The Fountainhead of Chinese Erotica: The Lord of Perfect Satisfaction (Ruyijun zhuan) (review)

Charles R. Stone, the translator and editor of this important work, has made a great contribution to the scholarly literature on the understanding of the role of sex in imperial China. This complements a general study by Paul Rakita Goldin, The Culture of Sex in Ancient China, recently published also by the University of Hawai'i Press. In this critical edition of the Ruyijun zhuan, Stone focuses on the sexual encounter between politics and power during the reign of Wu Zetian, the only empress of China.

Influenced by a seminar given by David Roy on the Jin ping mei (The plum in the golden vase), Stone wrote a short article on the Ruyijun zhuan. After translating the text, he added his critical observations on the historical and cultural context, and these observations developed into the present book. Although it is not mentioned in the nine-page introduction, the book's title is taken from Stone's 1999 doctoral dissertation for the University of Chicago, "The Ruyijun Zhuan and the Origin of the Chinese Erotic Novel."

The translation of the Ruyijun zhuan should be seen in the context of its precursors in early Chinese erotic literature, among which Stone mentions the Fu poetry of the Han dynasty, which dealt with a "combination of love, politics, and morals." There is an apparent incongruity between the putative moral considerations of these poems and the sensuous style in which they were composed. By comparison, the Ruyijun zhuan was written less with moral and political considerations in mind, and in language that was considerably more vulgar and explicit.

Daoist sexual practices also play an important role in relation to the Ruyijun zhuan. In this connection, Stone mentions the death of the Han emperor Wu Di (r. 141-87, B.C.), who died because he failed to conserve his vital essence during intercourse, as prescribed by such practices, and the Han emperor Cheng Di (r. 33-7 B.C.), who is said to have succumbed to an overdose of aphrodisiac.

Stone mentions that among the archaeological discoveries at the Mawangdui tombs in 1973 were a number of sexually explicit texts dating from 168 B.C. Some scholars feel that these were medical texts, while others are convinced that among the fifteen manuscripts on medical topics four were, in fact, sex manuals. Stone makes no reference to the objects of a sexual nature that were discovered earlier in 1968 in the tomb of Liu Sheng at Mancheng City in Hebei Province. In this tomb were discovered two bronze items connected with sexual practices. Much later, in 2002, Yi Xiaojian, from the Shaanxi Institute of Archaeology, discovered more sexual paraphernalia in the Han tombs at Xi'an.

Stone offers a comparative description of sex manuals and medical manuals from the Sui dynasty and sex stories and manuals from the Tang, including the lurid tale of Wu Zetian and her lover. He also mentions the medical classics of Sun Simiao (581-662), in which Simiao states that a man who is able to have sex with ninety-three women without ejaculating will live for ten-thousand years.

The Ming dynasty Neo-Confucian Wang Yangming (1472-1529) discussed how desire affected a person's development and concluded that carnal desire made self-cultivation impossible. This idea is central to each of the "Four Masterworks" of the period: The Journey to the West, The Outlaws of the Marsh, The Plum in the Golden Vase, and The Romance of the Three Kingdoms. Stone examines all of these for what they have to say about sex and human frailty, but in none of them is this sexual weakness as destructive as depicted in the Ruyijuan zhuan.

In chapter 4, "Context and Analysis," Stone discusses the considerable controversy that surrounds the authorship of this text, devoting seventeen exhaustive pages out of the chapter's 113 to this topic—even though the...