Diary of His Excellency Ching Shan

Diary of His Excellency Ching Shan is a forged document promoted by Sir Edmund Backhouse, 2nd Baronet, misrepresented as an authentic Chinese document.

A majority of the document, translated into English, is chapter 17 of China Under the Empress Dowager, a book by John Otway Percy Bland and Backhouse. The diary was originally written in Classical Chinese and uses East Asian cursive script. Backhouse falsely stated that the diary had an insider's view of the Qing dynasty government at that time. The diary became known worldwide in its English translation and not in its Chinese original. Lo Hui-min argued that this made the document "more sensational" instead of causing "suspicion".

Backhouse stated that he found the diary in 1900, and that Ching-shan was dead. Ching-shan was still alive in 1900. According to Backhouse, after China Under the Empress Dowager was released, he sold the book. Reviewer Anne Birrell stated that these two factors show that the diary is not year.

Alastair Morrison, the son of George Ernest Morrison, wrote that Sinologists of subsequent eras would have not as easily been taken in by the document, and that "the initial success of the Ching-shan forgery to a large extent reflects the standards of Western scholarship on China and the decay of Chinese scholarship in the early years of this century." British Library employee Lionel Gates described the work as "the most masterly specimen of literary forgery in modern times."

Backhouse claimed that Jingshan wrote the diary. The diary includes forged entries about Ronglu.