<p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0.0001pt;text-align:justify;line-height:normal;"><span style="font-family:Helvetica, sans-serif;font-size:11.5pt;">8vo. pp. xxvii, 314, f. [1] (plates). Includes frontispiece portrait. “For our dear Bob, with best love, from us both, F.H. &amp; B.A. Needham … 1916” inscribed on front pastedown endpaper.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0.0001pt;text-align:justify;line-height:normal;"><span style="font-family:Helvetica, sans-serif;font-size:11.5pt;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0.0001pt;text-align:justify;line-height:normal;"><span style="font-family:Helvetica, sans-serif;font-size:11.5pt;">First edition of this spurious biography by the hoaxer, journalist, criminal, and literary forger William Francis Mannix (d. 1920), who claimed to have based his work on manuscripts written by the Chinese politician, diplomat and general Li Hung Chang (1823-1901). Mannix wrote the work while being imprisoned for fraud and had installments published in the New York Sun and the London Observer in 1912 before he turned it into the current form. At the request of Houghton Mifflin, the American company that published the work in the same year (see Bib# 907704/Fr# 1538), the American diplomat and journalist John Foster reviewed the work and even wrote an introduction for it, vouching for its authenticity. See M. K. Duhon, Journalist and Hoaxer: William Francis Mannix and the Long History of Faked News. Baton Rouge, Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College, Master thesis, 2017.</span><br /></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0.0001pt;text-align:justify;line-height:normal;"><span style="font-size:11.5pt;font-family:Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0.0001pt;text-align:justify;line-height:normal;"><span style="font-size:11.5pt;font-family:Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size:11.5pt;font-family:Helvetica, sans-serif;"><a href="https://catalyst.library.jhu.edu/catalog/bib_4103530" rel="ugc nofollow">Click here to view the Johns Hopkins University catalog record.</a></span></span></p>