Introduction

This volume includes two memoirs about courtesans in seventeenth-century China: Reminiscences of the Plum Shadows Convent (hereafter Plum Shadows) by Mao Xiang (sobriquets Piji- ang and Chaomin, 1611–1693) and Miscellaneous Records of Plank Bridge (hereafter Plank Bridge) by Yu Huai (sobriquets Danxin and Manweng, 1616– 1696).1 It also presents anecdotes, stories, and poetic writings related to two of the most famous courtesans from that period: Liu Rushi (1618–1664) and Chen Yuanyuan (b. 1623). The world these materials evoke is that of the Lower Yanzi area in the final decades of the Ming dynasty (1368–1644) and in the aftermath of its collapse in the early years of the Qing dynasty (1644– 1911). This was a period when a chorus of voices elevated aesthetic refinement and romantic sensibility and showed an extraordinary interest in recording perceptions, sensations, emotions, and memories. Often the same voices showed deep political engagement and were committed to bearing witness to contemporary turmoil and to remembering the world before Qing conquest. These writings therefore not only provide a window into the sights, sounds, smells, and texture of pleasures and passions but also bear the burden of memory and nostalgia and show us the moral reasoning justifying apparent indulgence. xii Introduction

COURTESANS IN CHINESE HISTORY

The words for “courtesans” in Chinese, chang ၬ and ji ࿃, are etymologically related to the more ancient graphs chang ّ and ji Ծ, whose meanings include musician, singer, actor, and entertainer. The function of the courtesan is to provide pleasure, and the continuity between aesthetic and sensual pleasure implies an inherent ambiguity in her role. As object of desire and sexual exploitation, she could experience shame and degradation, yet as entertainer she was also, at least potentially, an artist who could claim self-expression and, in rare instances, even self-invention. In the hierarchy of sexual transactions, courtesans were distinguished from mere prostitutes because of their accomplishments.2 From the fifth and sixth centuries on, there are records of famous courtesans who entertained not only with music, songs, and dance but also by mastering the ornaments of literati culture—zither, chess, wine games, poetry, painting, calligraphy, and refined, witty conversation. Mastery of such skills, often prized above beauty, sometimes meant a courtesan was less sexually available, although it also played a standard part in the game of seduction. The fascination with courtesans is bound up with the idea of permeable boundaries. The courtesan escaped the well-defined roles and relationships of traditional Chinese society. Classified as “debased” ( jian), she yet consorted with elite men, sometimes as intellectual equals, and could reclaim respectability through marriage (congliang).3 She could befriend elite women. Starting from the sixteenth century, we find poetic exchanges between elite women and courtesans; some of them are even vaguely homoerotic in tone, unavoidable perhaps because poetic conventions for prais- ing female beauty and talent are often rooted in male desire. In the eighteenth century, for example, it was not uncommon for elite women to invite famous courtesans to join them on pleasure excur- sions on the painted boats of Qinhuai. Theoretically “off limits,” Daoist priestesses could sometimes be de facto courtesans, as in Introduction xiii the cases of the famous Tang poets Yu Xuanji (842–872) and Li Ye (eighth c.). Several renowned seventeenth-century courtesans, including Wang Wei (ca. 1595–ca. 1647), Bian Sai (1620s–ca. 1663), and Liu Rushi, embraced Daoism and Buddhism, implicitly negat- ing the sensuous existence they once embodied but also potentially developing a new kind of allure. A courtesan was often born or sold into that station, but an elite or even aristocratic woman could have been reduced to that status because her family belonged to a vanquished dynasty, was an ousted faction in court, or simply got into political or economic troubles, and as such she retained the allure of what might otherwise have been inaccessible.4 A particularly notorious case was the Yongle emperor of the Ming dynasty (r. 1402–1424). He ruthlessly eliminated officials who opposed his violent usurpation of the throne in 1402. Female family members of his opponents were often condemned to join the ranks of courtesans and prostitutes.5 In this sense, state control of courtesans answered the per- ceived need to maintain distinctions between the “debased” and the “respectable” (liang). The legends that Guan Zhong (d. 645 BCE), a Qi statesman for whom Confucius expresses both admi- ration and criticism in the Analects, invented the institution of “women’s wards” (nülü) in order to use “the earnings of their noc- turnal unions” to enrich the state6 or that the ancient Yue king Goujian (fifth c. BCE) kept widows on a hill to entertain his sol- diers7 point to the notion that “women of pleasure” could serve the “public good.” The rationale is that the errant energy of society could thus be channeled and controlled to facilitate its proper functioning. Taxes levied on courtesans were called “flower con- tribution” (huajuan) or “powder money” (huafen qian, zhifen qian) in various periods.8 Song courtesans were drafted as vendors of wine, which was sold through government monopoly. In the late thirteenth century the first Ming emperor (r. 1368–1398) established sixteen towers to house official courtesans (guanji) in Nan- jing, then the capital. The purpose was apparently to increase xiv Introduction revenue and to encourage urban revival.9 Almost six centuries later, the Qing loyalist general Zeng Guofan (1811–1872), “taking Guan Zhong as example,” tried to revive the economy of the Lower Yangzi area by lifting the ban on courtesans, which had been enforced by the insurgents during the Taiping Wars (1850– 1864). Taxation and public records defined the parameters of state control. Entertainers under the control of the Registry of Musi- cians (yueji), formalized in 528 in north China during the North- ern Wei dynasty (386– 534), had a debased status that was hereditary: they could not marry “respectable” persons and could not easily remove their names from the registry (luoji, tuoji), and sumptuary rules applied to them.10 The enforcement of such rules varied greatly in different periods. Entertainers in the registry came to belong to the Right and Left Bureau of Music Instruc- tions (jiaofang si) upon their establishment in 714. This early Tang (618– 907) reorganization of a late sixth-century Sui (581– 618) institution was to last in one form or another till the end of the imperial era.11 The bureau specialized in the training of court entertainers. These entertainers were sometimes called official courtesans and could be summoned for performance in state celebrations and official feasts. In 606, Emperor Yang of Sui (r. 604–618) dazzled a Turkish delegation with a large-scale musical gala in the Sui capital Luoyang. As many as 30,000 female entertainers were involved in this extravagant display of state power.12 Courtesans could also be asked to entertain foreign delegations or serve at state banquets. Flourishing in tandem with official courtesans were private courtesans (siji), usually associated with an independent establishment in an urban setting. Indeed, by the seventeenth century, the period in which the texts translated in this volume were written, the boundaries between official and private courtesans were blurred. Belonging to the Music Registry seemed to involve little more than special taxes and the obligation to attend certain official feasts. Unlike entertainers kept inside the confines of rich and powerful families (jiaji) as property of their master, both official Introduction xv and private courtesans had choices about their accessibility that was in varying degrees negotiable. From about the tenth century onward, the relationship between officials and courtesans was curiously both legitimized and crimi- nalized. During the Song dynasty (960– 1279), official courtesans entertained and performed at social gatherings, but officials could be demoted because of sexual liaisons with them.13 There are stories of courtesans who sacrificed themselves rather than own up to rumors of their intimate relationship with an official. Thus did the courtesan Yan Rui defend the official Tang Yuzheng: in stories that cast the famous Confucian philosopher Zhu Xi (1130– 1200) as the unforgiving and unsympathetic moralist, Yan Rui refused to implicate Tang, endured flogging, and earned the reputation of being a heroic “woman knight-errant” (xianü).14 At the same time, there were Song courtesans who married civil and military officials. One notable example was Liang Hongyu, who married Han Shizhong (1090– 1151) before he attained prominence as a military commander; she is remembered in miscellanies, fic- tion, and drama as the heroic woman who beat the war drum on the battlefield as the Song fought the Jurchens.15 Ming laws stipu- lated that officials who took courtesans as wives and concubines would be flogged and forced to separate from them, and strict sumptuary laws were supposed to apply to denizens of entertainment quarters. Yet various sources indicate that it was common practice for officials to take courtesans as concubines. Throughout the Qing there were periodic decrees prohibiting prostitution and forbidding liaisons between officials and courtesans. As in earlier periods, they were consistently ignored, although from the late eighteenth to the early nineteenth century prohibition seems to have encouraged elite men to patronize instead male actors and singers, who were de facto male courtesans referred to as “likely ladies” (xianggu).16 Enforced interdiction invited bold banter. Around 1796, the famous poet Yuan Mei (1716– 1798) sent poems to a governor protesting the prohibition decrees, and Zhao Yi xvi Introduction

(1727–1814), another well-known poet and scholar- official, lauded him as “the excellent monk protecting the Dharma of the pleasure lanes” ᒣᓧ䆧⌅ྭ⋉䮰, one who “specializes in rescuing armies of ladies in our all-too- human world” 㙁ᮁӪ䯃၈ᆀ䓽.17 The relationship between patron and courtesan encompasses many gradations of sexual, romantic, and intellectual intimacy. There was little social space for men and women not related by kin- ship to meet as equals in premodern China, although there were rare exceptions. Friendships between courtesans and the literati offer tantalizing glimpses into what seems to have been difficult to attain in the relationship between the sexes. The Tang courtesan poet Xue Tao (768–834?), for example, left behind social and occasional poems that implied her friendship with elite men. The late- Ming poet Wang Zhideng (1535–1612) and the courtesan- painter Ma Xianglan (1548–1604) were tied by mutual appreciation tinged with romantic attachment.18 Another late-Ming courtesan, Zhao Yanru, was said to have “shared the affection of brother and sister” with “famous gentlemen” in her old age.19 Literati who wrote prefaces or colophons for works by courtesans seem to have been privy to the latter’s anxieties and melancholy, implying their bond as soul mates. Despite pointed avoidance of or only veiled reference to their status as courtesans in such writings, there is also a keen sense that a courtesan’s literary and artistic accomplishments added to her allure. Friendship with elite men, especially as expressed through their tributes to a courtesan’s mastery of literati culture, was vital for her claim to be a “famous courtesan” (mingji). Such friendships supposedly took her to a more exalted sphere beyond mere sexual transaction; at the same time, these relationships were still often defined by sexual tension. In other words, literati accomplishments and friendship might promise a courtesan escape from the fate of commodification, yet they could also just mean that she had become a more prized commodity. Writings by and about late Ming courtesans are especially rich in evidence of intriguing ties of friendship with the literati. The Introduction xvii affinities that allow a courtesan to address herself or be addressed in male or gender- neutral terms like xiong (older kin) or di (younger kin) suggest deliberate avoidance of romantic and sexual innuen- does. Thus Dong Qichang (1555–1636) and Chen Jiru (1558–1639) address the courtesan Wang Wei as daoxiong (brother in the Way), Chen Liang calls Gu Mei (1619–1664) “Mei xiong,”20 Chen Zilong (1608–1647, jinshi 1637) refers to Liu Rushi as “Master Liu” in his preface to her first poetry collection, and Liu Rushi refers to herself as di in her letters to the rich Anhui merchant and literatus Wang Ruqian (1577–1655). 21 At the same time a longing for romance sometimes introduced instability into such friendships, and literary exchanges reveal the negotiation of expectations. Possible romance between courtesans and their clients has long captured the Chinese imagination. With arranged marriages, whereby husband and wife met only at their wedding, being the norm in premodern China, the pleasure quarters might well have been the only place where agency, tension, yearning, and uncertainty—the ingredients of romance— could come into play. Countless anecdotes, poems, songs, stories, novels, and plays trace the contours of the courtesan romance. The male protago- nist is usually a man of letters, not least because these accounts are often built around poems— his poems for and about a courtesan, or literary exchanges between him and a courtesan poet. From frank sensuality to tortuous longing, from mournful involutions to hedonistic revelry, from the celebration of a courtesan’s freedom to the clear-eyed depiction of her degradation, from themes of betrayal and abandonment to stories of improbable unions, from the romantic glorification of love to its ironic deflation, these writings encompass a great range of possibilities and include some of the best known works in various genres in the tradition. New art forms often first emerged or became popular in the pleasure quarters, even as courtesans were sometimes “trend setters” in sartorial fashions. Song lyrics in the tenth century, dramatic arias in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, vernacular songs and xviii Introduction kun opera in the sixteenth century, and the sentimental courtesan novel in the nineteenth century were all cultural innovations rooted in the pleasures and passions of the courtesans’ world.22 The relationship between the literatus and the courtesan was symbiotic. The lyricist Liu Yong’s (987–1053, jinshi 1034) fabled popularity among courtesans is a case in point. He spread their fame in his song lyrics, and by singing his compositions the courtesans confirmed Liu Yong’s reputation.23 We may surmise that to thus externalize and objectivize one’s feelings and fantasies— that is, have them sung by courtesans—could be a mode of self- affirmation for men of letters. Sun Qi’sAccounts of the Northern Ward (Beili zhi, 884) includes a story about a dying courtesan who invited poets to write dirges for her; one may presume that the grat- ification was mutual.24 We also have negative examples, whereby a literatus could exert power over a courtesan by mocking and defaming her.25 In the texts in this volume, the authors often include poems (sometimes their own) that spread a courtesan’s fame. At the same time, a courtesan’s most appealing trait could be her “appreciation of talent” (liancai), which means that men also sought and treasured her recognition. As collective object of desire, the courtesan defined the relationship between men. The poets Bai Juyi (722–846) and Yuan Zhen (779–831) both patronized the courtesan Linglong, who seemed to have served as a conduit for their feelings for each other. In Yuan Zhen’s words: “Do not send Linglong to sing my poems, / My poems are all words about parting from you” Ձ䚓⧢⫿ୡᡁ䂙, ᡁ䂙ཊᱟࡕੋ䂎.26 The Song courtesan Li Shishi is said to have inspired rivalry among her lovers, including Emperor Huizong (r. 1100– 1126) and the poet Zhou Bangyan (1056–1121). 27 Courte- sans functioned as gifts in a system of exchange based on patron- age and service. Tang poets like Liu Yuxi (772– 842) and Du Mu (803– ca. 853) received “family entertainers” from their superiors’ households as gifts in recognition of their poetic talents. It was not uncommon for scholar-officials to “present” courtesans or opera Introduction xix singers to their superiors to advance their careers. All the famous liaisons between literati and courtesans were collectively celebrated, especially in the Ming and Qing dynasties, for such a union would instantly become a poetic topic, especially among the man’s friends. Passion was validated through public display and reaf- firmed bonds among elite men. As we will see, Mao Xiang’s memoir of Dong Bai (1624–1651) was written in part to invite compositions from his friends. Mao also requested his friend Zhang Xun to paint scenes from Plum Shadows (MPJ 1:629– 30, 2:1113).28 Collected Writings of Kindred Spirits (Tongren ji, compiled 1673–ca. 1692), Mao Xiang’s anthology of writings by himself and his family members and friends, includes many pieces on Dong Bai. Major decisions in the relationship between Mao and Dong were made in front of his friends. At crucial junctures in their relationship, his friends facilitated their union in decisive ways. The civil service examination, from its institution in the sev- enth century, was a crucible determining various aspects of the relationship between courtesans and the literati. To become a scholar-official through the examination was the major, if not the only, goal available to most literati during the imperial period. The disappointment of failure (and possibly the prospect of few resources) led some to end their relationship with courtesans, as Yu Huai did with Meiniang and Mao Xiang did with Chen Yuanyuan and almost did with Dong Bai, as we will see in Plank Bridge and Plum Shadows. Success brought entitlement. During the Tang, the top candidates (the so-called “presented scholars” or jinshi) were fêted, courtesans in attendance, at Winding Brook (Qujiang). Sometimes success meant that the newly appointed jinshi would abandon a courtesan in pursuit of more eligible and advanta- geous unions, as in Jiang Fang’s “Huo Xiaoyu’s Story” (ninth c.), or it could give him the wherewithal to marry her, as in another Tang tale, Bai Xingjian’s (776– 826) “Li Wa’s Story.” Historians argue that the latter scenario was very unusual during the Tang, but anecdotal evidence suggests that it might have become more xx Introduction common in later periods. The late Ming (ca. late sixteenth–mid- seventeenth c.) was especially notable in its rich lore of courtesan- literatus romances, some of which resulted in marriages, such as the famous unions between Gu Mei and Gong Dingzi (1615– 1673, jinshi 1634) and between Liu Rushi and Qian Qianyi (1582–1664, tanhua 1610). In both cases the erstwhile courtesans became concubines but were treated like principal wives.29 The fact that the courtesans’ quarters and the examination hall faced each other in late Ming Nanjing (Jinling) meant that the relationships with courtesans often amount to “the outer chapter in the battle of letters.”30 Mao Xiang recalled in 1689 how fifty years earlier he had composed mental drafts of examination essays every night for a whole month when he was staying with the courtesan Li Shiniang.31 The literati’s abiding concern with the examination system must account for its refraction and reflection in the courtesans’ world. The idea of “flower cases”hua’an ( ) or “flower examination lists” (huabang) seems to have originated during the Song.32 By the mid- and late Ming it had become very popular to have courtesans compared to various flowers and to have them ranked like examination candidates in “civil” and “martial” categories, with evaluative poems appended to their names.33 Examples include Yang Shen’s (1488– 1559, zhuangyuan [top graduate] 1511) appraisal of Sichuan courtesans (Ranking Flowers by the River [Jianghua pinzao], 1556), Cao Dazhang’s (1521– 1575, jinshi 1553) writings about courtesans in Qinhuai (Classification of Qinhuai Ladies [Qinhuai shinü biao], Rankings for a Gathering of Immortals at the Lotus Ter- race [Liantai xianhui pin]), Pan Zhiheng’s (1556–1621) commen- dation of courtesans in Nanjing (Ranking of Jinling Courtesans [Jinling jipin], Record of the Bend [Quzhong zhi]), Shen Meng- huan’s Supreme Examples of Yangzhou Ladies (Guangling nüshi dianzui), and Binghua Meishi’s Ranking of Courtesans in the North- ern Capital (Yandu jipin).34 The Many Charms of Suzhou Beauties (Wu ji baimei, 1617 preface) by Wanyuzi (Zhou Zhibiao) and The Many Introduction xxi

Charms of Jinling Beauties (Jinling baimei, 1618 preface) by Weilinzi (Li Yunxiang) demonstrate how this genre is connected to contemporary literary taste and a flourishing print culture. In addition to evaluative poems in classical genres, The Many Charms of Suzhou Beauties includes vernacular songs, probably sung by courtesans.35 Feng Menglong added comments and a postscript to The Many Charms of Jinling Beauties and seems to have facilitated the pro- duction of both works through his publication networks.36 We find an account of a public evaluation of courtesans in Plank Bridge. The practice continued throughout the Qing and even gained momentum with late-nineteenth- century journalism. The late- Qing novelist Li Boyuan (1867– 1906) instituted “flower examination lists” nominated and elected by readers to boost the sale of Entertainment News (Youxi bao), which he founded in 1896.37 The game outlasted the civil service examination itself, which was abolished in 1905. (The last newspaper-sponsored “flower examination list” dated to 1909, although “flower contests” in other forms lasted until 1920.) For countless aspiring scholars in late-imperial China, the examination system was a Kafkaesque machine that respected neither talent nor industry. For those who failed, the right to evaluate must have seemed a kind of compensatory jus- tice. For the successful candidates, the “flower lists” reproduced and continued their glory. The courtesans’ world was a malleable alternative reality. As with the real examination system, however, stories about unjust and arbitrary flower rankings abound.38 The language of connoisseurship in the “flower examination list” and the literature “appraising courtesans” (pinji) is symptom- atic of deeper ambiguities. Courtesans are lauded for their talents and beauty, yet at the same time they are treated as mere objects affording pleasure for their patrons. Their favors could be pur- chased, yet they are routinely praised as unattainable immortals (xian) and goddesses (shennü). Their trade by definition made them “unchaste,” yet many stories extol their fierce loyalty. The lore of courtesans, especially in the late Ming, celebrates the passionate, xxii Introduction unconventional, and independent spirit that defies prescribed roles and sometimes even gender boundaries.39 In the midst of preva- lent illiteracy, courtesans were customarily honored, beginning with Xue Tao, as “collators of texts” (jiaoshu), and many courtesans were noted poets. Gender roles were well defined in traditional China, but courtesans sometimes defied them by martial feats (e.g., the horse-riding Xue Susu [1598–1637]), 40 military interests (e.g., the Ming loyalist Liu Rushi), extensive travels (e.g., Wang Wei), cross dressing (Liu Rushi), consorting with men as friends or their intellectual equals (implicit in many of Yu Huai’s por- traits), or boldly pursuing union with their lovers (e.g., Dong Bai, Chen Yuanyuan). Caution is in order, of course, lest we over- romanticize. One well-known vernacular tale from the sixteenth century is the love story between an oil peddler and a famous courtesan. At one point the latter is humiliated as a common pros- titute by a man she spurns and is left to fend for herself by the wayside, with her shoes and foot-binding cloth removed.41 Zhang Dai (1597–1679), who eulogized ethereal and refined courtesans like Zhu Chusheng and Wang Yuesheng,42 also dwelled on their lesser counterparts in Yangzhou: “Numbering as many as five or six hundred, these vulgar courtesans come out of the alleys every day at dusk. Bathed, adorned, and perfumed, they linger and mill around teahouses and wine shops, doing so- called ‘sentry-duty at the passes.’ . . . When one of them sees a plausible candidate, she will draw close and drag him away. But the said courtesan will also suddenly know her place and respectfully let the client go first, while she follows him with slow steps.” Those left behind would sometimes sing, banter, or feign loud merriment to pass the time and hide their misery, “but their words and laughter gradually begin to sound pathetic and gloomy. When night deepens, they have no choice but to slink away in the dark stealthily like ghosts. When they see their old madam, they may have to endure hunger and flogging for all we know.”43 The texts in this volume describe an opposite world. The issue is not, however, a simple either-or choice Introduction xxiii between a glamorous aura and a sordid reality. There are many gradations and nuances in the spectrum, and the romanticism and heroism in these texts are often convincing. However, we should recognize that the sense of freedom, independence, and splendor is all the more treasured and celebrated precisely because it is recognized as a precariously sustained, carefully wrought, and passion- ately defended illusion, especially when the political turmoil of the Ming- Qing transition fuses memories of courtesans with lamenta- tion for the fall of the Ming dynasty and nostalgia for the romantic and aesthetic values of late Ming culture.

WRITING ABOUT COURTESANS

Starting with Cui Lingqin’s Accounts of the Bureau of Music Instruc- tion (Jiaofang ji, ninth c.) and Sun Qi’s Accounts of the Northern Ward, and especially from the mid- sixteenth century onward, we have a steady stream of works devoted to courtesans. These include the aforementioned works offering evaluations and praise of courtesans as well as guidebooks detailing the lore of the pleasure quarters and its codes of conduct, such as Elegant Expressions from the Blue Tower (Qinglou yunyu, 1616) compiled by Zhu Yuanji and Zhang Mengzheng.44 Mei Dingzuo’s (1553–1619) Records of Lotus in Mud (Qingni lianhua ji) tells stories of virtuous courtesans in Chinese history, and Pan Zhiheng devotes long sections of his Long History (Gen shi) and Miscellanies of Luanxiao (Luanxiao xiaopin) to courtesans and his relationships with them. Ranking of Flowers (Pin hua jian, early seventeenth c.) is the earliest extant anthology of writings on courtesans.45 Mao Xiang’s Plum Shadows, however, is a radical departure from this tradition. It unfolds as profoundly personal memories tracing Mao’s relationship with the courtesan Dong Bai over twelve years, from their fleeting encounter in 1639 till Dong’s death at age twenty- eight in 1651. Although there is a long tradition of xxiv Introduction elegiac poetry and biographical writings, Mao Xiang’s memoir is an unprecedented attempt to bring the minutiae of daily life and the frank avowal of emotions to the commemoration of a beloved woman. Portrayed as withdrawn and frail, Dong nevertheless actively pursued union with the initially reluctant Mao Xiang and, after overcoming many obstacles, became his concubine in 1642. Two years later, the Ming dynasty collapsed. They endured great hardships during the turmoil of the Ming- Qing dynastic transition. Mao gave a vivid account of their peregrinations and suffer- ings, paying mournful tribute to Dong’s strength, resourcefulness, and selfless devotion to him and his family. In other words, although Mao disclaims any explicit political agenda, the love story of Dong and Mao comes to be conflated with a higher moral-political purpose. It is as if Dong’s moral exemplarity vindicates the romantic- aesthetic values that form the basis of their initial bond. Plum Shadows follows a broadly chronological arc, but fragmentation, lyricism, and the aesthetic organization of experience hold sway. The compartmentalization of memories can be especially startling if we reconstruct all the events chronologically: Mao and Dong seem to have enjoyed the pleasures of travels; reveled in the connoisseurship of tea, incense, and flowers; and pursued arcane scholarly labors in the shadow of dynastic collapse or even while suffering dislocation in the midst of political turmoil. To the modern reader Mao Xiang may come across as a self- ish, inconstant, and cowardly lover; his self-perception and self- presentation seem to be that he set the right priorities by placing filial piety and devotion to his family and lineage above private passion. Contemporary public opinion might well have been on his side. Despite social acceptance of dalliances with courtesans, critiques of potential excesses abound. Mao’s friend and fellow Revival Society member Wei Xuelian (1608–1644, jinshi 1643) initially disapproved of his relationship with Dong.46 The scholar- official Huang Daozhou (1585–1646) sent a poem entitled “Sum- moning Liu’s Soul” (Liu zhao) to his disciple, Mao Xiang’s sworn Introduction xxv brother Liu Lüding (1597–1645), to urge him to leave the world of pleasure quarters (QMZ 5:593–94). The scholar and thinker Huang Zongxi (1610– 695) criticized Hou Fangyu (1618– 1655), a good friend of Mao Xiang and Yu Huai, for drinking with courtesans in 1639 when his father was in prison. When a friend defended Hou as one who could not bear solitude, Huang replied, “If a person cannot bear solitude, where would he not descend to?”47 In Huang’s view, consorting with courtesans when moral obligations beckon was indefensible. Mao Xiang was born in 1611 to a distinguished scholar- official family in Rugao (Jiangsu) that traced its ancestry to a Mongol prince. He was a prolific writer. Aside from the aforementioned anthology (Collected Writings of Kindred Spirits), he left behind collections of his prose and poetry. Despite early success in passing the lowest level of the civil service examination and a reputation for literary precocity, Mao attained only a place on the supplementary list for provincial graduates in 1642. He was a staunch member of the Revival Society (Fu she). Established in 1629, it consisted of a late Ming group of scholars, officials, and literati committed to purifying politics and reinvigorating literature.48 Repeated attempts to take the examination meant many sojourns in Nanjing, where fervent literary and political discussions often took place on the painted boats of Qinhuai in the company of courtesans. Political idealism, romantic passion, engagement with contemporary crisis, and pursuit of pleasure seem to have been inextricably intertwined. After the fall of the Ming, Mao did not serve under the Qing government. Some have suggested that he might have been covertly involved in anti-Qing resistance in the 1650s, but the inference is based on oblique references.49 In the aftermath of Qing conquest, to become a loyalist (literally, “remnant subject” or subject of a bygone regime) who “refused to serve two dynasties” was to take a path widely recognized as honorable. Unlike loyalists who embraced ascetic withdrawal from the new order, however, Mao xxvi Introduction retained a lifestyle of relative opulence and sometimes socialized with Qing officials. Despite suffering losses during the dynastic transition, the Mao family retained enough of its wealth to build a garden estate, the Painted- in-Water Garden (Shuihui yuan), in the 1650s. Mao offered refuge to his loyalist friends and their descendants, hosting literary gatherings and theatrical perfor- mances that were often suffused with mournful nostalgia.50 The family’s financial situation eventually deteriorated considerably, in part because of a family feud, and by the late 1670s Mao Xiang was making a living by selling his calligraphy. Even then, he was actively involved in charity efforts to ameliorate the effects of fam- ine in his hometown. Dong Bai was one of the courtesans whom Yu Huai wrote about in Plank Bridge, the second work included in this volume. Indeed, a number of characters appear in both books besides Dong Bai and Mao Xiang: these include Gu Mei, Gong Dingzi, Li Daniang, Sha Cai, Wei Xuelian, Hou Fangyu, Fang Yizhi (1611– 1671, jinshi 1640), Qian Qianyi, Wu Qi (1619–1694), and Zheng Yuanxun (1604–1645). Yu Huai and Mao Xiang were good friends and had much in common: both failed in the examination system despite their great talent, both belonged to the same literary cir- cles in Jiangnan, both were actively involved in the Revival Soci- ety, and both lived as Ming loyalists after the fall of the Ming, combining covert political engagement with a lifestyle that did not eschew sensuality and refinement.51 For all that, the logic and organization of the two works are different. Mao Xiang focuses on one courtesan who became his concubine, while Yu Huai offers a series of anecdotes and memories about twenty-seven courtesans. Mao Xiang implicitly defends the continuity of their former lifestyles, but Yu Huai emphasizes rupture. Mao seems to want to impose orthodox moral and social order on romantic sentiments and political chaos, even while aestheticizing that order, whereas Yu proposes an order that transcends conventional boundaries as Introduction xxvii it emerges from the vagaries of memory. Both can sound by turns boastful and defensive about their participation in the world of courtesans, but Mao is more consistently self- righteous about his choices. Unlike Plum Shadows, Plank Bridge distinctly evokes the aforementioned tradition of writing about courtesans. Works written in the shadow of dynastic collapse to preserve the memories of cities at the height of their glory, including memories of their entertainment and pleasure quarters, such as Meng Yuanlao’s (twelfth c.) Record of Dreams of Splendor of the Eastern Capital (Dongjing menghua lu) and Wu Zimu’s (late thirteenth c.) Record of a Millet Dream (Meng liang lu), also inform its sensibility.52 Plank Bridge draws upon the style and narrative modes of those earlier works, but it bears the distinct imprint of its era. Yu Huai was born in 1616 in Putian (Fujian), but at a young age he moved to Jinling with his parents and never returned to his hometown. In 1669 he moved to Suzhou; he died there in 1696. He had a wide circle of friends and acquaintances, among them many famous men of letters. In their extant writings we find Yu Huai praised as a young man of extraordinary talent and promise and, with advancing years, a person of wide interests and deep political engagement. He served as the secretary of Fan Jingwen (1587– 1644), a former minister of war, from 1640 to 1644. (To become a secretary and unofficial advisor of officials was a common path for the literati who could not enter officialdom through success in the examination.) He did not advance beyond the lowest degree in the civil service examination and alluded to his failure in the 1642 provincial examination in Plank Bridge. Some scholars suggest that his peregrinations in the Yangzi area from the mid- 1640s to the late 1660s were tied to anti-Qing resistance, although the evidence is not conclusive.53 Yu Huai’s extant cor- pus, a mere fraction of what he wrote, includes many poems of political lament, and he made a point of not using the reign titles xxviii Introduction of Qing emperors, but there are no direct references to resistance. Both fellow loyalists and Qing officials feature prominently in Yu’s literary exchanges. Plank Bridge is the only work by Yu Huai that had wide circu- lation during the Qing dynasty.54 Yu wrote Plank Bridge in 1694, fifty years after the fall of the Ming. Eight centuries earlier, Sun Qi wrote Accounts of the North Ward in the aftermath of the devas- tating Huang Chao Rebellion (880) and implied that his “forgot- ten stories of an era of peace” offer a warning on how “things going to one extreme must end in reversal.” Yu Huai also referred to his book as a warning against sensual indulgence, but compared to Sun Qi’s his tone is much more personal and frankly nostalgic. Yu mixes recollections of the pleasure quarters along the Qinhuai River in Nanjing with reported anecdotes about courtesans and their clients. He claims to use these memories to sum up “what is bound up with the rise and decline of an era and the melancholy reflections over all those years.” Yu Huai’s deep nostalgia for late Ming courtesan culture bears the toll of personal loss and national calamity: mourning lost years and friends who are no more, he also uses his account of the destruction of the Qinhuai pleasure quarters to lament the fall of the Ming dynasty. Plank Bridge has played a decisive role in establishing the late Ming courtesan as a cultural ideal. Yu Huai chronicles the beauty, wit, and refined taste of these courtesans and their accomplishments as poets, painters, calligraphers, and musicians. He empa- thizes with their plights and dilemmas, successes and failures, unconventionality and free spirit, and above all their role in the political struggles of the period. By paying tribute to the political convictions of these courtesans and their patrons, Yu Huai implies, like Mao Xiang, that heroism and moral integrity can accommo- date romantic liaisons; further, apparently self-indulgent behavior may actually mask or even encourage moral resolve. Again and again Yu Huai refers to the statesman Xie An (320–385) and the poet Du Mu as his models: these are figures deeply engaged with Introduction xxix political and military issues despite their aesthetic sensibility and romantic dalliances.55 Both Plank Bridge and Plum Shadows spawned many imita- tions during the Qing dynasty. Almost all Qing accounts of courtesan quarters evoke Plank Bridge and affect a melancholy tone in their prefaces; in the cases of works written in the aftermath of the Taiping Wars and during the late Qing dynastic crisis, their authors drew explicit parallels between confronting political turmoil and pursuing or remembering pleasures and passions. Plank Bridge was first reprinted and translated in 1772 in Japan and had significant reverberations in Japanese literature.56 Eighteenth- and nineteenth- century memoirs about wives and concubines fol- low the model of Plum Shadows.57 Chen Peizhi’s (1794–1826) Reminiscences of the House of Fragrant Orchids (Xiangwan lou yiyu) in particular contains many deliberate echoes of Plum Shadows. Chen’s memoir in turn became the basis of a play, The House of Fragrant Orchids (Xiangwan lou, 1825 preface) by Peng Jiannan. Shen Fu’s (1763–after 1809) Six Records of a Floating Life (Fusheng liuji) and Jiang Tan’s (ca. 1820–1862) Fragments of Memories Under the Autumn Lamp (Qiudeng suoyi) both bear the imprint of Plum Shadows.58 Wang Tao’s (1828–1897) Memoir of the Meizhu Convent (Meizhu an yiyu, ca. 1853) describing his unrealized romance with a young woman also evokes Mao Xiang’s work. Six Records contains a section on “The Delights of Leisure,” which reminds us of the passages on the art of living in Plum Shadows; these passages in turn evoke the Ming- Qing literature of connoisseurship. The emphasis on personal, private experiences and the definition of value beyond the fulfillment of familial and sociopolitical roles in these works have given them a new appeal since the early twenti- eth century. In the section “Two Famous Courtesans,” I have included stories and poems about Liu Rushi and Chen Yuanyuan. Liu was a poet who consorted with renowned men of letters and eventually became Qian Qianyi’s concubine. The great historian Chen Yinke xxx Introduction

(1890–1969) reconstructed details of her life, including her covert involvement in anti-Qing resistance, and claimed that she repre- sents “the independence of spirit and freedom of thought of our people.” Liu Rushi was not from Qinhuai, hence her exclusion from Yu Huai’s memoir. Chen Yuanyuan was from nearby Suzhou and was active in Nanjing; Yu could have included her but chose not to, perhaps for political reasons.59 Chen Yuanyuan plays a significant role inPlum Shadows, but the dramatic story of her supposed role in the fall of the Ming dynasty is told in other materials. Both Liu and Chen embody the intersection of romantic and political passions that are also central to Plum Shadows and Plank Bridge and account for their abiding appeal.

NOTE ON TRANSLATION

It was common for elite men and women, as well as courtesans, to have sobriquets and style names (zi, hao). Men can also be desig- nated by their official titles, the location where they served, their place of provenance, titles of their collections, or their posthumous honorifics. A person’s given name ming( ) is rarely used in conversation and in writing, except in formal biographies. For the sake of clarity, I have mostly unified nomenclature under given names. I have adhered to the traditional Chinese way of calculating age, whereby a person is one year old at birth. Places often have mul- tiple names—for example, Nanjing is also called Jinling, Moling, Baimen, Baixia, and the Stone City. I have modernized and unified place names in some cases. In the Chinese lunar calendar, the beginning of the first month usually comes sometime in late Janu- ary or in February. For example, the Chongzhen emperor (r. 1627– 1644) killed himself on the nineteenth day of the third month in 1644, and that was April 25 in the Gregorian calendar. I have ren- dered cun (varying through history from 2.25 to 3.2 cm.) and chi (10 cun) as “inch” and “foot,” although the Chinese measurement Introduction xxxi units are smaller. One li is about a third of a mile. A tael and a catty (16 taels) weigh a little more than an ounce and a pound. The qin (koto in Japanese), a horizontal string instrument, is translated as “zither,” while pipa, which resembles a lute, is left in translitera- tion. Lan, translated as “orchid” here, bears little resemblance to the familiar ornamental plants with that name; these herbal plants can grow wild and have long narrow leaves and smaller, more fragrant flowers (see figs. 2.1, 2.2). I have added Chinese characters for poems and titles of poems in the notes and in the supplementary materials. I have not done so for the poems in Plum Shadows and Plank Bridge because the original texts are easy to find.