1 Some Wandering Thoughts on the Flowering Fame of Old Shanghai

SPRING PALACES

Historically, erotic works seemingly coincided with the rise of the merchant classes during the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644), particularly in cities such as Suzhou, Hangzhou and Guangzhou – cities that shaped themselves long before Shanghai’s fishing village turned into a city of steamy imaginations in the 1920s. Delicious artworks called ‘spring palace paintings’ were not afraid to flaunt scenes of threesomes and orgies; perhaps these are actual precursors to the more recent sex scandals of wife-swapping amidst the Chinese Communist Party cadres. Ancient Chinese people viewed spring palace paintings much in the same way that people view videos today; a tool for sexual education and arousal. Also the images were reproduced on the roof beams of houses to protect homes from fire, as it was thought that the goddess of fire, an unmarried lady, would feel embarrassed by the sex-heavy scenes and avoid the house. Some collections of artwork, termed ‘pillow books’ were given to newly married couples as instruction guides, but the main purpose of the artwork was to get the exchange of juices going. All these references to the presumed debauchery that occurred behind the walls of the Forbidden City were similar in style to the Japanese shunga tradition of the same period executed in woodblock print format.

Translated literally, the Japanese word shunga means picture of spring; ‘spring’ is a common euphemism for love or sex.

NOTORIOUS

During the Ming Dynasty, authors and artists prospered under relatively liberal policies promoting science and the arts.

The introduction of the woodblock press simultaneously brought a proliferation of Ming-era Chinese erotica in the form of lowbrow scripts culminating in the creation of the erotic classic The Plum in the Golden Vase. Published towards the end of the Ming Dynasty, it marked a first. Written under the pseudonym Lanling Xiaoxiao Sheng, meaning ‘The Scoffing Scholar of Lanling’ it is considered to be the ‘fifth’ of the Four Great Classical Novels. It is a rambling story about the downfall of a great household and its rooster whose varied acts with his nineteen partners via sex toys shed some striking light on the author’s imagination.

Another was the Embroidered Couch, termed ‘the most licentious and inflaming book of its age’ and attributed to Lu Tiancheng (b. 1580), a well-known playwright of the Ming dynasty.

Regarded as a notorious classic in Chinese literature, it has long been banned in China. Explicit even by today’s standards, it detailed the travails of a romantic scholar named Easterngate, who encourages – and is aroused by – a relationship that unfolds between his pretty and demure wife Jin and his compadre (and occasional sex partner) Dali against the extraordinary backdrop of early 17th-century China.

INTO THE STREETS

Like artworks, the great Ming and mid-Qing novels were produced slowly in the privacy of the courts and for an audience of friends – reworked, discussed, and reworked again. Although the ruling elite’s attitudes towards sex and pornography were beginning to become more reserved during the Qing dynasty, a further explosion of Chinese erotica followed. Though originally produced in bound book form, the narratives and images began to live their own lives as the sheets were released from their leather cages and reconfigured in smaller compilations, catering to a semi-literate audience. Thus, while courtesan imagery reached new heights in the late-Qing, the narratives of courtesan life did not address the meaning or implications of these same images. Instead the text seems simply to rest on the page next to the illustrations.

The narratives are about the political and social transgression of norms and boundaries, and found its parallel in real life as the space of erotic action moved out of the courtesan houses and into the streets, colonizing the brothel into a space of business, culture, and politics.

FUZHOU ROAD

Fast forward to early 20th century: Fuzhou Road, one of the sections of Shanghai once known for its combination of tea and pleasure houses. The road was also the city’s printing center, and is still marked by a high density of bookshops today. The calendar art produced there offered a combination of leisure, desire, temptation and consumption, albeit uneasily on the borders of social acceptance. With their origins in traditional art forms, these items were accepted by the urban populace as decorative items in their homes, and represented a nexus between the modern commercial imagery of the West, and the long tradition of looking at paintings of beautiful or exemplary women in Chinese art. These women became personalities in calendars, newspapers, characters in serial novels, icons in photographs that advertised places of business. As the female image turned to flesh; their patrons and admirers became – instead of only government officials of the courtesan era – journalists, novelists and artists.

Their images ranged from the line drawings in early illustrated magazines to photographs in advertising cards and newspapers. These were the first mass produced images of women; women who had highly individualized media identities, and until the Republican period (1912-1928), women whose company was explicitly for sale for instance at dance halls and ballrooms.

EROTIC AIRBRUSHES

Lines of inquiry across the boundaries between high and low art, between what constituted calendar art and high art have not been thoroughly investigated, but it is important to mention that the training of calendar artists often took place in the same classrooms and studios as the training of future Western-influenced producers of Chinese modern art. Some Shanghainese artists were drawn to Marinetti’s Futurist Manifesto, which arrived to Shanghai via Berlin and Tokyo, others were grasped by writer Lu Xun’s rupture with literature, then others still preferred calendar art, with its approximate erotic airbrushes – with a nostalgia for courtesan imageries.

PENIS ENHANCEMENT

The Carnal Prayer Mat, an erotic novel written by Qing dynasty author Li Yu was illustrated in a style similar to the earlier spring palace paintings and features an outrageous plot in which the main character seeks to seduce a woman away from her well-endowed husband and so undergoes surgery to replace his penis with that of a dog. Each chapter ends with a short critique of the action, ostensibly by a reviewer but presumably written by the author himself, enhancing the tongue-in-cheek humor of the novel. The arrival of Christian missionaries from across Europe and a revival of Confucianism resulted in the banning and even destruction of many previously treasured works of art; indeed, the oldest and best-preserved copy of The Carnal Prayer Mat only survives by dint of having been taken to Tokyo University in Japan in 1705. Recently it has served as inspiration for the first 3D erotic movie: Sex and Zen: Extreme Ecstacy (2011).

QUEER IMAGININGS

In the meantime, the influential Orientalist and linguist Sir Edmund Backhouse (1873-1944), who was in Beijing for many years at the end of the Qing Dynasty, covered this period most extensively in his memoir. He boasted of having had affairs with prominent people, including Lord Rosebery, Paul Verlaine, an Ottoman princess, Oscar Wilde, and most part-ic-ularly the Empress Dowager Cixi of China. It is clear that he knew Beijing brothels well but it is equally clear that he loved making things up. Some scholars describe him as a total lunatic and fraudster (notably, early 20th Century Shanghai specialist professor Robert Bickers).

^{Further reading: Memoir (or Is It?) of Sex and Opium, By Joyce Hor-Chung Luu, New York Times, March 30, 2011.}

BOYS ON PARADE

Equally interesting is a recent work by David Mungello, who clearly shows that China was a place for European and North Americans to escape homophobia and puritanical Victorian Britain in his book: Western Queers in China (Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2012). His groundbreaking study traces the lives of two dozen men, many previously unknown to have same-sex desire, who fled to China and in the process influenced perceptions of Chinese culture to this day. Their individual stories encompass flight from homophobia in their home countries, the erotic attraction of Chinese boy-actors, friendships with Chinese men, intellectual connections with the Chinese, and the reorientation of Western aesthetics toward China. Some traveled to China and lived there; others immersed themselves in Chinese culture at a distance. Most established long-term friendships and acted as cultural intermediaries who opened the aesthetic range of Western culture to a new sense of beauty and a fresh source of inspiration for poets, artists, and dramatists. Their ‘boys’ – Chinese males whose services were available at low cost as messengers, rickshaw pullers, guides, cooks, entertainers, escorts, and prostitutes – were transformed into a universal metaphor of Chinese culture that lingers to this day: images of exoticism portraying sexual liberties – with men and women alike – behind smoky curtains of Opium desire.

Shanghai-born photographer Zhou Haiying (1929-2011), who was the son of the illustrious Chinese writer Lu Xun, documented the transition from the Republic of China to the People’s Republic of China. Crowd scenes during streets processions were one of his specialties.

THE PARAMOUNT

‘The largest ballroom in the Far East, with sumptuous and gorgeous architectural structures and exquisite modern facilities (…) a paradise in the human world,’ these were the words used to publicize the opening of the Paramount in Shen Bao, Shanghai’s largest Chinese-language newspaper. The mass media stoked the dancing fervor of the Shanghai people. And in its turn the city had many popular dance halls to offer. The Paramount, built in Art Deco fashion, was exemplary – imaginary horizons strung across the ballroom, and women for hire (taxi-dancers) to dance with.

How to speak to our sordid history of lovin’ hearts with the juicy tidbits from a cabaret-and-ballroom-filled world of late 1920s and early 1930’s Shanghai? The legendary Paramount left its mark in contemporary literary works. People in Shanghai remember this ballroom from the short story, The Last Night of Taipan Chin by Kenneth Pai (collected in Taipei People, 1971) and from The Shanghai Foxtrot (1932) by Mu Shiying. Its fame is recalled in both textual and visual representations.

The ballrooms actually were some of the favorite haunts for these writers. Mu courted and married a dance hostess. Shi Zhecun, pioneer of Chinese neo-sensatio-nalism, resi-ded on Yuyuan Road, as did Eileen Chang, an important female writer, who lived in Eddington House, an apartment located across the road from the Paramount. Among the most famous dancers is Chen Manli who was shot dead on the spot in 1941 for saying, ‘No,’ when a Japanese man asked her to dance.

YELLOW MUSIC

The period was complete with socialites, journalists, yes, ‘taxi girls’, and the powerful gangsters who loved them, but also jazz. Shanghai was the Chinese front for the jazz revolution. Guys like Whitey Smith and Buck Clayton (who went on to play for Count Basie) fused Chinese folk melodies to jazz beats, inducing young Chinese to swamp the dance halls. One of the main figures of this movement – also referred to as shidaiqu – was Li Jinhui (September 5, 1891 – February 15, 1967), a composer and songwriter whose fame grew after the fall of the Qing Dynasty. As radio became more widely accessible, so did Li’s jazz, for which he received vicious criticism as ‘Yellow (or pornographic) Music’. One 1934 reviewer said of Li that he is ‘vulgar and depraved beyond the hope of redemption…[but] as popular as ever’.

The Chinese Nationalist Party attempted to ban his music, and eventually silenced Li in death as a victim of political persecution in 1967 during the height of the Cultural Revolution.

His greatest source of Jazz influence came from American Buck Clayton who worked with Li for two years and who played a major role in shaping the musical scores written by Li.

Yellow Music is the first written history of the emergence of Chinese popular music and urban media culture in early twentieth century China.

Andrew F. Jones focuses on the affinities between ‘yellow’ or ‘pornographic’ music – as critics derisively referred to the ‘decadent’ fusion of American jazz, Hollywood film music, and Chinese folk forms – and the anti-colonial mass music that challenged its commercial and ideological dominance.

^{Further reading: Yellow Music: Media Culture and Colonial Modernity in the Chinese Jazz Age, Duke University Press Books (June 19, 2001)}

SHANGHAI BLACK & WHITE

Whether considered yellow or not, Fei Mu’s Spring in a Small Town (1948) is regarded as one of the best Chinese films ever made. The film is epochal in its fusion of the personal and the historical, as well as the East and the West.

The repressed emotional and sexual impulses of the main characters and the dying but irresistibly languid and romantic small town in a nation about to undergo unprecedented change are all articulated in a language that is part literati poetry of Tang Dynasty and part Freudian unconsciousness. Wei Wei (1922) who played the female lead Zhou Yuwen recounts her story in the documentary I Wish I Knew (dir. Jia Zhangke, 2010).

Fei told her to help the then-inexperienced male lead Li Wei feel more comfortable in his role by convincing him that she was really in love with him, off-screen as much as off. It worked, but with unintended consequences – the young man was so smitten that he would not stop his pursuit even after the film shoot ended, resulting in her emigrating to Hong Kong just to be free of him. In telling this story, Jia intercuts between shots of the actress reminiscing and sepia-toned black and white footage excerpted from Fei’s movie, fusing reality and artifice into something that falls magically in between.

FROM PROSTITUTE TO PIONEER

Sold to a brothel at a young age, Pan Yu-liang’s life story has become the subject for various novels and films. The young woman was able to escape the life of a courtesan as a wealthy customs official Pan Zanhua took an exceptional liking to her, married her and helped her with her education. She moved with him to Shanghai, where she enlisted in the Shanghai Art School and became the first woman in the country acknowledged to paint in a Western style, often painting nudes.

Pan studies in Italy and France from 1925-1929 after which she is invited back to the Shanghai Art School to become a teacher. But the institute closes after a series of demonstrations against the foreign influences on Chinese art, and in protest of the use of nude models. Pan continues making nude portraits, using herself as a model. She becomes an affluent artist in Europe and the United States, winning the Paris Gold Prize in 1959 for her self-portrait Bathing Woman. In China her work was never recognized and remained classified as ‘depraved’.

DOE-EYED YOSHIKO

Yoshiko Yamaguchi, a beautiful doe-eyed singer and actress, was featured in a number of propaganda films in China the 1930s when the Japanese occupied Manchuria. Appearing under the pseudonym Li Xianglan, she caused a sensation in erotic melodramas like China Nights, about a love affair between a Chinese peasant and a heroic Japanese ship captain in wartime Shanghai. Her producers at the sinister Manchurian Film Association purposely hid her nationality. Most of her fans thought she was Chinese. Yamaguchi (also known as Ri Koran) was born in Manchuria to Japanese parents and grew up speaking both Mandarin and Japanese. When the war was over she fell into the hands of Chang Kai-shek’s nationalist forces, who charged her with collaborating with the enemy, a crime punishable by death. She was only spared execution when he was able to prove she was ethnic Japanese. But Yamaguchi’s career didn’t end there.

After the war she reinvented herself, first as the star of pro-American films and then as the Hollywood actress Shirley Yamaguchi, her name inspired by Shirley Temple, appearing in several B-movies. After retiring from film in the 1950s she became a diplomat’s wife and worked as a television talk show host and journalist, with stints in Vietnam and Palestine, and was a prominent politician in the Japanese Parliament for 20 years. Her story has been fictionalized in the novel The China Lover by Ian Buruma (2008, Penguin Press).

IN THE PINK: SWEEPING THE YELLOW

Yellow is associated with Western exoticized racial fantasies (Yellow fever), but also offers a common Chinese reference to the past Imperial courts (and all their decadence). When the term for ‘yellow’, (뼝, huáng) is used in connection with any kind of publication or media, it means the thing it describes is pornographic. For example, 뼝暠 (huáng tú, yellow picture) means pornographic pictures and graphics; 뼝蝎 (huáng shu, yellow book) means pornographic writings; 뼝튬 (huáng pian, yellow clips) means pornographic movies; and 뼝貢 (huáng wang, yellow web) means pornographic websites. So the next time you see Chinese police officers wielding a big banner saying 뼝댔렷 (sao huáng da fei, ‘sweep the yellow and beat the un-’), you will know it’s time for one of their raids on pornography, which has been an ongoing campaign for many years now. Shanghai Expo 2010 was the scene of regular crackdowns on erotica, and widely-publicized raids on massage parlors and pink-lit barbershops, leading to the expulsion of 90,000 workers from the city.