project Gutenberg ebook 523, https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/523 ; Internet Archive scan, https://archive.org/details/courtlifeinchina00head
• Headland, Court Life in China, chapters used for scenes in this course. Ch. 1: princess — 'We never talk about the early history of Her Majesty'; educated daughters — 'everybody knows, but nobody talks about it'; Headland's extraction (born about 1834, father Chao, small military official later beheaded, east gate of the Tartar city; denies the sold-as-slave story). Ch. 6: Lady Miao; seven pictures Headland says are from Cixi's brush; eighteen court painters in three groups of six; Mr. Kuan's sixty pictures a year; fish-bone and Dr. Hopkins; Cixi as Goddess of Mercy, Li Lien-ying, young Yu the court photographer; four peach-blossom monochromes from Liu Li Chang; the diamond of twigs 'no professional would twine.' Ch. 7: Mrs. Headland on tablecloths, the requested bowl, Mrs. Conger, the St. Louis portrait, the charm. Ch. 10: island prison, drawbridge, French-legation physician, six reformers beheaded 28 September, Wang Chao in hiding. Mrs. Headland: hours in Kuang Hsu's presence, eunuch turned by the shoulders, no knee except the foreigner's, 'Where is the Emperor?' Ch. 17: red envelope, Saratoga-trunk cart, standing all day, tribute shoes, pawned trousers. Ch. 21: edicts of 13–17 November 1908 and Headland's notice that the printed hours do not sit.
• National Museum of Asian Art, Smithsonian Institution, Isaac Taylor Headland, 1859–1942, Missionary, Author, and Academic, biographical sheet, 29 February 2016. Born Freedom, Pennsylvania; Mount Union 1888; Boston University School of Theology, ordained 1890; arrived China October 1890, American Methodist Episcopal Mission; professor of science at Peking University, 1890–1907; married Marian Sinclair, a practicing physician in Beijing, 1894; 'Headland was able to write about court life in China through her connections with female patients there'; Court Life in China (1909); letters at Burke Library, Columbia. https://asia.si.edu/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/Headland-Isaac-Taylor.pdf
• Gregory Adam Scott, finding aid, MRL 6: Isaac Taylor Headland Papers, [1890?]–1939, The Burke Library Archives, Columbia University Libraries / Union Theological Seminary, prepared April 2010, updated 2014. Born 16 August 1859, Freedom, PA; A.B. Mount Union 1888; China October 1890; professor of science at Peking University; married Marian Sinclair 11 June 1894, physician to aristocratic families in Beijing. The finding aid then writes that Marian also treated the Empress Dowager Cixi — wording wider than Headland's own preface, which this course does not follow. Died 2 August 1942, Alliance, Ohio. https://library.columbia.edu/content/dam/libraryweb/locations/burke/fa/mrl/ldpd_8516138.pdf
• Encyclopaedia Britannica, 'Cixi' and 'Guangxu.' Cixi: born 29 November 1835, Beijing; died 15 November 1908, Beijing; consort of Xianfeng, mother of Tongzhi, adoptive mother of Guangxu. Guangxu: born 14 August 1871; died 14 November 1908; Hundred Days from 11 June 1898; Cixi's coup confines him; 2008 Chinese study reported arsenic in his remains and did not name who ordered the poison. Used here to check Headland's extracted childhood and to date the double death, not to replace the 1909 book. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Cixi ; https://www.britannica.com/biography/Guangxu
• Sarah Pike Conger, as quoted by Headland in chapter 7 from Letters from China: Mrs. Headland named as 'an accepted physician and beloved friend of many of the higher Chinese families' through whom arrangements with princesses were made. Confirms the same door the preface claims, from the American minister's household rather than from Headland alone.

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