Keith McMahon

The Contents and Terminology of the Mawangdui Texts on the Arts of the Bedchamber

In the Han, the art of the bedchamber belonged to the disciplines called “prescriptions and techniques,” which also included various medical arts such as nutrition, internal conduction, and associated incantations and spells. This essay investigates the Mawangdui art of the bedchamber texts with special emphasis on their terminology, and briefly addresses the importance of these texts in studying ancient Chinese culture. Seven texts are examined: “Prescriptions for nourishing life,” “Prescriptions for miscellaneous cures,” “Book of childbirth,” “Ten questions,” ’Joining yin and yang ” “Prescriptions for miscellaneous spells,” and “Talks on the loftiest ways under heaven.” The terminology found in these works is organized into the following categories: male and female genitals, the steps of foreplay, positions and methods of intercourse, the benefits and harms of intercourse, techniques of ejaculation control, and male and female sexual reactions. The terminology and topical categories of later bedchamber texts are highly consistent with the Mawangdui texts, especially regarding the following three most influential concepts: “the method of nine shallow and one deep,” “ride many young women, but ejaculate rarely,” and “returning jing to supplement the brain.”

TWO LATE MING VERNACULAR NOVELS: CHAN ZHEN YISHI AND CHAN ZHEN HOUSHI

Abstract Introduction To date the two late Ming novels CHAN ZHEN YISHI (LOST TALES OF THE TRUE WAY) and its sequel CHAN ZHEN HOUSHI (LATER TALES OF THE TRUE WAY), by Fang Ruhao, have received little scholarly attention. In comparison with the JOURNEY TO THE WEST or the GOLDEN LOTUS, they perhaps have less to offer in terms of style, complexity of structure, and intellectual depth. However, they are of interest because of their characteristically late Ming qualities, and because they provide a larger framework than the short story, which is the most studied fiction of this period, for surveying those qualities. By “late Ming qualities” I mean the following: 1) their explicit eroticism; 2) their focus on social classes; and 3) their mixture of mythic and mimetic modes in imitation of certain earlier full-length novels.

The Potent Eunuch: The Story of Wei Zhongxian

Literary and historical sources assumed ulterior, even diabolical, motives in the man who voluntarily became a eunuch. If he was lucky, he could become the ruler’s confidant and even usurp imperial power. Focusing on Ming eunuch Wei Zhongxian (1568–1627), the article addresses key questions in the portrayal of eunuchs: How and why did a man become a eunuch? What were his motives, as far as can be learned from historical cases; and what did storytellers and other writers think his motives were? In the case of powerful and influential eunuchs, the question also became, how, after his act of self-destruction, did the eunuch reconstruct himself? How did he re-create himself as a newly potent man?

Fleecing the Male Customer in Shanghai Brothels of the 1890s

Late Qing novels abound in situations of transition, where classical antecedents coexist with modern departures. In this period of not-so-sure adjustment, we still encounter the love fantasy of the elite prostitute and her male patron, which has traditionally constituted a home away from the ritually defined home of marriage and family. In the 1892 novel Flowers of Shanghai (Haishanghua liezhuan), by Han Bangqing, this home away from home has now moved to the separate space of the foreign concessions of Shanghai, which is, in effect, a city away from the rest-of-China. There, where capitalism and foreign laws reign, the role of the traditional master—Confucian father, local magistrate, or the emperor himself—has weakened. Instead we have the vigorous and entrepreneurial prostitute and her male patron, the man whom she “fleeces” (qiao) as he searches for the woman with the most aura. It is the particular way Han Bangqing portrays this prostitute that makes the novel so singular. He begins by vilifying her in a manner that is common to other writings of the period, namely, that she wears beauty on the outside but is poisonous within, “The one before your eyes may be as beautiful as the legendary Xishi, but underneath she is more vicious than a yaksha” (1.1). Yet Flowers of Shanghai then quietly brackets that viewpoint as one belonging to the stymied male and instead goes on to foreground the reality of the business of the brothel, that is, the womens’ often urgent problems of getting by, about which

Women Rulers in Imperial China

“Women Rulers in Imperial China”is about the history and characteristics of rule by women in China from the Han dynasty to the Qing, especially focusing on the Tang dynasty ruler Wu Zetian (625-705) and the Song dynasty Empress Liu. The usual reason that allowed a woman to rule was the illness, incapacity, or death of her emperor-husband and the extreme youth of his son the successor. In such situations, the precedent was for a woman to govern temporarily as regent and, when the heir apparent became old enough, hand power to him. But many women ruled without being recognized as regent, and many did not hand power to the son once he was old enough, or even if they did, still continued to exert power. In the most extreme case, Wu Zetian declared herself emperor of her own dynasty. She was the climax of the long history of women rulers. Women after her avoided being compared to her but retained many of her methods of legitimization, such as the patronage of art and religion, the use of cosmic titles and vocabulary, and occasional gestures of impersonating a male emperor. When women ruled, it was an in-between time when notions and language about something that was not supposed to be nevertheless took shape and tested the limits of what could be made acceptable.

Opium smoking and modern subjectivity

As an agent in the extension of the capitalist network of exchange, opium was a magic helper that allowed early nineteenth-century British merchants sudden propulsion across China’s closely controlled boundaries. The extraordinary success of this trade came after opium smoking was already well established in China, and after the British realized they could have the poppy grown and processed in India and then imported illegally to China. There it constituted a radically new form of intoxication. ‘Radically new’ refers to the effect that addiction had of suspending smokers from their normal social-symbolic links. At the lurid extremes, a man ruined his family in order to buy more opium; he became utterly unemployable as he smoked himself into destitution; a daughter hid her addiction from her future in-laws until she had already married; she gave birth to an addicted baby. When the international outlawing of opium and other dangerous drugs finally took place in the early twentieth century, the definitive line was drawn between these modern subjects of drug consumption and the prior users of poppy and other drugs like coca, hashish, or peyote. Drug users as subjects of modernity, in other words, came into collective being through their categorical departure from the Andean chewer of coca leaves, the shamanistic user of peyote in what is now northern Mexico, the medieval Chinese eccentric who took cinnabar elixir, or the Chinese, Indian, or European who ate opium to remedy a wide range of maladies. Opium smoking as a radically new, that is, modern, mode of intoxication makes best sense in light of opium’s function as the banished other of capitalism, by which I mean: as the obscene underside of the cleaned-up exterior of Capital. As banished other, opium smoking has an uncannily symbiotic relationship with the circulation of capital and its relentless dissolution of traditional hierarchies. We can characterize the capitalist machine by its incessant production of commodities set to incite repetitive cycles of desire in the consumer. Opium then is a model commodity that creates insatiable need for itself by making the user sacrifice all other needs, even food, for the sake of opium. Empirically and historically, the legitimate capitalist enterprise finally left the opium trade behind as it proceeded along its way of incorporating and abandoning yet further domains of production and consumption. But as an early and reverberant moment in that ongoing enterprise, the opium trade formed an economic relationship with pathologically persistent overtones. What I am proposing in simplest terms is this: opium’s greatest significance lies in its announcement of a monstrous and narcissistic form of sensuality. The eventual banishment of opium is a reaction that contains this Postcolonial Studies, Vol. 8, No. 2, pp. 165–180, 2005

The Attendant's Lament: Loan-Sharking, Squeeze, and Extortion in the Yangzhou Novel Fengyue meng (Seductive Dreams)

Abstract:The brothel and the local yamen are the two main institutions around which life revolves in the 1848 novel Fengyue meng 風月夢 (Seductive Dreams) by an anonymous author. Loan-sharking, squeeze, and extortion are the most prominent ways besides prostitution of making a living in this milieu, which features an array of characters rarely described before in fiction in such detail: yamen functionaries and other working or idle underlings, including clerks, runners, servants, entertainers, laborers, and beggars. The most down-and-out characters resemble the subject of one of the deepest instances of self-expression in the novel, a song about an opium addict, whose lament addresses a key aspect of the life of underlings like him, that he has left village and family to enter the broad mix of people living in Yangzhou, the city of opium, prostitution, and corruption. The novel is about the raw and practical interactions of that world and the new types of relations that take place there. My focus is on the terminology and descriptions used to identify these people and the ways in which the novel narrates the transactions of their brothel-dominated, usury-prone, and squeeze-driven society in terms of both money and that moneys equivalent in terms of a characters survival.

The Institution of Polygamy in the Chinese Imperial Palace

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Love martyrs and love cheaters at the end of the Chinese Empire

Male subjection to female will is a core feature of fiction about prostitutes and male patrons in Shanghai brothels of the late Qing. The love story of the late-Qing brothel must in general be read with a deep consideration of historical roots, especially Ming and Qing motifs of heroic women and the notion of qing . This chapter translates qing as ?sublime passion,? which reflects the late-Ming scenario in which the supreme heroic figure is the remarkable, talented woman. It defines qing by looking back at the most famous Chinese love story since roughly the end of the eighteenth century, Dream of the Red Chamber , which ends unhappily, resulting in the production of numerous sequels attempting to repair the damage. The chapter ends with the figure of the savvy Shanghai prostitute, who emerges in the last two decades of the Qing as a new female star and remarkable woman. Keywords: Chinese love story; Dream of the Red Chamber ; heroic women; late-Qing brothel; Shanghai prostitute

Sublime Love and the Ethics of Equality in a Homoerotic Novel of the Nineteenth Century: "Precious Mirror of Boy Actresses"

This is the publishers version, also available electronically from: http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/156852602100402332.