Overt and Covert Treasures: Essays on the Sources for Chinese Women’s History

15. Between Drawing and Writing: Prostitutes in the Dianshizhai Pictorial

Between Drawing and Writing: Prostitutes in the Dianshizhai Pictorial Hon-ming Yip In the process of compiling a full-text index to the Dianshizhai Pictorial (Dianshizhai huabao 點石齋畫報) (hereafter the DSZ), China’s first popular illustrated news magazine published in the late nineteenth century,1 I have been struck by its large coverage of topics related to prostitutes. Among the approximately four thousand hand-painted illustrations and explanatory paragraphs of the pictorial, over 330 are concerned with the issue of prostitution. Because of their impressive quantity, the captioned pictures connected with the topic cover almost all pertinent questions ranging from different kinds and hierarchies of prostitutes, their status and behavior, social backgrounds, lifestyles, brothels and other spaces of activities, how they were treated, their various fates, the economics of prostitution, brothel runners and adherents, norms of the trade, operational institutions, drastic changes in the business, local characteristics, patrons and clients, custom and culture, crimes, laws, and punishment, and so on and so forth. A close viewing and reading of this rich body of source material will enable us to further develop our studies of the cultural history of prostitution in China at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, a field that is being developed to shed light on not only the history of gender and sexuality, but also the problem of modernity as experienced by China on the verge of modern transformation. The DSZ certainly signified a kind of visual modernity. Its publisher, the Englishman Ernest Major who founded Shenbao 申報 in 1872 and who established the Dianshizhai Lithographic Printing Studio in 1879 in Shanghai, played a crucial role in introducing popular journalism into China by applying the modern technology of offset lithography.2 Issued every ten days along with Shenbao, the DSZ was in the style of the London Illustrated News, Harper’s, Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Paper, and The Graphic. In its fourteen years of existence, the pictorial came 488 | Overt and Covert Treasures to represent an age of mass production of cheap and accessible popular illustrated magazines that reached an expanding reading and viewing public which emerged along with new social formations facilitated by Shanghai’s urban commercialization, Settlement consumerism, and print capitalism. The city as a modern urban arena was also a cultural space that favored the growth of popular culture, which in turn necessitated the expansion of a market for mass media products such as the DSZ. With the development of lithography, mass-produced illustrations came to replace the traditional Chinese woodblock prints, which were expensive to reproduce in large quantities. Technically, it was photolithography that became the most important printing technique in late nineteenth century China. Combining photography and lithography, the novel technology allowed the large-scale reproduction of detailed drawings with lines and shading. This imported skill facilitated the inclusion of many straight lines in Chinese woodblock printing forms. According to a researcher on this new printing style, photo-lithography was the most convenient device to create the “feel” of Western perspective. In a move away from traditional woodblock printing, the new technique was able to highlight the diversity of human expressions and activities.3 It was innovative and attractive because: Intricate facial expressions and gestures of human subjects are juxtaposed with strong backgrounds composed of numerous straight lines, creating a strange combination of vigor and stiffness.4 Admittedly, however, Chinese illustrations at that time were still bound by their traditional drawing style and could not catch up with the avant-garde pictorial style in use in the West and Japan at the time,5 Chinese perspective was shown to be seriously faulty, and illustrations in the DSZ awkwardly combined Western techniques of shading, perspective, stereoscopic drawing, and Chinese line drawing in ink and brush style. As a result, foreign elements in the pictorial were like alien articles being forced into the Chinese world.6 This ironically reflects the situation of Western encroachment upon China during the age of imperialism. Notwithstanding this limitation, the DSZ did produce a shocking impact on the reading/viewing public of the time as it featured novelties which made a lasting impression on contemporaries such as Bao Tianxiao 包天笑, the famous playwright and author of Chuanyinglou huiyilu 釧影樓回憶錄.7 In fact, it was the content of the pictorial, i.e., strange and peculiar objects and phenomena, that mattered more than the form, for example, of the pictorial in producing Between Drawing and Writing: Prostitutes in the Dianshizhai Pictorial...