Note on Terms, Units, and Illustrations
Ages Customarily, Chinese babies are one sui old upon birth and gain another sui per Lunar New Year. Thus, a girl of four sui might be as young as two years old if reckoned by the Gregorian calendar. Because it is difficult to be certain of which system was being used in any particular instance during this period, ages in my sources are taken as given.
Currency The proliferation of poorly regulated currencies and widely differing regional practices and vocabularies for money plague attempts at reckoning prices in the late Qing and early Republic.1 In Beijing circulated old Qing silver taels valued by weight, Mexican silver dollars, Chinese-minted silver coins, various denominations of copper coins, and paper bills. Exchanges between these sys- tems tended to fluctuate daily. For simplicity’s sake, Iwill follow the system below when comparing prices, though it is far from precise. For example, though from 1905–1907 the following rates seem to have held true, by 1926– 1930 the ratio had changed by as much as a factor of three—that is, each sil- ver dollar converted to 300 copper cents. To make matters more complex, though police records generally use the official terminology for Chinese sil- ver dollars ( yinyuan) and copper cents (tongyuan), people of all classes used a huge assortment of slang terms, which pepper testimonies and other sources. References to “dollars” and “cents” in the text are to Chinese currency unless otherwise noted. 1000 (Qing standard) or 100 (customary practice in the 1910s) imperial copper cash (wen) = 50 Xianfeng-era emergency cash (tongqian, jingqian, tongzi’r, dazi) = 10 copper cents (tongbi, dan tongyuan, dangshi, daqian, mei) =
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5 “big” copper cents (tongbi, da tongyuan, dang ershi, datongzi, datongzi’r, damei) = 1 diao or strand = 1 silver dime ( yinjiao) = 0.10 tael ( yinliang) = 0.10 yuan or silver dollar ( yinyuan, yuan, dayang)
Measures Chinese units like the cun, chi, and jin were roughly equivalent to imperial inches, feet, and pounds. However, one li is only about one-third of an impe- rial mile; in the text, a “mile” refers to the latter.
Chinese Terms A glossary of Chinese characters for key terms and names in the text is online via the University of Toronto Library’s TSpace Repository here: http://hdl .handle . net / 1807 / 98020 . I have omitted names that have no historical signifi- cance beyond this text as well as well-known personal and place names that can be easily found in standard references. Also, I have used traditional or sim- plified Chinese script depending on the chronological context in which the phrase appears.
Illustrations Please note that all images are available for online viewing via the University of Toronto Library’s TSpace repository. Three figures (A, B, and C) are exclu- sively viewable online. Permanent links are provided in the text. REINVENTING LICENTIOUSNESS