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68 CHAPTER FOUR The Love Story and Civilizational Crisis Sublime Passion and Cultural Renewal in Traces of the Flowery Moon Gong Zizhen’s 1839 Miscellany, Hanshang Mengren’s Seductive Dreams, and Chen Sen’s Precious Mirror of Boy Actresses precede by half a century the times in which Chinese intellectuals first defined China as a modern nation struggling to divest itself of an outmoded past. It is too early for ideas like geming in its sense of the complete “overthrow” of the traditional political system, or wenming, which instead of Chinese civilizational order, its original sense, will be redefined in terms of “modern” and “modernity.” The literary and political discourse of the mid-nineteenth century still promotes the idea that the customary exercise of courage and virtue can repair China’s crises.1 In the 1858 Traces of the Flowery Moon (Huayue hen), by Wei Xiuren (1819–1874), the main practitioners of the kind of courage and virtue that it takes to bring about cultural renewal are pairs of exemplary lovers , whose romantic and erotic bonds embody the type of energy that will die if the dynasty dies or else will bring about China’s grand-scale renewal.2 Prior to the 1890s, Traces of the Flowery Moon is the novel that most explicitly equates the destiny of love and the destiny of China as a historically symbolic whole. The battle that takes place in this story between the armies of essential good and the enemy that threatens extinction is a battle between the native forces characterized by heroic love, on the one hand, and the demonic energy of the Taiping rebels and their heterodox religion, on the other. This chapter is about two qing-inspired authors who place the love story of the male consort of the remarkable woman in the context of the civilizational crisis of contemporary history. Both Traces of the Flowery Moon and Wang Tao’s Later Tales of Liaozhai share the despair that literati male patrons feel alongside their prostitute-mistresses. The passion in Traces of the Flowery Moon is more earthshaking, while Later Tales of Liaozhai manages a modicum of optimism in tremulous times as long as the Chinese man can enjoy refuge with the Chinese courtesan. Like Precious Mirror of Boy Actresses, passages of which Wei Xiuren copied directly, Traces of the Flowery Moon exalts qing soul mates in their protracted struggle against villainous forces.3 But Traces of the Flowery Moon differs from Precious Mirror of Boy Actresses in its direct reference to historical reality. As I have said, the closest Seductive Dreams and Precious Mirror come to referring to historical reality are the pervasive descriptions of opium smoking, which can refer in only an implicit way to Western intrusion and issues surrounding the Opium War. In Traces of the Flowery Moon, on the other hand, a team of valiant love couples heads the defeat of the Taipings and the demise of their foreign-bred Christian cult. A brief but significant passage after the defeat describes the victorious Chinese government forcing the Europeans to reverse the unfair stipulations of their treaties. The central characters of the novel are a literatus and a courtesan who, before the defeat of the Taipings, endure a tortured love affair and die a love death as heroic loyalists, defeated by both corrupt brothel managers and the situation of China in a seemingly endless state of crisis. The author then follows with the swift victory of valiant love couples who bring about the successful regeneration of the Chinese empire. The contrasting love stories act as screens onto which the author projects the transition from dynastic cataclysm to healthy civilizational recovery. The Taiping Rebellion is the most significant historical event in the lives of both Wei Xiuren and Wang Tao. Their self-conscious engagement of historical reality in their fiction allows us to make a key point about the symbolism of Chinese civilizational energy. The Taipings and their shadowy allies, the European Christians , represent a demonic force threatening the Chinese state. Who represents the sublime essence of Chinese civilizational energy? The genteel philanderer and his courtesan mistress. There is even a primal level at stake, especially when we consider the sexual elements involved. One of the love couples in the battle against the Taipings is a man and woman who are masters of Daoist sexual alchemy. Members of the Taipings, on the other hand, practice deviant sex and possess monstrous sexual capacity. An allegory thus emerges in which Chinese...

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