Modernist Chinoiserie: Archival Sources and Cultural Imagination in Lytton Strachey’s A Son of Heaven

Lytton Strachey’s 1912 play, A Son of Heaven: A Tragic Melodrama, stages the political and cultural crises of the late Qing Empire during the Boxer Rebellion. While its orientalist themes are evident, the play’s specific textual genealogy has remained largely unexamined. This article identifies and analyzes Strachey’s unacknowledged archival sources, revealing his deep reliance on the forged Ching-Shan diary – propagated by J. O. P. Bland and Edmund Backhouse in China Under the Empress Dowager – alongside the contemporary, female-authored memoirs of Der Ling, Sarah Pike Conger, and Katharine Carl. By tracing these intertextual echoes, this study demonstrates how Strachey eschewed factual historical reconstruction in favor of a curated modernist patchwork. His strategic appropriation of these texts transforms “Chineseness” from a stable historical reality into a performative textual palimpsest. Ultimately, the revelation of these archival roots shows how Strachey utilized the Qing court to enact a profound internal cultural diagnosis, exposing the fragility of Edwardian liberal humanism and the broader entanglement of art, power, and imperial decay.