Introduction

In 1949 R. H. van Gulik (1910–67), a Dutch Sinologist and diplomat stationed in Tokyo, stumbled upon a set of printing blocks of an erotic album from China’s Ming dynasty (1368–1644). His original plan to print limited copies of selected pictures from the album for academic use led eventually to the publication in 1961 of a major volume titled Sexual Life in Ancient China: A Preliminary Survey of Chinese Sex and Society from ca. 1500 B.C. till 1644 A.D.¹ Covering the entire Chinese dynastic period except the Qing (1644–1911), the book appeared at a time when sexuality was outside the mainstream of writing history. For the decades that followed, it remained a lonely benchmark on the subject in any language. When the book was first introduced to China in 1990, the translator remarked that “its contents are so alien to the Chinese audience that it feels like it were about another country,” testifying to the degree of neglect.²

Half a century later, we are looking at a drastically changed landscape with regard to the academic interest in sexuality in premodern Chinese history, thanks to new theoretical insights, in particular those on gender, developed in the past decades. Van Gulik’s analytical framework—characterized by critics as based on the nineteenth-century European discourse on sex and the twentieth-century “cultural assumptions” with which scholars wrote about the “Orient”—and his central thesis that the Chinese sexual life was on the whole “normal and healthy” have been challenged, but a greater indication of the growth of the field lies in the appearance of a wide range of scholarly work in the past two decades.³ The efforts by historians and literary scholars alike have led to the rewriting on some of the most culturally laden topics such as female chastity, courtesan culture, and the practice of footbinding,⁴ while opening terrains of inquiry to include state policies, medical discourses, the Confucian classics, as well as literary representations of masculinity and femininity, the body, same-sex bonding, and homoeroticism.⁵ The recent publication of Susan Mann’s Gender and Sexuality in Modern China (2011) signifies another milestone in the field. Although Mann’s book centers on the transition from the nineteenth to the twentieth century, it offers the most comprehensive and penetrating delineation to date of the cultural context that gave rise to ideas and practices about sexuality in China’s long past, crucial for the understanding of sexuality in the twentieth century.⁶

The growing scholarship on sexuality in Chinese history before the twentieth century is also a result of scholars tapping into a wider range of sources for research. Textual materials are abundant for the history of imperial China, thanks to its remarkable consciousness about the importance of preserving history (shi) and a social elite that placed high value on written work as a means of securing a name for eternity, but the production and preservation of writings on sex were far from consistent. As Mann puts it, sometimes the historical record “becomes very noisy” and “at other times it is quiet.”⁷ The fluctuation of this record, understandably, also corresponded with genres of writing, with some making louder “noise” than others. A case in point is the fate of the so-called sex manuals, a type of text depicting the techniques of sexual intercourse (mostly for men) that were crafted for the purposes of “nourishing life” and for enhancing spiritual cultivation in the Daoist tradition. They had been in circulation since the Han (206 BCE–220 CE) but vanished not long after the Tang (618–907 CE). It was not until the early twentieth century that portions of sex manuals became known to the Chinese through Japan, where they had been preserved. An archaeological excavation in 1973 of a second-century BCE tomb in South China led to further discovery of manuscripts in this category, thus enabling scholars to reconstruct a lost tradition of the “arts of the bedchamber.”⁸

Van Gulik attributed the disappearance of these texts to the censorship of neo-Confucian ideology, which dominated the last...