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East Asian History NUMBER 9 . JUNE 1995 THE CONTINUATION OF Papers on Far Eastern History Institute of Advanced Studies Australian National University Editor Geremie R. Barme Assistant Editor Helen Lo Editorial Board Mark Elvin (Convenor) John Clark Andrew Fraser Helen Hardacre Colin Jeffcott W. J. F. Jenner Lo Hui-min Gavan McCormack David Marr Tessa Morris-Suzuki Michael Underdown Business Manager Marion Weeks Production Helen Lo Design Helen Lo; Maureen MacKenzie (Em Squared Typographic Design) Printed by Goanna Print, Fyshwick, ACT This is the ninth issue of East Asian History in the series previously entitled Papers on Far Eastern History. The journal is published twice a year. Contributions to The Editor, East Asian History Division of Pacific & Asian History, Research School of Pacific & Asian Studies Australian National University, Canberra ACT 0200, Australia Phone +61 6 249 3140 Fax +61 6 249 5525 Subscription Enquiries Subscription Manager, East Asian History, at the above address Annual Subscription Australia A$45 Overseas US$45 (for two issues) iii CONTENTS 1 A Common People's Literature: Popular Fiction and Social Change in Republican Shanghai Ng Mausang (with an accompanying essay by Geremie R. Barme and a short translation by jonathan Hutt) 23 Seven Dialogues from the Zhuangzi jean Franr;:ois Billeter-translated by Mark Elvin 47 The Thin Horses of Yangzhou Wei Minghua-translated and introduced by Antonia Finnane 67 Ku Hung-ming: Homecoming (2) Lo Hui-min 97 West Meets East: Rewi Alley and Changing Attitudes towards Homosexuality in China Anne-Marie Brady 121 Liberation and Light: the Language of Opposition in Imperial Japan Ve ra Mackie iv Cover calligraphy Yan Zhenqing rou�J�n, Tang calligrapher and statesman Cover picture From the photograph-album of Rewi Alley: "After tiffin, Henli, August 1930," Kathleen Wright Collection, Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand THE THIN HORSES OF YANGZHOU WeiMinghua WB�� Translated and introduced by Antonia Finnane INTRODUCTION Wei Minghua, a teacher at the Yangzhou College of Culture and the Arts, has 1 Wei Minghua, Yangzhou wenhua tanpian devoted his scholarly life largely to the study of Yangzhou culture. The more [Remarks on Yangzh ou culturel (Beijing: significant of his many essays on this subject have recently been compiled Sanlian Shudian, 1994), pp.1 50 -67. The versi on presented here in translati on was in a volume published by Joint Publishers:1 included in that volume is a given to me in manuscript form by th e slightly revised version of the article translated here. The title, "The Thin auth or in 199 2. An earlier an d much shorter Horses ofYangzhou," is not self-explanatory. 'Thin horses' Cshouma I�L�Dwas versi on appeared in a lea ding Chinese literary journal in 1983: Wei Minghua, "Yangzh ou a term used to denote girls reared specifically for the purpose of supplying sh ouma" [The thin horses of Yang zhoul, Yangzhou's market in concubines. The term came to be indissolubly Dushu 3 (1983): 103-7. I wish to thank connected with Yangzhou. Geremie Ba rm e for pr oviding me with a In this article, Wei Minghua considers the origins of the gendered stereo­ copy of th is essay. typing of Yangzhou, his native place. Over a thousand years ago, Yangzhou 2 This oft-cite d poem is translated in full in A. C. Graham, Poems of the late Tang was a great and prosperous place, a centre of merchant wealth and high (Harm on dsw orth, Mddl x: Penguin Books, culture, much celebrated in literature and later in legend as well. At this time, 1965), p. l23. during the golden years of the Tang dynasty, the central literary motif for 3 The trope has been traced in Wei Minghua, Yangzhou was established. It came from the pen of the poet Du Mu UtJ: "Xi Yangzh ou meng da shiren: Du Mu he who, in the midst of a life crisis, repented the years he had spent indulging tade qiannian fe ngliu meng" [Analysing the Dream of Yangzh ou: the great poet Du Mu in the pleasures of the flesh: and his th ou sand-year er otic dreaml, in Wei Ten years and I woke from my dream of Yangzhou, Minghua , Yangzhou wenhua tan pian, pp. Known only for cavorting in the houses of pleasure2 109- 27. In later centuries, other 'dreams of Yangzhou' were written which drew directly on Du Mu's imagery, encapsulating the experience of Yangzhou as that of the hazy, pleasurable world of the bordello.3 Between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, the clustering of salt merchants in Yangzhou succeeded in recreating a semblance of the grand city of Tang times. One thousand years after Du Mu, the poet and artist Zheng Banqiao ��i&m 0693- 47 48 WEI MINGHUA • ANTONIA FINNANE 1765) "dreamt ofYangzhou, and then dreamt that Yangzhou Figure 1 was dreaming of [himJ." His verses make frequent reference Woodcut of a courtesan of the Qing period, by Gu to prostitutes in connection with his Yangzhou days 4 YunchenliJi�E2.. Courtesans, like the 'thin horses', The appearance of typical Yangzhou characters in geo­ were trained in the fine arts. In eighteenth-century graphical works and novels helped reinforce the images Yangzhou, recruitment to at least one famous house developed within poetry. On the male side these characters of courtesans was based on the talents of the girls were salt merchants, whose wealth provided the basis for rather than on their appearance. See Li Dou, Yangzholl huafang III [Chronicle of the painted Yangzhou's flowering in the late-imperial period; on the barques of YangzhouJ (J 796; reprint ed., Taiwan: female side they were 'thin horses', singsong girls or Xuehai Chubanshe, 1969), 9.16b (Source: Wei common whores, all prostitutes of one kind or another. The Minghua, Yangzholl wenhua tanpian, frontispiece) merchants are usually characterized as either vulgar or decadent, fond of "music, women, horses and dogs, " as the Chinese expression has it-at once miserly and extrava­ gant, canny and uncouth. The prostitutes are not represented with quite the same contumely as the merchants. It would seem fair to compare them with the gardens and teahouses for which Yangzhou was also famous. They summoned up an image of the city as a place of beauty and pleasure, the poignancy of their situation simultaneously allowing the poetic imagination to range freely from eros to pathos. 'Thin horses', as Wei Minghua shows, were very particularly associated with I I Yangzhou, and his article identifies the major texts that j described the circumstances of these unfortunate girls. I I This highly gendered image ofYangzhou, developed in i a literary context in which southern writings and southern I literati were dominant, can be understood partly as a . I representation of the exotic. Yangzhou, both close to the !: � • south yet far from it, was felt to be different from the cities 1. • of Jiangnan. In Dream of Red ManSions, the heroine Lin t' • Daiyu returns to Nanjing from Yangzhou, a distance of � around a hundred kilometres, and is beseiged with ques­ tions by Baoyu who asks of her: "What places of historical interest were there in Yangzhou? What were its inhabitants like? What were its local customs?'" 4 See Anthony Cheung and Paul Gurofsky, Yangzhou was also a place of economic opportunity. Men crossed the eds an d trans., Cheng Pan-ch'iao: selected river to find a job there when they could not make ends meet back home. poems, calligraphy, paintings and seal There was an old saying dating from a time when the word Yangzhou actually engravings (Hong Kong: Joint Publishing Co., 1987), pp.46-8, 66, 73- 5. applied to a vast area of south-east China: "If girding yourself with cash is , Cao Xueq in, Thestory of the stone. Volume 1: The golden days, trans!' Dav id Ha wkes 6 Yi Junzuo, Xianhua Yangzhou [Idle talk on 7 Feng Zikai, "Yang zhou meng" [The dream (Harmondsworth, Mddlx: Penguin Bo oks, Yangzhoul (Shangha i: Zh onghua Shuju, 1934). of Yangzhoul, cite d in We i Minghua, "Analys­ 1973), p.396. Fo r a discuss ion of the case see Anton ia ing the Dream of Yangzhou," pp .121-2. Finnane, "A place in the nation: Yangzhou and the 'i dle talk' controversy of 1934," Journal of Asian Studies 53 4 (Nov. 1994 ) 1150-74 . THE THIN HORSES OF YANGZHOU 49 your aim, Fly to Yangzhou on the back of the crane." The imagined availa­ bility of the prostitute perhaps summed up the idea of access to power and Figure 2 wealth in Yangzhou while the word 'Yangzhou' itself came to be equated Zheng Xie (Banqiao) ��� cW;jiD, with the image of beautiful women with extremely small feet. one of the 'eight eccentric' anists of There was more to this image of the city than simply the power of a Yangzhou CYangzhou baguai metaphor. In the late-imperial period the city's population included a consid­ HUHJ\ t�D.A native of Xinghua district, which lay within Yangzhou erable number of sojourners who either sought out occasional sexual prefecture, Zheng took advantage of partners or actually set up second homes there. Such practices were common the flourishing an market in enough throughout China at the time. In Yangzhou, probably the wealthiest Yangzhou to retire from offiCialdom city in eighteenth-century China, young girls were exploited by profiteers to and make his living through the sale the full. Given the presence in Yangzhou of so many prosperous merchants, of paintings, mostly in the bamboo genre (Source: Zheng Banqiao ji the number of extant texts making reference to 'thin horses' in particular or [Collected works ofZheng Banqiao] prostitutes in general should come as no surprise.

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