Dangerous Pleasures: Prostitution and Modernity in Twentieth-Century Shanghai

By Gail Hershatter

This pioneering work examines prostitution in Shanghai from the late nineteenth century to the present. Drawn mostly from the daughters and wives of the working poor and declassé elites, prostitutes in Shanghai were near the bottom of class and gender hierarchies. Yet they were central figures in Shanghai urban life, entering the historical record whenever others wanted to appreciate, castigate, count, regulate, cure, pathologize, warn about, rescue, eliminate, or deploy them as a symbol in a larger social panorama.

Over the past century, prostitution has been understood in many ways: as a source of urbanized pleasures, a profession full of unscrupulous and greedy schemers, a changing site of work for women, a source of moral danger and physical disease, a marker of national decay, and a sign of modernity. For the Communist leadership of the 1950s, the elimination of prostitution symbolized China's emergence as a strong, healthy, and modern nation. In the past decade, as prostitution once again has become a recognized feature of Chinese society, it has been incorporated into a larger public discussion about what kind of modernity China should seek and what kind of sex and gender arrangements should characterize that modernity.

Prostitutes, like every other non-elite group, did not record their own lives. How can sources generated by intense public argument about the "larger" meanings of prostitution be read for clues to those lives? Hershatter makes use of a broad range of materials: guidebooks to the pleasure quarters, collections of anecdotes about high-class courtesans, tabloid gossip columns, municipal regulations prohibiting street soliciting, police interrogations of streetwalkers and those accused of trafficking in women, newspaper reports on court cases involving both courtesans and streetwalkers, polemics by Chinese and foreign reformers, learned articles by Chinese scholars commenting on the world history of prostitution and analyzing its local causes, surveys by doctors and social workers on sexually transmitted disease in various Shanghai populations, relief agency records, fictionalized accounts of the scams and sufferings of prostitutes, memoirs by former courtesan house patrons, and interviews with former officials and reformers.

Although a courtesan may never set pen to paper, we can infer a great deal about her strategizing and working of the system through the vast cautionary literature that tells her customers how not to be defrauded by her. Newspaper accounts of the arrests and brief court testimonies of Shanghai streetwalkers let us glimpse the way that prostitutes positioned themselves to get the most they could from the legal system. Without recourse to direct speech, Hershatter argues, these women have nevertheless left an audible trace. Central to this study is the investigation of how things are known and later remembered, and how, later still, they are simultaneously apprehended and reinvented by the historian.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1997.
This pioneering work examines prostitution in Shanghai from the late nineteenth century to the present. Drawn mostly from the daughters and wives of the working poor and declassé elites, prostitutes in Shanghai were near the bottom of class and gender hie

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Release date: Sep 1, 2023
• ISBN: 9780520917552

Gail Hershatter

Gail Hershatter is Professor of History at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is the author of many books, including Dangerous Pleasures: Prostitution and Modernity in Twentieth-Century Shanghai and Women in China’s Long Twentieth Century, both from UC Press.

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Dangerous Pleasures

A

BOOK

The Philip E. Lilienthal imprint

honors special books

in commemoration of a man whose work

at the University of California Press from 1954 to 1979

was marked by dedication to young authors

and to high standards in the field of Asian Studies.

Friends, family, authors, and foundations have together

endowed the Lilienthal Fund, which enables the Press

to publish under this imprint selected books

in a way that reflects the taste and judgment

of a great and beloved editor.

Dangerous Pleasures

Prostitution and Modernity

in Twentieth-Century Shanghai

Gail Hershatter

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

Berkeley Los Angeles London

The publisher gratefully acknowledges the

generous contribution provided by

China Publication Subventions,

Permission to reprint material published elsewhere has been granted as follows:

The Hierarchy of Shanghai Prostitution, 1919-1949, Modern China 15.4 (October 1989): 463-97, © 1989 Sage Publications, Inc.

Prostitution and the Market in Women in Early Twentieth-Century Shanghai, in Rubie S. Watson and Patricia Buckley Ebrey, eds., Marriage and Inequality in Chinese Society. Berkeley, Los Angeles, and Oxford: University of California Press, 1991, 256-85, © 1991 by the Regents of the University of California.

Courtesansand Streetwalkers: The Changing Discourses on Shanghai Prostitution, 1890-1949, Journal of the History of Sexuality 3.2 (October 1992): 245-69, © 1992 by The University of Chicago.

Regulating Sex in Shanghai: The Reform of Prostitution in 1920 and 1951, in Frederic Wakeman, Jr., and Wen-hsin Yeh, eds., Shanghai Sojourners. Berkeley: University of California Institute of East Asian Studies, 1992, 145-85, © 1992 by the Regents of the University of California.

The Subaltern Talks Back: Reflections on Subaltern Theory and Chinese History, positions: east asia cultures critique 1.1 (spring 1993), 103-30, © 1993 by Duke University Press.

Modernizing Sex, Sexing Modernity: Prostitution in Early Twentieth-Century Shanghai, in Christina Gilmartin, Gail Hershatter, Lisa Rofel, and Tyrene White, eds., Engendering China: Women, Culture, and the State. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994, 147-74, © J994 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College.

University of California Press

Berkeley and Los Angeles, California

University of California Press, Ltd.

London, England

©1997 ЬУ

The Regents of the University of California

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Hershatter, Gail.

Dangerous pleasures: prostitution and modernity in twentieth-century Shanghai / Gail Hershatter.

p. cm.

A Philip E. Lilienthal book—

Includes bibliographic references and index

ISBN 0-520-20438-7. (alk. paper). —ISBN 0-520-20439-5 (pbk.: alk. paper)

1. Prostitution—China—Shanghai—History—20th Century. 2. Women—China—

Shanghai—Social Conditions. 3. Women—China—Shanghai—Economic conditions.

4. Shanghai (China)—History—20th century. 5. Shanghai (China)—Social conditions. I. Title.

HQ1250.S52H47 1997

306.74'0951'132—dc2o 96'5357

CIP

Printed in the United States of America

98765432 1

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National

Standards for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials,

ANSI Z39.48-1984.

For Sarah and Zachary

CONTENTS 1

CONTENTS 1

ILLUSTRATIONS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

CHAPTER 1 Introduction: Knowing and Remembering

CHAPTER 2 Classifying and Counting

CHAPTER 3 Rules of the House

CHAPTER 4 Affairs of the Heart

CHAPTER 5 Tricks of the Trade

CHAPTER 6 Careers

CHAPTER 7 Trafficking

CHAPTER 8 Law and Disorder

CHAPTER 9 Disease

CHAPTER 10 Reformers

CHAPTER 11 Regulators

CHAPTER 12 Revolutionaries

CHAPTER 13 Naming

CHAPTER 14 Explaining

CHAPTER 15 History, Memory, and Nostalgia

APPENDIX A Tables

APPENDIX В Poems

NOTES

GLOSSARY OF CHINESE CHARACTERS

BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX

ILLUSTRATIONS

(following page iyy)

1. Pheasants soliciting customer

2. Pheasant and attendant

3. A stray lamb who has lost his way amid the delights of Shanghai

4. Scene in amusement hall

5. Lan Yunge

6. Shen Baoyu

7. Qin Yu

8. Courtesan in operatic dress

9. Courtesan with book

10. Courtesan (and attendant?) with Chinese chess set

11. Qin Lou

12. HuaSibao

13. Xiao Qinglou

14. Courtesans with automobile

15. Man cutting the melon

16. Cover of Sun Yusheng’s find de shenghuo, 1939

17. Prostitute and list of demands

18. Two courtesans with child

19. Patron inspecting prostitute under supervision of madam

20. Women’s Labor Training Institute

21. Drawing blood for STD tests

22. Attending classes

23. Learning embroidery

24. Graduation ceremonies

25 and 26. Illustrations accompanying Lu Xing’er’s account of interviews

with incarcerated prostitutes

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I have accumulated many debts of gratitude during the decade in which this book took shape. My field research in Shanghai, where I was hosted by the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences, was facilitated by Xue Suzhen, Zhao Nianguo, Wang Dehua, and the staffs of the Shanghai Municipal Archives and the Shanghai Municipal Library. Time for research and writing was supported by grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Harvard University Fairbank Center for East Asian Research, Williams College, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Bunting Institute at Radcliffe College, the University of California President’s Research Fellowship in the Humanities, the American Association of University Women Educational Foundation, the Pacific Cultural Foundation, and the University of California Humanities Research Institute. Much of this largesse was obtained with the help of Susan Mann, Frederic Wakeman, Jr., and Marilyn Young, who repeatedly recommended this project. I received additional funds for research assistance from the Academic Senate Committee on Research and the Division of Humanities at the University of California at Santa Cruz.

Shanghai prostitution is discussed in a massive number of diverse and widely scattered places. Erika Elvander, David Roberts, and David Schill- moeller helped me retrieve and organize sources in English; Guo Xiaolin, Max Ko-wu Huang, Jiang Jin, Pan Hangjun, Wang Xiangyun, Wang Yufeng, and Yu Yuegen assisted me in surveying and puzzling out early-twentieth- century materials. Max Ko-wu Huang also saved me from egregious errors in poem translation; any remaining howlers are not his fault. Timothy Brook, Merle Goldman, Nancy Hearst, Elizabeth Perry, Michael Schoenhals, and Jeffrey Wasserstrom called important sources to my attention. Emily Honig and Wang Zheng accompanied me on my fieldwork trip to the Hongqiao Hotel in 1993.

Sheila Levine at the University of California Press was an encouraging and engaged editor; I thank her for swallowing her dismay at the length of the final manuscript. Laura Driussi and Rose Anne White helped speed production of the book. Carl Walesa provided skillful copyediting; Cheryl Barkey prepared the Chinese glossary and wrested it from the maws of a recalcitrant piece of software. The China Publication Subventions Program eased production costs.

My greatest debt is to the many readers who offered encouragement and criticism as this project evolved. Bina Agarwal, Wendy Brown, Judith Butler, Sankong Fang, Carla Freccero, Christina Gilmartin, Nona Glazer, Carma Hinton, Grace Laurencin, Susan Mann, Sonya Rose, Janet Seiz, Michael L. Smith, and Christine Wong read and commented on portions of the manuscript. Colleagues on the Board of Studies in History at the University of California at Santa Cruz—Maria Elena Diaz, Lisbeth Haas, Martha Hodes, Cynthia Polecritti, and Marilyn Westerkamp—provided useful reactions to the chapters dealing with contemporary China. Members of the University of California Humanities Research Institute residential research seminar on Colonialism and Modernity in East Asia—Yoko Arisaka, Chungmoo Choi, James Fujii, Tak Fujitani, Ted Huters, Julie Park, Amie Parry, Lisa Rofel, Shu- mei Shih, Miriam Silverberg, and Lisa Yoneyama—lent their critical expertise to the shaping of the introduction. Emily Honig and Lisa Rofel listened, raised questions, read, and reread during the years in which the book was put to paper; one could not ask for more generous and tough-minded colleagues and friends. The thoughtful and detailed responses of Luise White and Marilyn Young, who read the manuscript for the University of California Press, forced me to sharpen the argument. Randall Stross commented with characteristic perspicacity and ire on every paragraph and endnote; he should be credited with helping to produce a leaner and more tightly organized book, but absolved of responsibility for its continuing sprawl.

Finally, I thank my daughter and son, to whom this book is dedicated, for pleasure, engagement, and a sense of balance.

PART I

Histories and Hierarchies

CHAPTER 1

Introduction:

Knowing and Remembering

This book is both less and more than an imaginative reconstruction of the lives of Shanghai prostitutes from the late nineteenth century to the present.¹ Less, because prostitutes, like every other nonelite group, did not record their own lives. It is extremely rare to find instances where prostitutes speak or represent themselves directly (although, as I will argue later, they are not entirely silent, either). Rather, they entered into the historical record when someone wanted to appreciate, castigate, count, regulate, cure, pathologize, warn about, rescue, eliminate, or deploy them as a symbol in a larger social panorama. The sources that document their existence are varied, and include but are not limited to guidebooks to the pleasure quarters; collections of anecdotes, portraits, and poetry to and by high-class courtesans; gossip columns devoted to courtesans in the tabloid press; municipal regulations prohibiting street soliciting; police interrogations of streetwalkers and those accused of trafficking in women; newspaper reports of court cases involving both courtesans and streetwalkers; polemics by Chinese and foreign reformers arguing the merits of licensing versus abolition; learned articles by Chinese scholars commenting on the world history of prostitution and analyzing its local causes; surveys by doctors and social workers on the incidence of sexually transmitted disease in various Shanghai populations; records by relief agencies of kidnapping and trafficking cases in which women were sold to brothels; and fictionalized accounts of the scams and sufferings of prostitutes. Each of these sources has its uses; as a group, they are most informative about how prerevolutionary elites constructed and sought to contain categories of the subordinated other. In short, they tell us much more about the classificatory strategies of the authors than about the experiences of prostitutes. As the reformer Zeng Die commented sardonically in 1935:

Actually, these are prostitutes as they exist in the brains and ears of the writers. If you ask such a writer, What, after all, do these women eat, what do they wear, are they willing to lead this type of life or not? he is unable to answer.

Whether one perused the tabloid gossip columns, reformist fiction, or racy descriptions of Japanese and White Russian prostitutes in Shanghai, Zeng complained, one could not find a single straightforward statement by a prostitute.²

The very rich historical record on prostitution, then, is not spoken in the voice of the prostitute. And the much-sought voices of prostitutes themselves, if we could hear them, would not be unmediated, either; their daily lives, struggles, and self-perception were surely constructed in part by these other voices and institutions. It is impossible, then, for even the most assiduous historian to apply the retrieval method of history making, where energetic digging in neglected documents can be made to yield up a formerly inaudible voice. The impossibility of such an enterprise, in fact, calls into question the retrieval model itself. It directs attention to the ways in which all historical records are products of a nexus of relationships that can be only dimly apprehended or guessed at across the enforced distance of time, by historians with their own localized preoccupations.

Yet if this study is a humbling meditation on the limits of history-as- retrieval, it also aims at more than a transparent exercise in reconstruction. Prostitution was not only a changing site of work for women but also a metaphor, a medium of articulation in which the city’s changing elites and emerging middle classes discussed their problems, fears, agendas, and visions. In Shanghai over the past century, prostitution was variously understood as a source of urbanized pleasures, a profession full of unscrupulous and greedy schemers, a site of moral danger and physical disease, and a marker of national decay. It was also discussed as a painful economic choice on the part of women and their families, since it was sometimes the best or only incomeproducing activity available to women seeking employment in Shanghai. The categories through which prostitution was understood were not fixed, and tracing them requires attention to questions of urban history, colonial and anticolonial state making, and the intersection of sexuality, particularly female sexuality, with an emerging nationalist discourse. Every social class and gender grouping used prostitution as a different kind of reference point, and, depending on where they were situated, it meant something different to each.

The shifting and multiple meanings assigned to the prostitute demand that we move beyond transhistorical references to the world’s oldest profession, or dynasty-by-dynasty catalogs of written references to courtesans,³ and begin instead to historicize and localize sex work. Prostitution is always about the sale of sexual services, but much more can be learned from that transaction: about sexual meanings, about other social relations, about sex as a medium through which people talked about political power and cultural transformation, about nationhood and cultural identity.

In some respects China’s modern debates about prostitution echoed those of Europe and the United States. Recent feminist scholarship has explored the ways in which prostitution illuminates

a society’s organization of class and gender: the power arrangements between men and women’s economic and social status; the prevailing sexual ideology;… the ways in which female erotic and procreative sexuality are channeled into specific institutional arrangements; and the cross-class alliances and antagonisms between reformers and prostitutes.⁴

Although this literature is far too complex to summarize here, several recurrent themes have implications for the study of Shanghai. First is the difficulty of working with sources generated largely by regulators, reformers, journalists, fiction writers, and others while trying simultaneously to hear a language that comes from the work and experiences of prostitutes themselves.⁵ Second is the attention to prostitution’s powerful use as a symbol. What was written and said about prostitution, writes Alain Corbin of nineteenth-century France, was then a focus for collective delusions and a meeting point for all manner of anxieties.⁶ For France such anxieties included fear of venereal disease, social revolution, and ‘immorality,’ however defined,⁷ as well as a more generalized sense of threat to male mastery.⁸ For the United States in the early twentieth century, the list of anxieties also encompassed unrestricted immigration,… the anonymity of the city, the evils of liquor, the growth of a working-class urban culture, and, most important of all, the changing role of women in society.⁹

A third theme common to much of this scholarship is the insistence on regarding prostitution as a form of labor, even if not always one freely chosen, rather than (as many reformers believed) a state of degradation or a moral failing.¹⁰ Some scholars argue that prostitutes themselves saw their activities as a form of work.¹¹ Prostitutes’ labor, and the earnings that accrued from it, could both facilitate independence from the constrictions of family (as it did in nineteenth-century New York) and help to maintain the economic health of the women’s families (as it did in colonial Nairobi).¹²

A fourth theme in recent scholarship is the attempt to move beyond characterizations of prostitutes as victims and to find the historical agency, however limited, exercised by women in the sex trades.¹³ This requires attention to the entrepreneurial talents of madams,¹⁴ as well as critiques of the polarized image of the prostitute as the innocent victim or the sinister polluter.¹⁵ In spite of considerable public hysteria about the traffic in women in both Britain¹⁶ and the United States, Ruth Rosen writes that the vast majority of women who practiced prostitution were not dragged, drugged, or clubbed into involuntary servitude.¹⁷ Rather, as Christine Stansell comments, [p]ros- titution was one of a number of choices fraught with hardship and moral ambiguity.¹⁸ Under certain conditions, it offered women a limited degree of control, as Judith Walkowitz explains:

Superficially, prostitution seemed to operate as an arena of male supremacy, where women were bartered and sold as commodities. In reality, women often controlled the trade and tended to live together as part of a distinct female subgroup. Prostitutes were still not free of male domination, but neither were they simply passive victims of male sexual abuse. They could act in their own defense, both individually and collectively. They negotiated their own prices, and they were as likely to exploit their clients as to suffer humiliation at male hands.¹⁹

A final theme that dominates much of the recent scholarship on prostitution is the heated debate that raged between state authorities and reformers in a variety of nations during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Crudely summarized, state functionaries, bolstered by medical authorities, argued that prostitution was a necessary evil to be regulated through the registration and medical inspection of prostitutes. Reformers of many types, including Christians and women ‘s-rights activists, countered that prostitution was a social evil that should be abolished. Variations on the regulationist approach shaped the organization of prostitution in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century France, England, Scotland, Italy, and Russia.²⁰ When exported to the colonies, regulationism had a racial edge as well, stigmatizing native prostitutes and seeking to protect the colonizers (particularly soldiers) from the menace of disease and the purported uncleanliness of women of color.²¹

Neither regulation nor abolition was beneficial to prostitutes. Under regulationist regimes, women were subjected to intricate registration requirements that isolated them from the working-class communities of which they had been a part, increased clandestine prostitution, and led to police harassment of all working-class women on suspicion of being prostitutes.²² Ironically, the upper-class women reformers who opposed regulation, on the grounds that licensing and inspection degraded women, did little better by their fallen sisters. Many feminist groups saw themselves as striking a blow against the sexual exploitation of women and the larger problem of male domination. All too often, however, abolitionist laws made the lives of workingclass women more difficult. State repression of prostitutes increased. Driven into clandestine prostitution and harassed by the police, for instance, many women turned to pimps as a source of protection, only to pay dearly—in loss of income, control, and personal safety—for the arrangement.²³

Each of these themes was important in the course of Shanghai prostitution as well. But in China, prostitution was also invoked in urgent public dis cussions about what kind of sex and gender relationships could help to constitute a modern nation in a threatening semicolonial situation. China was never completely colonized by a single power. Rather, from the midnineteenth century European powers, the United States, and Japan established themselves in treaty-port cities and larger spheres of influence that encompassed both urban and rural territory. Mao Zedong coined the term semifeudal, semicolonial to describe this situation, in which a weak national government exercised limited authority over rural elites while foreigners dominated the modern sector of the economy and intervened in regional and national politics. Direct foreign political control, economic activity, and intellectual influence were most concentrated in the concession areas of treaty-port cities.

From the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, Shanghai was a treaty port—a place where Westerners governed part of the city, where Western and Japanese businessmen, sailors, industrialists, and adventurers made their homes and sometimes their fortunes. Shanghai was also China’s biggest industrial and commercial city, a magnet for merchants from around the country and for peasants of both sexes seeking work, and the birthplace of the Chinese Communist Party. Shanghai embraced populations from various nations, regions, and classes, and harbored political agitators ranging from Christian moral reformers to Marxist revolutionaries—all presided over by three different municipal governments (International Settlement, French Concession, and Chinese city). The International Settlement and the French Concession were governed by councils elected by foreign ratepayers; foreign investors were active in commerce and light industry; foreign educators dominated many of the city’s new educational institutions.²⁴

In this volatile and virtually colonized Shanghai environment Chinese elites, themselves undergoing profound economic and political transformations, keenly felt the instability of China’s semicolonial situation, the fragility of China’s sovereignty. The very incompleteness of China’s colonization generated particular anxieties, different from those of fully colonized territories. The situation could always get worse (and frequently threatened to do so); conversely, perhaps purposeful human activity could stave off further political disaster. Many varieties of nationalism flourished in Shanghai. Most nationalists took as their goal the establishment of a strong, modern nation that could appropriate and adapt the methods of the colonizers to thwart the colonial enterprises, to keep semicolonialism from deepening and ultimately to roll it back.

The modernity sought by this heterogeneous lot of reformers and revolutionaries was not clearly delimited. It was a shifting and receding target, one that encompassed economic and military strength but would also, many felt, require a thorough overhaul of cultural practices. Debates over prostitution, sexuality, marriage, and public health were inseparable from attempts to define a Chinese modernity that could irreversibly consign semicolonialism to the past. And yet these conversations, incited and shaped by the significant foreign presence in Shanghai, seldom made direct reference to that presence. When Chinese writers invoked foreigners, they usually did so to make a comparative point about prostitution or marriage in Europe, the United States, or Japan. The foreign prostitutes who worked in Shanghai, their foreign patrons, the foreigners who sought out Chinese prostitutes, and the larger operations of semicolonial power that provided so much of the city’s shape and history received only perfunctory mention in most of the literature on prostitution. This was a determinedly domestic conversation about modernity conducted in the urban interstices of a semicolonized space.

What it meant (to participants and observers) for a woman in Shanghai to sell sexual services to a man changed across the hierarchy of prostitution and over time, as understandings of prostitution were shaped, contested, renegotiated, and appropriated by many participants: the prostitutes, their madams, their patrons, their lovers and husbands, their natal families, their in-laws, the police, the courts, doctors, the city government, missionaries, social reformers, students, and revolutionaries. Studying prostitution and its changes thus illuminates the thinking and social practices of many strata of Shanghai society. And since the debates about prostitution often took place in regional or national publications, such a study also suggests the contours of conflicts about gender and modernity in twentieth-century Chinese society.

Across the century I am investigating here, the changing figure of the prostitute performed important ideological work in elite discussions.²⁵ Elite men (and occasionally elite women) wrote a great deal about prostitution, but the types of attention they devoted to it changed over time. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the upper-class prostitute²⁶ appeared in elite discourse as the embodiment and arbiter of sophisticated urbanity. Guidebooks, memoirs, and gossipy tabloid newspapers known as the mosquito press²⁷ devoted themselves to the appreciation of beautiful courtesans and the depiction, often in titillating detail, of their romantic liaisons with the city’s rich and powerful. This literature also contained warnings about the capacity of courtesans to engage in financial strategizing at the expense of the customer. Embedded in such writings was a highly detailed set of instructions on how the sophisticated customer should display knowledge and power to courtesans and other customers; guidebooks became primers for the production of elite masculinity. Side by side with this literature of appreciation, the local news page of the mainstream dailies and the foreign press carried accounts of the activities of lower-class streetwalkers, who were portrayed as victims of kidnapping, human trafficking, and abuse by madams, as well as disturbers of urban peace and spreaders of venereal disease.

One might conclude that there was one discourse on upper-class prostitution and another on lower-class prostitution. But as Shanghai moved through the second quarter of the twentieth century, the themes of victimization and sexual danger gradually increased in volume, all but drowning out the discourse of pleasure by the 1940s. During the 1920s and 1930s, the prostitute was widely represented as a victimized, disorderly, dangerous embodiment of social trouble. Reformers regularly decried prostitution as exploitation of women and a national shame, indeed as one of the keys to China’s national weakness, since it was argued that a system that permitted the treatment of women as inferior human beings would inevitably give rise to a weak nation.²⁸

At the same time the press and popular-fiction writers began to pay more attention to the less privileged and protected sectors of the trade. This was part of a more general development of muckraking reportage and fiction targeted at an emerging middle-class urban audience. Such writings paid attention to a wide variety of social ills that included but were not limited to begging, public sanitation, the mistreatment of domestic workers, and prostitution.²⁹ During the same period, the police and the courts, extending their authority into new realms in urban life, undertook to regulate prostitution, at least at the margins where it involved the sale into prostitution of women of good families, or street soliciting that was seen as a threat to public order. By the 1940s, prostitutes were clearly marked off from respectable people, particularly the respectable petty urbanites.³⁰ They had been relegated to the category of urban disorder.

This set of transformations was less orderly than the neat schematic account given here implies. The portraits of prostitution as sites of pleasure and of danger overlapped and coexisted in time. Nevertheless, the increasing attention to disorder and danger, and the development of regulatory regimes to contain them, had multiple consequences for the daily lives, identities, and actions of Shanghai prostitutes. Indeed, they even helped to determine who was considered a prostitute. Changes in migration patterns and economic opportunities might have increased the number of prostitutes and the alarm over them. But changes in elite notions about the link between women’s status and national strength helped create the language through which a rise in prostitution acquired meaning—even gave it the most commonly used modern term for prostitute, jinprostitute female), which displaced the earlier mingji (famous prostitute).³¹ And the elite shaped the institutions that emerged to classify, reform, or regulate prostitution—all of which in turn became part of the material environment in which prostitutes lived. Shanghai prostitution is a rich venue in which to explore the interlocking of material and ideological changes, since neither alone can be regarded as determinative of the conditions of prostitutes’ lives.³²

THE KNOWING HISTORIAN

Central to this study is the investigation of how things are known and later remembered, and how, later still, they are simultaneously apprehended and reinvented by the historian. Here the writer of local and national history must confront larger questions of contemporary historical practice. Just when the epistemological crisis engendered by poststructuralism appears to be waning in many academic fields, it has been taken up by that most curmudgeonly of disciplines, history. Historians wonder, with an agony no less heartfelt for being so belated: How can we let go of the belief that there is an objective, knowable, recoverable past out there, and still write history? If there is no there there, then what is it we spend our scholarly lives creating? Is history, ultimately, no more than a collection of the representations we fashion in the present, forever constrained by the limits and the politics of our contemporary concerns?³³

This set of questions, important as it is, still assumes that the past—although no longer sitting out there waiting to be discovered—somehow awaits our touch to bring it into being as history, as a set of textual representations. Yet if we try to imagine the conditions under which the textual traces of the past were themselves produced, we realize immediately that before we ever take them up as the raw materials of our trade, they are already sedimented into historical conversations of their own.

To take an example from the subject being fashioned here: I come to the history of sex work in recent China with a particular set of questions informed by Marxism, feminism, poststructuralism, the late-twentieth-century demise of revolutionary regimes, and assorted political and intellectual commitments of both the coherent and the fragmentary variety. To summarize crudely: Marxism has shaped my interest in the historical workings of power, the centrality of material life, the analysis of capitalism and colonialism, the history of nonelites, and labor history. Feminist writings by scholars and activists have insisted that gender is central to the workings of all societies and that prostitution is sex work, a form of labor. In addition, feminist historians of European and American prostitution have raised many issues about female agency, resistance, sexuality, and the state; this book enters an ongoing conversation about those issues. From poststructuralist critics I have learned to pay attention to to the instability of all categories and to language as constitutive, not merely reflective. I have become suspicious of seamless narratives in the sources and less eager to create a seamless narrative myself; I have learned to hear silences in the historical record as more than simple absence. And yet I remain unwilling to give up the weaving of historical narratives. No longer sure that it is feasible, ethical, or wise to give order to the stories of others, suspicious as to whether historians can move beyond sophisticated ventriloquism on behalf of the oppressed, I am still unwilling to contemplate a world in which histories are unwritten or denied outright. Such a possibility takes on particular poignancy in the postsocialist period, in the wake of regimes that claimed to speak for the oppressed even while silencing history and reordering collective memory. The demise of revolutionary regimes has raised anew the question of what modernity might mean for China, a question articulated by several generations of reformers and revolutionaries described in this book. But the end of revolutionary socialism raises questions as well for those of us living in late capitalism. How do we know that capitalism is late, for instance, rather than middle-aged or just coming into its own? What visions of equity, what workings of power, what deployments of gender and sexuality will animate postsocialist subjects on both sides of what used to be called, in a simpler time devoted to the enforcement of binaries, the Iron Curtain?

Such is a partial catalog of one historian’s current preoccupations. But the writings about Chinese courtesans that were produced by cultivated gentlemen of the late Qing and early Republican eras, although they may yield answers to my questions, tell me a great deal more than what I might ask if left to my own limited contemporary devices. Many of these men were themselves writing about their own recent past—were lovingly, poignantly, nostalgically recalling the courtesans of twenty years before their own time. What we are reading, then, is not a transparent recording of the facts of a particular woman’s native place, work history, physical charms, major liaisons, poetic talents, and so forth, but rather a story already rendered nostalgically. Courtesans here are brought into the written record—and become accessible to my own contemporary musings—only because men a century ago recalled them with longing and sadness as part of a world that they, and China, had forever lost.³⁴

A similar process of sedimentation characterizes the writings about lower- class streetwalkers. Concerned about the health and strength of the Chinese nation in a world dominated by imperialist powers, many elite Chinese from the 1910s on called for an end to prostitution. Creating origin stories in support of the reform cause, they assembled a radically dichotomized, even incoherent, portrait of streetwalkers: innocent, passive adolescents torn from their families and communities by evil traffickers, or aggressive harridans purveying disease in a new and dangerous urban environment. Rather than looking nostalgically to a cherished past, the reformers gazed with apprehension at a degenerate present and an imperiled future. Streetwalkers entered into history as emblems of national disaster.

This is not merely a question of the aesthetics of nostalgia or the trajectory of particular reform campaigns. The narrativized traces that form the historical record of courtesans and lower-class prostitutes are also a set of congealed relations of power. Men defined themselves in relationship to each other by performing and then creating in textual form certain social rituals with courtesans, or by asserting themselves as advocates for reform of prostitution. In the act of writing about prostitutes, they captured, even created, their connections with other elite men by situating themselves with respect to a nostalgically recalled Chinese past, an unsatisfactory present, and a range of imagined national futures. As figures through whom such concerns were spoken, prostitutes were not marginal on the twentieth-century urban scene. Rather, they were key elements in the stories that men told about pleasure, danger, gender, and the nation—stories in which the shifting fields of power between women and men were sometimes made to stand for the equally unstable power relationships between families and the nation, or the nation and the outside world. Prostitutes are brought into history embedded in the histories and the contests for power of those who first fashioned their stories.

Embedded here does not imply immobile, however. What appears to us as a concrete, examinable textual trace is in fact part of a movable past, a shifting set of relationships between historicized and historicizer, in which my entry as historian is only the latest ripple. And the fact that these gentlemen authors would not have called their appreciative or cautionary writings history—but would rather have labeled them memoirs, belles lettres, remonstrations with government authorities, or even historical romance— only alerts us to the important role that shifting boundaries of genre play in constituting what we now, in the inclusive mood of the late twentieth century, broadly call the historical record.

The new, improved, reflexive historian, sensitive to contested meanings and polyvocal perspectives, then, has more to worry about than how she and her contemporary concerns enable the telling of certain stories while occluding others. She must always remember that everything in the historical record itself bears the traces of earlier contests and concerns. This is certainly true in the case of self-conscious nostalgic or cautionary writing, where the authors are putting a subject into history in particular ways. But it is true as well of less obviously crafted pieces of the historical record. Statistics, for instance, can be read as the attempts by particular entities to count, classify, tax, suppress, ameliorate, or otherwise shape that which they are bringing into being by the act of counting it. Police interrogations of street prostitutes can be read as highly formulaic encounters (and in the case of 1940s China their repetitive nature virtually compels this kind of reading) in which law-enforcement officials organize prostitutes into particular categories— classifying them by motivation, for example—and prostitutes quickly learn which type of self-presentation will bring them the most lenient treatment. The historian reads such fragments as immutable fact at her peril—not because numbers inevitably lie, or because detained streetwalkers routinely dissemble, but because what we are seeing is not in any simple sense a set of facts but the itinerary of their creation, and we need to attend to both (never forgetting, of course, who we are and what historical baggage we carry, but not bludgeoning the reader to death with reminders, either).

In crafting this story of prostitution over the last century or so in China, I attempt to map the shifting connections between facts, fact makers, and fact interpreters, always bearing in mind that facts are constituted, not discovered, in the human process of making meaning. Whether there is such a thing as extralinguistic experience that remains outside this process does not concern me here. Historians, by definition, get to work only with discursive traces, with texts broadly defined. As a historian, I am grateful for the efflorescence of writing about prostitution that has left such a rich textual record. Nevertheless, I must ask why the record is shaped the way it is, and what its bumps, twists, configurations, and cavities can tell us about the people who made that record, their preoccupations, and their sense of place in the world.

This is both less and more than what Robert Berkhofer calls ethnocontext, the placing of matters within the context and terms of those living and experiencing it.³⁵1 have no hope of re-creating categories of meaning exactly as late nineteenth-century literati (much less prostitutes) understood them; at the same time, I have neither the desire to relinquish, nor the possibility of relinquishing, agendas and questions of my own. But if poststructuralist theory has made those of us who are historians more attentive to the process of our craft in producing historical narrative, we should also attend to the trace of craft, as well as the crafty presentation or concealment, that permeates every text we peruse. Rather than search for the past out there, we need to triangulate the shifting relationship between what was recorded, who was recording it, and ourselves.

Perhaps this process is best described by resorting to a culinary metaphor. If we think of the process of writing history as an onion-peeling exercise, where the historian concentrates on stripping away layer after layer in search of some imagined essential core, she is apt to find herself with nothing left but compost and irritated eyes. On the other hand, if what interests her is the shape and texture of the onion, the way it is constituted by the layers and the spaces between them, the way it appears as a unified whole but breaks apart along initially invisible fault lines, the process by which investigating its interior actually alters the shape of the whole onion, the smell it produces under various circumstances, and the effects that the investigation produces in the person doing the peeling—well, then the onion approach to history can be very productive. Onions are, arguably, prediscursive and out there waiting to be peeled, so perhaps the metaphor is not flawless. Yet historians are, after all, examining a something. And it could be said that onions are not prediscursive either; they need to be recognized as food in order for peeling to become a worthwhile activity.

This chapter first describes the ways in which prostitution was known in various sources. Second, it discusses the way prostitution has been remem bered in state-sponsored histories since 1949. Third, it sketches certain contemporary historical concerns that animate the reinvention of history in this study: the pursuit of elusive subaltern voices, the quixotic search for agency and resistance, and the exploration of semicolonialism as a social field. Finally, the chapter concludes with a guide to the strategy of storytelling adopted in the remaining fourteen chapters. The reader would do well to remember that these divisions among history-making activities are enforced by an act of will (mine) and a suspension of disbelief (yours): there is no clean line between knowing and remembering, remembering and reinventing, reinventing and storytelling.

KNOWING

Two sets of sources are helpful in thinking about how Shanghai prostitution was known to contemporary observers. Travel essays, guidebooks, and the so-called mosquito press dealt primarily but not exclusively with courtesans as social companions. The mainstream press reported on prostitutes of all ranks, usually as victims of oppressive social relations or threats to social order.

Among the richest sources on Shanghai prostitution are travel essays and guidebooks written by elite authors, devoted either wholly or in substantial part to descriptions of prostitution. Travel essays by visitors to Shanghai offered poetic images of prostitutes as an integral feature of the Shanghai scene. At dusk, one visiting official noted in an 1893 memoir, women, their powder white and their makeup black and green, all lean on the balustrades and invite in passing guests. Near the end of an opera performance, he added, the latecomers from the courtesan houses would make their entrance, ‘just like the enchantment of summer orchids and musk-scented mist, elegant silk gathering like clouds. Truly it is a fragrant city that knows no night."³⁶

The guidebooks derive from a much older genre of reminiscences about prostitution but appear to have been published for a growing urban audience. They have titles like Precious Mirror of Shanghai, A Sixty-Year History of the Shanghai Flower World, Pictures of the Hundred Beauties of Flowerland, A History of the Charm of the Gentle Village, and A Complete Look at Shanghai Philandering, the last by an author who took the pseudonym Half-Crazy One.³⁷ Guidebooks included biographies of famous prostitutes; anecdotes about famous customers; directories of courtesan houses and their residents; exhaustive glossaries of the language of the trade; meticulous mappings of brothel organization; descriptions of the proper behavior required of customers when a prostitute made a formal call or helped host a banquet or gambling party; descriptions of fees, billing procedures, and tips; lists of festivals and the obligations of a regular customer at each season; accounts of taboos and religious observances; and tales of various scams run by prostitutes to relieve customers of extra cash.

Guidebooks were one venue where elite men could display their erudition, refinement, and wit to one another. Their accounts were larded with classical references; even their name for the courtesan quarters—Beili, or northern lanes—was derived from the name of the brothel district in the Tang dynasty capital of Chang’an.³⁸ Their descriptions of courtesan beauty were lodged in a rich horticultural vocabulary, and in their prefaces they engaged in extended discussions about whether the lotus that grew from the mud unstained (a common trope for courtesans) was more beautiful than all other flowers.³⁹ Writing prefaces for each other’s work, they gently mocked their fellows for devoting attention to women rather than using their talent to help the emperor rule,⁴⁰ or imagined that the songs of Shanghai prostitutes sounded grieved and touching in a time of national weakness and failed diplomacy.⁴¹ At the same time these authors also registered appreciation of each other’s profound emotions and their attachment to equally emotional courtesans.⁴²

Guidebooks, in spite of the prevailing tone of appreciation, occasionally included denunciations of madams, remonstrations with customers to shun the dissolute atmosphere of the courtesan houses, or hortatory pieces aimed at persuading courtesans to leave the profession. These pieces, too, were selfconscious displays of erudition, not only in their refined moral sentiments but in their poetic form. One attack on madams was labeled as written in the style of the Tang dynasty poet Xu Jingye’s attack on [the usurping empress] Wu [Zetian], while poems directed at customers and courtesans were written in imitation of a poem by [the Tang poet] Li Bai.⁴³

But the writers were equally apt to turn their mastery of literary styles to the production of jokes, producing a counterfeit government order to the effect that underwear and socks not be hung out to dry in the brothel districts, constructing imaginary letters from a courtesan to her customer, even crafting sly sexual jokes such as the following:

A man named He from Jiangxi was an expert at poetry from his youth. He had the look of a handsome scholar. He visited Shanghai and stayed in a certain inn. An old man in the same inn, from Nanjing, liked most of all to play with words. One day, He and the old man saw the courtesan Xie Shanbao. Because Xie had long since ceased work as a courtesan, they did not speak to each other. But she turned her head and glanced at them in an extremely lingering manner. Because of this, He, borrowing words from the Suiyuan Poetry Talks, said to the old man, The sight of a beauty can nourish the eyes, the poetry of a poet can nourish the heart. This is well said. The old man liked to fabricate vulgar literary allusions and pretend to be cultured. So he said with a straight face, "These two sentences are from the Records of Qidong. Following them are four more sentences. [The man named] He clearly knew that he was deceiving him, so he asked about it. The old man said, I remember the next four sentences as ‘Traveling on a green plain can nourish my feet. Yang Guifei’s breasts can nourish my hands.’⁴⁴ [The man named] He laughed heartily and said, So you have also seen this book. There are still two more sentences that you have forgotten. The old man was startled and said, What are they? He laughed and said, The mouths of Daiyu and Lanfen [Lin Daiyu and Lu Lanfen, two famous late-Qing courtesans in Shanghai] can nurture my … He hadn’t yet said the next word and was already laughing uncontrollably. The old man asked more and more persistently. He told him, Try to guess. If you can’t guess, let me go back and look it up in the book to show you."⁴⁵

These notes of sexual innuendo were rare in the guidebooks, which provided entertainment not through explicit erotic description but through literary allusions and puns:

The twenty-fourth day of the sixth lunar month is said to be the birthday of Leizu [the thunder spirit]. On that day a certain guest was drinking at the home of a certain courtesan. The place was full, with double banquet tables. Many people were drinking and playing the finger game. Many prostitutes [literally, flowers] were around. Among them was a courtesan who usually drinks a lot, but that night no cup wet her lips. When others asked, she said, "Today is Leizu’s birthday. For a day and a night we shouldn’t eat cooked food [shiyanhuo]" Even though others urged her repeatedly, she steadfastly refused. When the feast was over, a guest still wanted some fun. He went to her house. She didn’t receive him. Her servant told him that she had drunk too much, that she was nauseous and had gone to bed already. In fact she had asked a patron to stay for the night and had long ago gone to sorcery mountain. The next day they met at another feast table. He asked her, If you can’t eat cooked food, how can you keep a guest for the night? Is it not very irreverent? The courtesan couldn’t answer. Her face turned red. After a while, she said bashfully, "Is it possible that there is cooked food [yanhuo, which also has the literal meaning fireworks] in his thing?" All the people at the table choked with laughter.⁴⁶

By describing, appreciating, and putting words in the mouths of courtesans, writers established a fellowship of repartee among themselves.

The guidebooks can be read in conjunction with the mosquito press— tabloid newspapers that typically devoted a page or more to gossip about courtesans.⁴⁷ The final decade of the nineteenth century saw a proliferation of many types of newspapers in Shanghai, including tabloid papers. Among the earliest of these were Li Boyuan’s Youxi bao (Recreation news) and Wu Jianren’s Xiao bao (Laughter news). Both of these editors were well-known writers of castigatory novels (qianze xiaoshuo), a genre popular in the first decade of the twentieth century. The utterly permeable boundary between journalism and literature shaped much writing about courtesans.⁴⁸ Youxi bao sponsored elections for Shanghai’s most beautiful and talented prostitutes from 1897 to 1909 (see chapter 6), a move that increased its sales and helped establish a favorable climate for the establishment of other tabloids devoted to brothel news.⁴⁹

Perhaps the most famous of the tabloids was Crystal (in Chinese, Jingbad), published every three days beginning in 1919 for more than two decades.⁵⁰ Crystal overlapped with the guidebooks in content, but devoted a great deal of column space to tracking relationships between courtesans and the city’s elite, as well as personality quirks and quarrels among courtesans, business successes or reversals, reminiscences about famous courtesans of earlier times, and lists of courtesan-house names and phone numbers.⁵¹ Most of the detailed descriptions concerned courtesan brothels, but many also included substantial attention to the configuration of an elaborate hierarchy of prostitution.

Little was said in the guidebooks or tabloids about women being sold outright into prostitution, or entering into contracts against their will. For an elite audience, precise mechanisms of entry into the profession were not of interest. Not only with respect to the brothel, but also in matters of national significance, the women were portrayed as agents, not victims. During the May Fourth movement of 1919, for instance, students and other urban dwellers all over the country protested the negotiations at Versailles that ceded German rights over Chinese territory to Japan rather than returning control to China. Courtesans closed down their establishments for a day to protest the national shame, leafleted in support of a citywide strike, set up a refreshment stand for protesting students, and joined the boycott of Japanese goods.⁵² In short, courtesans were written into the civic and national drama as legitimate actors, not victims. The overwhelming picture that emerges from a reading of the guidebooks and mosquito press is a world of women with a great deal of room to choose their own companions and arrange their own working conditions, although obviously within many constraints, living lives of occasional penury but not serious material deprivation. Such women might break the heart of a son of the Shanghai elite, but their existence would not cause him any serious moral, political, or legal problems. Courtesans were seldom objects of pity.

But a survey of Shanghai’s earliest and most respected Chinese newspaper, Shenbao, yields a very different picture. True, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries Shenbao devoted some attention to cultivated, autonomous, upwardly mobile, romantically active courtesans, printing occasional poetry about them. But far more space was allocated to poor, oppressed, exploited, often battered prostitutes. They were not courtesans, but were usually of the pheasant class—streetwalkers. The term pheasant was a general one in Shanghai, used to refer to anything or anyone transient, including rickshaws and steamships on irregular runs.⁵³ Pheasant prostitutes were streetwalkers whose name described both their gaudy dress and their habit of go[ing] about from place to place like wild birds.⁵⁴ They were of ten barely out of childhood, although occasionally they were married women. Stories about them stressed their rural origins and the fact they they were either kidnapped and sold into prostitution or else pawned by destitute parents. No embodiments of urbanity they. In either case, the reports emphasized that they did not wish to be prostitutes, a sentiment reinforced for the reader by the repetition of a standard litany of oppression. They were most often seen in one of two situations: fleeing from a cruel madam and being sent by the municipal authorities to a relief organization; or being hauled in by the police for aggressively soliciting customers, fined five or ten yuan, and released, presumably to ply their trade again. The coverage of their activities lacked the loving detail lavished on courtesans. A typical article read in its entirety: Pheasant Dai Ayuan, from Changzhou, was arrested on Nanjing Road by Patrolman #318 from the Laozha police station and fined five yuan.⁵⁵

In the 1920s and 1930s, these types of sources—guidebooks, mosquito papers, the newspapers of record—maintained their coverage of prostitution, but with marked changes. Some voices grew louder; others became muted. Although the courtesan did not completely vanish, and appeared in the literature of nostalgia and in classificatory lists through the 1940s, she was no longer the emblematic figure of the sex trades. She was replaced by the disease-carrying, publicly visible, disorderly and victimized pheasant.

During and after the May Fourth movement, with rising concern about sexually transmitted diseases and their effect on the health of the Chinese race, discussions of prostitution became medicalized, and its persistence was increasingly described as a public-health problem. Parallel to the medical- ization of prostitution was the emergence of a legal discourse on prostitution, one that did not deem it illegal but regulated it in a way that offered protection to women of good families. A woman of good family, legally speaking, was one whose family did not intend to sell her and who found herself in a brothel without a contract that legalized her presence there. Frequently cases were reported in the press where a woman or members of her natal or marital family would go to court asserting that she had been sold into prostitution against her will. Only a woman who could prove that she had been forced into prostitution could hope to get legal help in fleeing the brothel system.⁵⁶ Prostitutes of any rank could and did sue to be released from an illegal contract or alter their status. By the late 1920s prostitution, both high-class and low, was a litigable sphere, one that was no longer a matter only of pleasure or money, but of contestable contractual obligations and legal regulation as well.

Beyond indicating the emergence of a legal discourse, these accounts also treated relationships between prostitutes on the one hand, and madams or traffickers on the other, as points of conflict, regardless of whether the sex worker was a courtesan or a pheasant. Prostitutes were almost invariably por trayed as victims in these relationships. More generally, prostitutes increasingly appeared in written sources as victims of a variety of oppressors: the madam, inconstant patrons and lovers, the labor market, a society that devalued daughters, and occasionally the state.

Another theme of increasing prominence, sounded both by reformers and by government agencies, was the need for regulation of the sex trades as a whole, usually without regard to rank in the hierarchy. Because of their threat to public health and order—and also, no doubt, because of their increasing numbers and potential for generating revenue—prostitutes in the Republican period attracted the intensified interest of a state that was itself growing increasingly intrusive and tutelary.⁵⁷ The state—in this case, the multiple municipal governments of Shanghai—began regularly to regulate, tax, or attempt to eliminate prostitution. As early as 1920, the International Settlement government, pressured by foreign missionaries to abolish commercialized vice, licensed all brothels and then progressively withdrew the licenses; the result of this foreign-run campaign was, as predicted by its opponents, an upsurge in unlicensed prostitution. Frequent and equally unsuccessful campaigns followed, until the comprehensive drive by the new Communist government in the 1950s eliminated prostitution. Its resurgence in the market economy of the 1980s occasioned, once again, fervent debate about whether and how state power should be deployed to frame and adjust the relationship between sexuality and social order.

The mosquito press and the guidebooks mainly described women at the top of the hierarchy of prostitution, and Shenbao and other newspapers mainly described women at the bottom. Both types of women sold sexual services, but there the similarity ended. Streetwalkers, unlike courtesans, worked in miserable and dirty circumstances, under duress, for cash, in the process posing both a danger to social order (dealt with by the police) and a danger to public health (as hinted at in the accounts of venereal disease). If we take these wildly differing accounts at face value, we have to question whether the single category prostitute assumes a uniformity where one should not be assumed, whether we should in fact stop talking about prostitution as a unitary occupation and instead use categories like courtesan and streetwalker.

Ultimately, however, I would argue to abandon attempts at reconciliation and to look instead at the dissonance. Prostitution was an extraordinarily flexible signifier for many different kinds of Chinese engaged in many different conversations. The dissonant chorus they produced raises questions both about the contemporary meaning of the category prostitution and about the concerns of the patrons and the wider urban population. Above all, we must approach with caution the notion that we can retrieve from history a single set of descriptive or explanatory facts about prostitutes.

The perpetual reconfiguration of the discourses on Shanghai prostitution certainly reflected the changing occupational structure of Shanghai, where commercial and industrial sectors grew in tandem with a deepening rural crisis, encouraging the migration, both voluntary and coerced, of peasant women and girls. These interlocked phenomena led to a swelling of the lower ranks of prostitution, changing the sexual-service structure such that alarmed reformers came to regard it as more disruptive of social order, more dangerous to social and physical health.

Yet this change in the representation of prostitution was not an unproblematic reflection of social change in the sex trades. One must also look at the eye of the beholder,⁵⁸ considering the changing self-definition of urban elites, the effect of the May Fourth movement and the growing revolutionary movement, the development of reformist conversations on the position of women in general and prostitutes in particular, and the effect of language and categories drawn from Western missionary sources as well as Chinese radical politics. The discourse on prostitution should also be counterposed to parallel and intersecting struggles over the meaning of marriage. It is interesting, for instance, that courtesans were initially regarded as social as well as sexual companions, and portrayed as offering a range of companionship and choice not to be found in arranged marriages. In the social ferment that followed the May Fourth movement, however, intellectuals began to articulate, if not to practice, a notion of marriage as a companionate partnership between equals. If marriage was companionate and desired as such, then courtesans were no longer important as educated women with great skills, as a means for relieving the tedium of an arranged marriage, or as entertainers. All that was left for the world of the prostitute was sex. Simultaneously, prostitution was redefined as an exploitative transaction where the main connection—an oppressive one at that—was between the prostitute and her madam, not the prostitute and her customer. Because of these connections, prostitution must be looked at as one of a range of subjects of discussion about what sorts of gender and sexual relations should be considered modern and therefore desirable.

REMEMBERING

As though to illustrate the futility of the historian’s boundary making, many of the authors engaged in knowing prostitution presented their works as products of the conscious act of remembering. Most guidebooks, as mentioned earlier, were engaged in a literature of nostalgia. Guidebooks written in the 1920s located the golden age of prostitution a quarter to a half century earlier. Some of the main guidebook authors explicitly said in their prefaces that they were recording the definitive historical account of a world that was about to disappear because of reform movements to abolish prostitution. Several authors even compared themselves with the famous Han dynasty historians Ban Gu and Sima Qian.⁵⁹ And like classical historians of the Han and later, many of these authors reprinted almost verbatim (and without citation) material from earlier guidebooks.⁶⁰

Contemporary concerns were not absent from the prefaces written by guidebook authors. Writing in 1907, Zhan Kai worried that poverty was growing in the interior while courtesan houses in coastal cities such as Shanghai grew ever more splendid, nourished by the coffers of the rich. After castigating the heartlessness and lack of patriotism of his wealthy fellow citizens, he went on to state that he decided to write down what I have seen and heard, and finish this book, not only in order to record these women in Shanghai, but also to show the fact that China is strong in appearance but weak in reality.⁶¹ Fifteen years later, writing in a political and literary world forever altered by the end of imperial rule and the rise of a variety of vernacular literary movements, Wang Liaoweng nonetheless echoed some of these sentiments. In the preface to his lengthy Sixty-Year History of the Shanghai Flower World, which covered the period from the 1860s to the 1920s, he lamented that educated students were wasting their time reading popular magazines rather than attending to serious intellectual activity. Nevertheless, he continued, he had decided it was worthwhile to go through materials he had been collecting for several decades in order to publish a book about the history of courtesans. Rather than proceeding directly to put an end to prostitution, he said, he preferred to investigate how it had come to be. To this end he had set out to determine which stories about courtesans were factual, picking and choosing to achieve what he saw as definitive historical accuracy.⁶²

In spite of their apparently modern concerns with national strength and facticity, guidebook authors resembled classical Chinese historians in their predilection for comparing the current age unfavorably with the past. Just as historians frequently mourned the failure of contemporary rulers to measure up to the sagacious rulers of yore, guidebook authors mourned the decline in entertainment skill, refinement, and classical training of upper-class prostitutes. In his 1919 series on turn-of-the-century courtesans, for instance, Zhang