Erotic humanity, Chinese style

KEN COCKBURN peruses a guide to traditional Chinese erotic throughout its imperial era

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THIS book, according to its editor, who is Emeritus Professor of Chinese Studies at the Australian National University, aims to present “a colourful and full-blooded picture of the erotic humanity of this great and vibrant civilisation.”

A mix of poetry and prose (fiction and non-fiction), it gives a good overview of Chinese literature and thought, from the I Ching, through Confucius, the great poets of the Tang dynasty and the later empire, until its collapse and the emergence of the republic in 1911.

With the focus on love — the Ch’ing of the book’s title — and the bedchamber, great historical events are referred to only obliquely, as when, for example, the translation of Byron’s Don Juan by Mu Dan (1918-1977) “miraculously escaped destruction by the Red Guards when they raided his home.”

This isn’t an anthology in the usual sense, that is, an introduction followed by the selected works, with footnotes providing further details as need be. Here each extract is accompanied by a commentary from Minford. While much of this contextualising is useful, the effect, paradoxically, is to place the extracts at a remove, rather than giving them space to breathe, and some prose extracts are simply too short to make much impact.

As outlined in the Introduction, Chinese concepts of love are drawn from the Tao, an ancient body of thought that conceptualises the universe as competing Yang and Yin energies. Crudely, Yang is male and active, while Yin is female and passive; harmony is achieved when the two are in balance. Love, too, in its ideal form, achieves just such a balance. Such concepts promote an equality between the sexes, at the sexual and romantic level, at least; as Minford writes: “Sexual union… brings mutual physical and psychological benefits.”

The visions of love that are given here are, as might be expected from such a starting point, largely heterosexual couplings. Minford makes no comment about the merits or otherwise of such an approach. There are occasional instances of homosexual love, as in the entertaining (and uninterrupted) extracts from Lu Tiancheng’s The Embroidered Couch, a “pornographic novel” from the an early 17th century about a menage a trois — wife, husband and his male lover — “saved by its brisk narrative pace and its light, almost comic touch.”

We are introduced to concepts and the poetic shorthand in which they are presented — concrete images drawn from the world, rather than abstractions — such as fengyue, wind and moon (the erotic), fengliu, wind and willow (romantic love) and jianghu, river and lake (the disreputable demi-monde).

The poems are given in rather old-fashioned translations; some are adapted from those made by Herbert Giles (1845-1935), Professor of Chinese at Cambridge until 1932. Three poems here are also in Wong May’s In The Same Light (2022); her versions, unconstrained by traditional English metrics and spaced out on the page, slow down the reading process and open up the poems’ meanings and associations to a greater extent.

After we reach “Recent Times,” the final section returns to earlier text, including a consideration of the binding of a girl’s feet to hinder their growth. Many of the tales included here feature erotically charged moments when these “golden lotuses” are seen or touched. A practice which continued for about a thousand years (it was finally banned in 1911), Minford confesses “honest perplexity” as to its extent and duration.

The anthology closes with extracts from a prose poem by Bo Xingjian (776-826), which Minford considers “the perfect ending for my book’s hymn in praise of the Tao of Ch’ing.” Much of it still reads well, covering love in its many guises — young, old, clandestine, seasonal — but the section on “The Emperor, Son of Heaven” is an extraordinary depiction of male privilege and entitlement: “Nine consorts serve his Majesty’s nightly pleasure… an avenue of charming ladies show the way… So many women/ For the pleasure of one man!”

This is one place where more rather than less commentary would have been welcome.

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