Shanghai Love: Courtesans, Intellectuals, and Entertainment Culture, 1850-1910 (review)

In this meticulously researched and beautifully illustrated book, Catherine Yeh celebrates the centrality of the elite courtesan (changsan 長三) in the transformation of Shanghai to a modern metropolis. Although books about historic Shanghai abound-perhaps no Chinese city has been explored in greater depth-Yeh's study is unique in its approach. The author argues that Shanghai itself was one of "three key players" (p. 4); the other two, the courtesan and the new class of urban intellectuals (many of whom belonged to China's first generation of journalists), came together in a "symbiotic and symbolic relationship" that altered this location "into the modernizing engine" (p. 5) of the Qing empire. Yeh views Shanghai in the mid nineteenth century as a "marginal place" serving a "multiethnic community of marginal sojourners" who flourished in an environment receptive to new forms of glamorous entertainment, and as a site buttressed by a publishing industry eager to capture the marvels of both leisure pursuits and Western accoutrements such as electricity, photography, and furniture.

This book carefully interweaves what is new or modern with what is old or traditional to Shanghai during the period circa 1860-1900. Dozens of reproductions from photographs and lithographic illustrations that display courtesans enjoying such novelties as riding in four-wheeled carriages, or playing billiards with their patrons (usually rich Chinese merchants), or residing in locations decorated with Western-style mirrors, clocks, kerosene lamps, glass-pane windows, cast-iron stoves, and Victorian furniture, captivate the reader's attention and make clear the complexity of the courtesan's life in Shanghai's foreign settlements, which had attracted Chinese migrants of all classes because of the mid century rebellions. Yeh stresses that the women's presence in Shanghai's public sphere was unprecedented and also sensational: the newly emerging media industry unashamedly published accounts of how well-known courtesans attended opera and theater performances, and reveled, in defiance of conventional Confucian norms, in giving public singing and storytelling recitals. The successful courtesan was also a competent, savvy businesswoman who knew that her income, and therefore her life status, depended on making a space for the exercise of mixing Chinese cultural skills with Western fixtures and modes of behavior. An appreciation of fashionable clothing was also integral to the maintenance of her station. From a wealth of photographic portraits, Yeh deftly documents the changing courtesan fashions over the decades, from hairdos to garments, from headbands to decorative sashes to collars, and changing sleeve lengths.

Yeh orients the elite courtesan in the past as well. Although she might have been dressing and behaving like a modern person, the changsan still felt the need for divine assistance. While the gods to which she prayed were related one way or another to the God of Wealth, she also honored the Buddhist practice of "reciting (precious) scrolls" (p. 130). The courtesan also ritualized her relationship with her clients by playing out roles derived from the eighteenth-century novel Honglou meng 紅樓夢 (Dream of the red chamber). Perhaps the most interesting part of Shanghai Love is the chapter connecting the changsan to the novel's scenarios and strategies. She and her literati admirers pursued a "board game" (which is reproduced on p. 166) in which they play out the Dream by naming themselves after the novel's central characters Daiyu and Baoyu, and by viewing the foreign settlements as the novel's Daguan Yuan (Grand View Garden). Yeh also sees the garden image indicative of Shanghai's new developing prestige "as the world's playground" (p. 166), where foreigners, local merchants, and men of letters created a new kind of urban setting in which dreamland and Western materialistic culture intersected. But this fantasy world was never far from reality: the emerging commercial press realized the market value of guidebooks to heighten appreciation of the Dream, for example, Honglou meng gongshi 紅樓夢觥史 (A history of dream of the red chamber drinking games), issued by the Shanghai...