Modern China2014, Vol. 40(4) 351 –392

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Article

Whorish Representation: Pornography, Media, and Modernity in Fin-de-siècle Beijing

Y. Yvon Wang1

AbstractUsing materials from police reports to song chapbooks, this article traces the experience of and discourse about sexually explicit media in late Qing and early Republican Beijing. Although explicit representations of sex and efforts to control them had a long history in China, two new forces converged in this period: ideas about reproductive bodies and technologies of reproducing information. These factors injected unprecedented volatility into the parameters of legitimate sexual representation, allowing them to be truly and widely contested for the first time. Existing Euro-American scholarship takes both the “invention of pornography” and the rise of modernity as peculiarly Western phenomena. Fin-de-siècle Beijing presents a corrective case: the fusion of mass-circulated media and sexuality not only casts a telling light on China in the twentieth century but has also embedded Chinese experiences ever more tightly in a complex ongoing saga of global modernities.

Keywordspornography, Beijing, print culture, Beijing Municipal Police, popular music, sexuality

1Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA

Corresponding Author:Y. Yvon Wang, History Department, Stanford University, 450 Serra Mall, Building 200, Stanford, CA 94305-2024, USA. Email: yiwenw@stanford.edu

499732 MCX40410.1177/0097700413499732Modern ChinaWangresearch-article2013

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China has a venerable tradition of state and secular attempts to regulate erotic life. Since the early imperial period, sex out of place has been held as a fun-damental threat to civilized society, political stability, and the very equilib-rium of the cosmos. Conversely, proper conjugal relations—as part of the Confucian interpellation of family in statecraft—and carefully practiced intercourse according to medical principles were considered vital to the health of the individual as well as the state (Goldin, 2002). The world’s oldest print tradition and an even older history of depicting sex made representation, as well as action, a subject of concern (Hinrichs, 2001). Yin 淫, “lewd” or “licentious,” connoting a natural phenomenon made beyond the pale by excess, came to be the most common label for books, images, as well as activities deemed to be sexually out of bounds. Phrases like shangfeng baisu 傷風敗俗 (“injuring and damaging customs”) and baihuai renxin 敗壞人心 (“corrupting people’s hearts”) were also common in official denunciations of unacceptably erotic representations.

Pornographic Turns

By the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Chinese society was undergoing dramatic changes in commerce, print technology, gender roles, and intellec-tual life (Ko, 1994; Brook, 1999). As in roughly contemporary Europe, unprecedented social mobility and the expansion of print heightened tensions over defining which among myriad diversifying media commodities should be counted as illicit, a direct “response to the perceived menace of the democ-ratization of culture” (Hunt, 1993: 13; Hegel, 1998). For instance, late Ming literati commentaries on the famously libidinous xiaoshuo 小說 Plum in the Golden Vase (Jin ping mei 金瓶梅) only began to invoke the book’s aesthetic and ethical worth “against immoral readings and readers” when the hand-copied, privately circulated manuscript became available to wider audiences through woodblock prints (Ding, 2002: xi–xii, xvii–xviii).1 Manchu rulers of the Qing, expanding into vast new territories and confronting the sustained growth of socioeconomic mobility, redoubled official efforts to shore up “good customs” (Sommer, 2000: 5–15) so energetically that the entire period has been dubbed “puritanical” (van Gulik, 2003).

This censorious label implies, in spite of easily marshaled counterevi-dence, that Qing prudery demolished an untrammeled ars erotica paradise, which leads to a critical question: Why has there been so little scholarly attention to the long history of explicit sexual representations and their con-trol in China? By contrast, historians of Europe and the United States have given erotic media, as material artifact and contested ideological category, a major role in the development of the West. According to this body

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of scholarship, sexual depictions were essentially linked to early modern revolutions in technology, gender relations, and politics (Hunt, 1993; Darnton, 1995).2 Furthermore, they were key to the reification of the central-ity of sex to personal identity during nineteenth- and early twentieth-century industrial and imperial expansion (Foucault, 1980; Horowitz, 2002; Marcus, 2009). In this period, the word “pornography” was coined: progeny of new technologies of reproducing information and new ideas about reproducing bodies, pornography was from its inception “an argument, not a thing,” an inherently controversial attempt to isolate certain sexual expressions as illicit (Kendrick, 1996: 31).

Explicit sexual media have been so little studied in China for the same reason that the Qing has been dismissed as “puritanical.” Namely, it is the “tediously familiar,” “either/or, same/different” dilemma of writing Chinese history (Clunas, 2012: 63). Positing a timeless, unfettered erotic tradition before the Manchu accession assumes China’s incommensurability with the European experience of church repression before the manufacture of “sexual-ity” and the unyielding categories of scientia sexualis after (Foucault, 1980; Furth, 1994). Persistent “delusions of grandeur and universality” (Rocha, 2011: 338) may lead us to regard modernity as the unique product of a sup-posedly monolithic West. But, in fact, pornography—volatile fusion of sex, representation, and power linking past to present—was not “an especially Western idea” (Hunt, 1993: 10), but an important global pattern of which China was part.3

Though some areas of the world adopted this pattern earlier than else-where, their precedence was slight and indecisive. At the turn of the twentieth century, in Beijing as in Tokyo and New York City, technologies capable of conveying new visions of politics, personhood, and proper sex with unprec-edented speed and scope were creating a worldwide field of confrontation between those who sought to control illicit erotic media and those who resisted that control.4 The long Chinese history of defining “lewdness” and regulating “custom” cast in particularly striking relief how pornography emerged as an accretion more than any simple displacement of old by new. Modern information technology and notions of sexuality shaped “pornogra-phy” by drafting new combatants and terms of engagement into the battle over erotic legality and licitness even as the past, having contoured the terri-tory in dispute, never quite faded away.

This article focuses on the markets for explicit sexual depiction in Beijing between empire and Republic as a case study of the ascendancy of pornogra-phy, a global phenomenon, over China’s indigenous yin.

Although Beijing was not the only city in the empire to host Manchu nobility and stipend-dependent Bannermen, nor the only one to attract

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sojourners of all sorts, it differed from other Chinese urban centers. Its highly skewed sex ratio—174 men for every 100 women in 1917 (Gamble, 1921: 99)—and the disproportionately large population younger than 40 were symptoms of long-term instability by which unwed, socially unmoored men became “bare sticks,” simultaneously villain and victim in discourse and daily life (Kuhn, 1990; Sommer, 2000: 12–15). It was never made a treaty port; thus the timeline and texture of Beijing’s nineteenth century deviated considerably from those of towns that were (Naquin, 2000: 678). Beijing also remained at least the nominal seat of national power across the 1911 transi-tion, which led to the city’s early establishment of modern law enforcement and the accrual of voluminous police archives.5 A third, crucial aspect was the remaking of the city into Old Peking. Even in the Qing, Beijing began to be transformed through guidebooks and essay collections into the reliquary of a quintessentially Chinese past, and that transformation has continued to be performed with unparalleled self-consciousness and persistence (Naquin, 2000: 679–708; Dong, 2003). Moreover, Old Peking was tinged with an erotic color by the city’s well-known courtesan culture, which included cross-dressing boy opera stars as well as female prostitutes (Goldman, 2012: 17–59). In short, Beijing at the fin-de-siècle, building itself upon “invented tradition,” uniquely represented the collisions between continuity and turbu-lent change that have shaped China in the century since, as they were articu-lated through sex and media—and sex in the media (Hobsbawm and Ranger, 1992; Dong, 2003: 16–17).

Below, I use the term “illegality” as framed by the capital’s police to sketch an initial portrait of how “pornography” fitfully emerged from the tradition of censuring yin during this transformative period in Beijing. Through representative cases, I suggest answers to broader questions: What kind of subject matter was deemed illicit in the city across the turn of the twentieth century? What did these items look like, who sold them, and where could they be bought? Finally, how did changes in content and form set in motion new contests over the very authority to define legitimacy?

Wicked Words

In August 1914, the Beijing and Tianjin Daily 京津日報 carried “Licentious Books Ought to Be Banned,” a short item denouncing the “many lyric book stalls with numerous types of licentious books like The Marvelous Joy of Intercourse between the Sexes (男女交合興妙) and The Candlewick Monk (燈草和尚)” near Xizhushikou 西珠市口, a major commercial crossroads in Beijing’s bustling Outer City between the Qianmen gate 前門 and the Temple of Heaven (BJMA, 1914: 181-019-07095). “We wonder if something should

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be done about these?” the bulletin asked rhetorically. “Is their existence even known?” We can only speculate about the latter, but police affirmed the for-mer by sending officers to the neighborhood’s night market and arresting three men at their stalls.

All were from nearby counties in Hebei, and ranged in age from 25 to 44. Their stock did not contain the exact titles named in the newspaper exposé, but police did find late Ming fiction that was, like The Candlewick Monk, infamous for their explicit portrayals of sex. Among these were two copies of The Biography of a Foolish Woman 痴婆子傳 and eight of The Pearl-Sewn Shirt 珍珠衫.6 Also discovered were titles invoking “the sexes” 男女: one volume of A Treatise on the Secret Organs of the Sexes 男女秘器談 and a dozen of A Discussion of Intercourse between the Sexes 男女交合論. In the end, 47 books were destroyed.

That might seem an impressive quantity, but these men were no smut tycoons. One testified that he had been out of work until an acquaintance from his native village let him take over the business. Another told interroga-tors that he had painstakingly hand-copied some of his books from stock at a printing shop; moreover, Beijing’s night markets, including the one where the men were arrested, were widely known for their cheap, “gray-market” goods (Gamble, 1921: 213). Finally, none of them could buy their way out of jail: for selling these “licentious books” 淫書, each member of the hapless trio received fifteen days’ detention in lieu of the fifteen-dollar fine specified in Article 31, Section 1 of the Police Ordinance 違警律.7

Only four days had elapsed from tipoff to sentencing. Yet this was far from an open-and-shut case. Let us begin with the seemingly conclusive citation of the Police Ordinance. In line with the late imperial regulatory vocabulary, Article 31-1 was listed under the heading of crimes “Damaging to Customs” 妨害風俗 (Dai, 1985: 15–24). However, this law targeted not licentious books, but “vagrants and loafers without honest employment,” and was typi-cally applied to urban indigents (Chen, 2012: 34–35). In fact, the only direct mention of yin or “licentiousness” in the 1908 Police Ordinance was a statute against “performing or singing lewd lyrics and operas” 唱演淫詞淫戲. To this the Beijing government’s Police Punishment Code 違警罰法 of 1915 added a rule against “enacting lascivious words or actions” 為狎褻之語言舉動 in public (Dai, 1985: 15–24, 76–86).8

Intriguingly, the vast majority of cases involving purveyors of explicit media that I have seen are terse, mentioning neither ordinance nor code. Most police scribes only jotted down the penalty to which a suspect was sentenced, and most punishments matched those stipulated for the most minor offenses against “custom”—a fine of between ten cents and five dollars or detention of between one and five days (Dai, 1985: 21). In one other exception to the

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pattern of statutory opacity, also based on a newspaper tip, the police cited the regulation against “merchants and industrialists operating unlawfully” 違章經營商工業 from an entirely different section of the ordinance to mete out five-dollar fines to five clerks and apprentices at various bookstalls in the Quanyechang market 勸業場 (BJMA, 1922: 181-019-35959).

Why, then, the specific citation and unusually severe fifteen-day sentence for the Xizhushikou peddlers? Burdened by myriad other duties and fre-quently inadequate human and financial resources, early Republican agents of the law in Beijing seem to have appealed to it against illicitly sexual media only sporadically, in cases of particular severity or potential bad press.9

And, though it drew the parameters of yin more precisely, even the Great Qing Code 大清律例 that had served as the law of the land until just four years before the Xizhushikou bust only contained one portion relevant to the censure of explicit media. This was a statute, inherited from the Ming, which condemned “producing wicked books and words” 造妖書妖言 (Xue, 1905).10 It contained two relevant sub-statutes, written into law at either end of the Kangxi emperor’s long reign. The first, attributed to a decree by Hongtaiji in 1636, equated the “printing, block-carving, and disseminating” of “words despicable, coarse, obscene, or rude” with a direct threat to social order; the second, from 1714, unequivocally identified “all yin words and xiaoshuo sold in shops, stores, and markets” 坊肆市賣一應淫詞小說 as targets for suppression. In addition to the code’s singling out of “wicked words” in print, the throne and central bureaucracy tried to stamp them out in performances. After the Kangxi emperor’s initial 1671 sanction on theaters and playhouses in Beijing’s Inner City, repeated exhortations through the Qing prohibited Bannermen and, more generally, all officials from performing or watching opera—though it proved so irresistible that the court itself patronized stars and contributed to the rise of new genres (Goldman, 2012: 70–76, 119–27, 134–41).

A much more specific clause against sexually explicit media was intro-duced in the Draft New Criminal Code of the Great Qing 大清新刑律草案, submitted to the court in 1907 by the committee tasked with preparing an entirely new criminal code as part of the New Policy reforms. By 1910, after slight modifications to the draft, Article 292, under Chapter 23—“Fornication and Bigamy” 奸非及重婚—stipulated a maximum fine of 50 dollars for “those who sell obscene books, pictures, or objects” 販賣猥褻之書畫物品, as well as those who, intending to do so, “produce, collect, or traffic them from foreign nations” 意圖販賣而製造或收藏或自外國販運 (FHAa, 1910: 03-7579-061).

The 1911 Revolution precluded the implementation of the New Criminal Code, but in 1912 it appeared, with only minor changes, as the Republic’s

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Provisional New Criminal Code 暫行新刑律. Article 292 would survive the Nanjing government’s accession in 1928 to persist in the Nationalists’ suc-cessive criminal codes until the present day (Xu, 2005). Yet I have found only two instances in which it was explicitly cited by early twentieth-century Beijing police: in one case, the suspect was to be tried in court because “sell-ing large quantities of licentious pictures and mirrors (淫畫鏡片) truly vio-lates the Criminal Code (實犯刑律)” (BJMA, 1919: 181-019-26247). In the other, police officials referred to the statute after arresting a street peddler with three books containing “words bordering on obscene” 詞近猥褻. Upon closer inspection, though, they were deemed to be merely “coarse and crude” 粗俚, and the man was released (BJMA, 1913: 181-019-03188). Again, it seems to have been the exceptionality of these cases that prompted specific citation of the law.

Though seldom seen in police records, the letter of both Qing and early Republican law indicated that depictions of sex commoditized through media technology was a primary target of prosecution, and that the variety most prominently singled out was the xiaoshuo. Of the plethora of late imperial fiction featuring descriptions of sex acts, Plum in the Golden Vase was per-haps most notorious, but its fantasies of polygamous hyper-sexuality and dire karmic retribution were not unique. Other common tropes, including voy-euristic maids, lewd monks, and lustful ladies, lent coherence to a genre that had come to epitomize the dangers of explicit sexual representation in the regulatory imagination (McMahon, 1995; Karasawa, 2007). Well into the Republic, Plum and works of fiction like it remained synonymous with explicit, potentially illicit texts: three-quarters of the books for which police arrested the three Xizhushikou night market vendors fell into this category. As late as 1944, a column discussing Rousseau’s Confessions and Frank Harris’s My Life and Loves, both deemed obscene in the contemporary United States, appeared under the headline “Foreign Plum in the Golden Vase” (Zhou, 1944).11

The Qing Code’s censure of “wicked words” included another popular textual genre that the Beijing police continued to condemn across the turn of the twentieth century: lyric books known as changben 唱本 or quben 曲本. Ci 詞, “word,” also denoted “verse” or “lyric”; lyric books bridged the sus-pect spheres of xiaoshuo and opera. Typically small, short, and cheap, they transcribed hundreds of variations on “drumsongs” 鼓曲, chants and tunes recited to the simple accompaniment of a drum and a bamboo clapper that flourished in regional performance art across China (Stevens, 1972: 13). Drumsongs had much content in common with xiaoshuo; as in fiction, many titles were well known to be sexually explicit. Book dealers catalogues openly marked these as “powder” 粉 or “spring” 春 (Zhang, 2000).12 While

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both genres were associated with erotic themes, it was recognized that not all xiaoshuo and lyric books contained them to an illegal extent: some, as we have seen, were merely tasteless (BJMA, 1913: 181-019-03186, 181-019-03188, and 181-019-03189).

What did certain xiaoshuo and lyric books actually talk about, then, that made them so “wicked”? In content, whether focusing on flirtation, seduc-tion, rape, or incest, late imperial Chinese depictions of sex hewed to conser-vative views of gender roles and sexual propriety while simultaneously subverting these notions.13 Young prostitutes warned lovers about dallying with other “fruitless flowers” only after the audience had been treated to the details of the girls’ defloration; in the drumsong “Missy Picks Spring Onions” and its variations, conventional morality and imperial law were invoked to be breached in a detailed seduction (FB 19F0400Z520; FSN AKUI4-063).

Paralleling opera, drumsongs also contained an inherently subversive sex-ual frisson as a performance art. Perceived as particularly dangerous to wom-en’s sexual integrity (Wang, 1981: 179), their threat intensified after legally enforced sex-segregation among performers and audiences in public shows gave way to mixed theaters after 1911. Moreover, the line between entertain-ers and sex workers had always been blurry: many female drumsingers who drew audiences by portraying desires thwarted and fulfilled onstage ended as concubines and low-end prostitutes after their fame waned (Cheng, 1996).

At the same time, xiaoshuo and lyric books consistently reflected a broadly premodern view of sex as organized in a “penetrative hierarchy,” wherein social status took precedence over physical difference in defining gender and sexual roles (Trumbach, 1989; Sommer, 2000: 162–65). In this paradigm, the phallus was always the protagonist in sex; correspondingly, both genres supplied abundant descriptions of turgid penises. But they also devoted substantial attention to the pleasure of the penetrated partner, marked in particular by vaginal secretions—“licentious water” 淫水. Ultimately, however, the ideal of utter female satisfaction fit into a cycle of production and consumption driven by men seeking out and profiting by vicarious thrills in texts about women’s bodies.14 And, by the organizing principles and bellicose metaphors of ancient esoteric discourse on sexual cultivation that in part shaped depictions of intercourse in xiaoshuo and lyric books, sex was a battle to defend against the loss of precious yang semen while plundering the yin feminine essence released by the female partner’s orgasm (Hinrichs, 2001; Goldin, 2002: 15).

Xiaoshuo also included graphic sexual detail at the lexical level by pep-pering passages with “fleshy tool” 肉具 and “cock” 屌. But anatomically specific vocabulary was not limited to fiction. Qing and early Republican rape cases hinged on a medical assessment of whether the victim’s vagina or

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anus had actually been penetrated by an assailant’s penis; to describe the outcome of this test, the authorities used technical terms like “portal of yin” 陰戶 and “object of yang” 陽物 (Sommer, 2000: 79–84; BJMA, 1913: 181-019- 01671). More commonly, literary depictions of intercourse relied on gauzy metaphors that probably served less as veils for the mechanics of sex than as a means to heighten their allure: “the butterfly plays in the plum flow-ers / like a smith’s bellows, huff-and-puff, darting in and out” (FB 19F0400Z693). Other images were less flowery. With the last of the “Eighteen Gropes” 十八摸, a well-known drumsong, the fondler found his partner’s genitals “thick and sticky to the touch of a hand / like rice gruel drunk by a bearded man” (FSN ADH-003).

Some of the lyric books and xiaoshuo the authorities condemned did not describe intercourse at all. Titles like the ditty “The Little Nun Flees the Mountain Temple” 小尼姑下山 were impugned for sympathetic portrayals of desire that merely hovered suggestively at the boundaries of marital sexual propriety and gender roles. Though the nun’s escape from monastic celibacy is the climax of the tale, her “transgressions are carefully contained”: in the end, she asks her parents to arrange a suitable marriage (Goldman, 2001: 76, 106). Even the trace of sexual impropriety in an already suspect genre suf-ficed for Qing censors to lump “Little Nun” together with far franker fare.15

Not only did the authorities conflate lyric books and xiaoshuo as represen-tative of illicit textual commodities, but the market seems to have also min-gled the two genres. Over the course of the Qing, Beijing’s print outlets had developed a degree of vendor specialization that lasted into the twentieth century; upscale shops in the Liulichang 琉璃廠 neighborhood continued to offer rare editions of xiaoshuo while Damochang 打磨廠, with its concentra-tion of lyric book printer-retailers, remained a major producer of that genre (Zhang, 2010: 37). But the more itinerant and small-scale the peddler, the less specialized his wares, and like the Xizhushikou trio jailed by a law designed to control homeless beggars, almost all of the sellers captured in the police records were “bare sticks” or sojourners, trying to turn a profit with an assorted line of goods on the lowest rungs of Beijing society.16

A 1922 case is typical. Again thanks to a newspaper alert to “Huge Quantities of Licentious Books Found at Tianqiao” 天橋, the police seized 5 vendors and 48 titles at the heavily trafficked Outer City market (BJMA, 1922: 181-019-35957). These men, like the Xizhushikou threesome, were sojourners from Beijing’s hinterland counties. All in their forties and fifties, none had started out in the book trade: the five variously claimed to have crafted lanterns, cut noodles, shaped tiles, run a sundries store, and worked in a smithy. Two said that they had taken over their operations from kinsmen leaving town, and one, the oldest, told police of supporting his 75-year-old

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mother, wife, and two small sons back home. From the unlucky five, the police confiscated books running the gamut from joke collections and The Bedchamber Arts 房中術 to The Complete and Unexpurgated Pearl-Sewn Shirt and a variation on “Missy Picks Spring Onions” as bawdy as the original.

Thus, across the turn of the twentieth century, there existed a recognized canon of titillating late imperial texts.17 Works like Plum in the Golden Vase and The Carnal Prayer Mat 肉蒲團, initially created and enjoyed by a rar-efied circle of litterateurs and holders of the highest examination degrees, were being hawked along with “Eighteen Gropes.”18 Long-term continuities in how these books were produced translated into persistent patterns in how they were circulated, controlled, and conceptualized: as recent research on print during the late Qing and early Republic has indicated, modern technolo-gies like the lithograph and letterpress did not simply or immediately usurp the venerable places of manuscript and woodblock (Brokaw, 2010). The Baowentang 寶文堂 printer-retailer in Damochang continued to profit from selling its woodblock-printed lyric books to villagers in the Beijing hinter-lands until as late as 1929, when a letterpress was finally installed (Liu, 1984). A merchant arrested in 1913 with just seven sets of blocks but nearly three hundred lyric books explained that he made good money by simply run-ning off fresh copies instead of investing in new titles (BJMA, 1913: 181-019-3189). As we saw in the case of the Xizhushikou peddlers, when even crude woodblocks were unaffordable, there was recourse to making copies by hand. In other words, the physical advantages of old technologies in cost and portability sustained their momentum in the print economy, which informed the decisions of individual producers to continue using xylography, even manuscript.

De facto legal standards for what counted as “wicked words,” and the techniques for (re)producing them, remained remarkably constant through the violence of imperfectly successful reform and revolution across the turn of the century. But changes were also afoot in the content and form of explicit sexual media in the Beijing markets. We glimpse an example of their impact in a title that stood out among the many taken from the midlife career chang-ers at the Tianqiao market—A Textbook of Licentious Desire 淫欲教科書. Like A Treatise on the Secret Organs of the Sexes and A Discussion of Intercourse between the Sexes, discovered some eight years earlier in the Xizhushikou night market, Textbook provoked no comment from the authori-ties despite being unmistakably and deliberately marked as neither xiaoshuo nor lyric book. What were these texts, and what was the significance of their inclusion in the prosecution of “wicked words?”

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The Informant

To answer these questions, we must detour momentarily to survey the rapidly shifting intellectual and ideological landscape of fin-de-siècle China. Since the mid-nineteenth century, the traumas of internecine and international vio-lence had chipped away at the authority, legitimacy, and philosophical foun-dation of the imperial state while reinforcing the adoption of a newly universal, linear view of space and time (Furth, 1983; Shih, 2001: 46–48). Massive quantities of imported works in translation, in addition to shared memories of past defeat and fears for the future, also imparted an unprece-dented urgency to new ideas about the opposite end of the scale—the body and self-identity. Bridging the gap was evolutionism, joining the individual with unprecedented specificity to the looming dangers of national weakness and racial deterioration: Yan Fu’s 嚴復 exegetical translation of Thomas Huxley’s Evolution and Ethics appeared in 1898 and was taken up by politi-cal activists spearheading the Hundred Days Reform, their fellow concerned scholars, as well as generations of Chinese thinkers to come (Shih, 2001; Sakamoto, 2004).

Elite late Qing readers also encountered an influx of translated writings on sexology and anatomy, which focused the evolutionist perspective on the reproductive self; most of these were rendered into Chinese from Japanese translations of European and American originals. Earlier Chinese notions of “good custom” had shared some of the dilemma inherent in the newer idea of sexual “nature.” Both granted sex a primal immutability while simultane-ously implying the possibility of losing touch with the valorized default state through passive corruption or active defiance (Rocha, 2010b: 617–18, 617n60). Thus arose an anxious need to maintain “nature” or “custom” even as both were assumed to be automatic. There had furthermore been a strain of evolutionist superiority in how, for instance, the Qing government regarded the people of its borderlands as unenlightened, sexually disorderly barbar-ians. The novelty of sexual nature in the late Qing, though, was its entrench-ment in an unprecedented evolutionary paradigm that rewrote the relationship between universe and body.

Illustrative here is the transformation of the term xingxue 性學. Before the introduction of sexual nature, xingxue had meant the philosophical study (xue) of humanity as part of the laws governing the natural world (xing); after, it became the translation of “sexology.”19 In other words, sex, once only one component of the cosmos, was coming now to stand for its entirety; put another way, all-encompassing xing had been narrowed to the particular realm of human sexuality (Huang, 2001).

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How did these intellectual developments produce the odd books about “the sexes” that the police found together with drumsongs and xiaoshuo in the bookstalls of early Republican Beijing? Let us trace as example the dozen copies of A Discussion of Intercourse between the Sexes confiscated from the three Xizhushikou vendors in 1914. About twenty years earlier, Kang Youwei 康有為, one of the most influential political thinkers of the late Qing and soon to become a principal in the dramatic events of the Hundred Days Reform, drew up a catalogue of Japanese books that included A New Discussion of Intercourse between the Sexes 男女交合新論 and A Popular Treatise on the Genitals 通俗生殖器論, among similar titles. Kang catego-rized these books as “studies of physiology” 生理之學 and extolled their foundational importance to the study of all other parts of the universe: “Truly, they are the origin of physics and the basis of psychology; taken as an entrée into philosophy, they encompasses the six directions and the four seasons, matters small and great, detailed and general, and the workings of everything without any omission” (Kang, [1898] 1976: 3–6). In keeping with his theory of pre-imperial Chinese primacy in the evolution of human civilization, Kang averred that “a small part” of the sexual science “recently flowing so freely in the West . . . can be traced to our own Basic Questions,” a Han-period text foundational to the Chinese medical canon (Furth, 1983: 328–31; Hinrichs, 2001: 122).

Kang’s plaudits for “studies of physiology” highlight a central source of the appeal sexology held for an elite late Qing audience increasingly obsessed with the fate of their polity and people: the new sexual science could be the solution to China’s apparent crisis. If properly harnessed, “natural” sexuality would rescue the Sick Man of Asia from the precipice of racial extinction. It might even enable an enhanced recapitulation of the classical golden age.

At the same time, sexology framed a return to sexual nature as the ultimate means to personal liberation, a goal distinctly in tension with the imperative of rescuing the nation. The diaries of Sun Baoxuan 孫寶瑄, scion of a promi-nent official family, illustrate this dual attraction. Sun had exiled himself from Beijing in 1894 after the rejection of a memorial he and thirteen allies had submitted against war with Japan (Sun, [1941?] 1983: 169). Like so many of his activist peers, Sun was also a keen reader of new translations: less than a week after the first advertisements for A New Discussion of Intercourse between the Sexes began to appear in the Shanghai press, he had acquired a copy (Zhang, 2009: 151). Finding the book’s “discussion of the means of producing children . . . very extraordinary,” Sun browsed widely in the latest sexological translations of 1901 and 1902. During those years, he meditated repeatedly on “the joy of man and woman” as one of “the three pleasures of life,” concluding from his readings that marriage in “the style of

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Europeans” based on “spiritual love” and comparable educational back-ground was the best means not only to achieve this personal joy, but, more importantly, to produce strong, smart, good-natured citizens. Thus the “ban on freely choosing spouses in our country” was a major cause of “unrefined character and lack of talent” among the Chinese (Sun, [1941?] 1983: 362–63, 382–84, 598, 611–12).

So, by the turn of the twentieth century, texts like A New Discussion of Intercourse between the Sexes had inserted desire uneasily between the imperatives of rescuing the nation and of individual enlightenment, introduc-ing a tension that would characterize intellectual life for decades to come (Schwarcz, 1986). Outside the small circle of people with Kang Youwei and Sun Baoxuan’s intellectual and political status, though, sexological books did not have quite the same effect.

Twenty-five-year-old Zhang Peilin 張沛林 was certainly neither radical thinker nor political activist. In 1918, the police confronted him at his book-stall in the bustling Dong’an Market 東安市場 (BJMA, 1918: 181-019-22193). A search of his wares turned up seven titles, including Essentials of Hygiene for the Sexes 男女衛生須知 and The Candlewick Monk, which he sold and rented at similar, modest prices. Thirteen photographs, which the case record noted as “all licentious pictures” 淫畫, were also discovered. Zhang insisted that he never regularly stocked any of these items, instead only buying them from other retailers at a customer’s request. Consequently told to pretend to his suppliers that he was gathering “lewd images and books at any price for the young master of a great house,” Zhang helped the authori-ties uncover a chain of purveyors, a microcosm of Beijing’s vast print market. The tight personal and spatial relationships between individuals in this sub-terranean trade—as well as the apparent ubiquity of illicit material in their stock—abetted police efforts in rounding up more suspects: two of the seven identified by name in the case were brothers, one operating a Dong’an market stall, the other managing a Liulichang shop; an anonymous retailer in the Qingyunge Market 青雲閣, catching sight of police ransacking his neigh-bor’s store, tried, too late, to hide his own copy of Essentials of Hygiene.

Though most of the suspects were the usual small-time peddlers, the police also summoned the proprietor of the Fujin Printing House 富晉書社, a high-end store in the Qingyunge Market visited frequently by Lu Xun 魯迅 and his brother Zhou Zuoren 周作人 before the two became national cultural celebrities. Renowned for its antique woodblock books, gazetteers, and archaeological texts, Fujin would be propelled into further fame in the thirties after acquiring a private library of Ming rare editions (Sun, [1962] 2010: 93, 109). Sixteen copies of Essentials of Hygiene were located there thanks to Zhang’s tip.

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Combined with the copies of A Treatise on the Secret Organs of the Sexes and A Discussion of Intercourse between the Sexes that police found in 1914 at the Xizhushikou night market, the crop of apparently sexological books reaped by police with Zhang Peilin’s compliance illuminates the fate of such titles as they rapidly escaped the rarefied orbits of Kang and Sun and plunged into the market. There, for purveyors as well as police, sexology’s representa-tions of sexual desires and acts, so catalytically important in reformist eyes, seemed practically indistinguishable from other, older illicit materials. Repetitious disclaimers in book advertisements hinted at how the new sexo-logical literature’s differences from Plum in the Golden Vase or “Eighteen Gropes” were widely seen as merely cosmetic. Nearly all advertisements for books of sexual science included a variant on the same theme: “do not con-fuse this text with wicked books because of the words ‘the sexes’ (男女) and ‘intercourse’ (交合) in the title” (Xinwenbao, [1902] 2009).20

It is possible that the editions of A Discussion of Intercourse between the Sexes being turned up by the police in Beijing’s bookstalls were in fact noth-ing like the ones that Kang Youwei and Sun Baoxuan found so inspiring. As befitting an old and lucrative industry, unauthorized reprints, deliberately mislabeled texts, and other tricks had been common in the repertoire of Chinese printers and merchants for centuries (Reed, 2003). Translated sexo-logical books were especially vulnerable to rampant piracy, according to both their detractors and advocates. The same text might be given several titles—in addition to giving away his colleagues, Zhang Peilin testified that various bookstores in Liulichang with their own lithographic presses were printing and selling editions of illicit books under new, innocuous names. Unauthorized compendia appeared in which several books were jumbled together, or, vice versa, longer books might be split into multiple titles (BJMA, 1922: 181-019-35959; Zhang, 2009: 155–56, 248–50). Even if the contents of sexological-sounding titles confiscated by the police in early Republican Beijing were the same as in those read by elite intellectuals decades earlier, they were cheaper and almost certainly had much lower production values. This was probably enabled by practices like that described by Zhang Peilin of the capital’s book dealers making “a hefty profit” on carbon-copy knockoffs of new titles shipped in from Shanghai.

More importantly, sustained demand for explicit, potentially criminal sex-ual depictions and a durable network of circulation already in place led to such promiscuous use of sexological terminology—“genitalia,” “inter-course”—in book titles and marketing that the terms rapidly merged with an older vocabulary referring to illicit depictions of sex. Thus A Textbook of Licentious Desire simultaneously conjured up evolutionist, eugenicist sexual education and the same yin licentiousness of Plum in the Golden Vase; thus

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the stream of protests about the texts’ scientific validity in advertisements for sexological translations in a way confirmed widespread suspicions of sexol-ogy’s titillating potential. Advertisements engorged with purple language about “a richness and concentration of flavor . . . truly beyond the wildest dreams of the conventional mind” in many advertisements furthered the effect (Xinmin congbao, [1902] 2009). In 1920, Lu Xun—by now a famous writer and Peking University professor—observed acerbically that publishers had “really taken to crowning their titles with the words ‘the sexes.’ Now even The Portrait of a Hundred Filial Pieties 百孝圖, which is supposed to ‘correct people’s hearts and protect custom,’ has those words appended” (Lu, [1932] 1979: 93). As we have seen, commoditized sexological texts had surged through a network including some of Lu’s own Beijing bookshop haunts; the proliferation through print of sexological (or at least sexological-sounding) titles had come to dilute the legitimacy and power of xingxue.

When police more closely examined the books confiscated from the hap-less night market trio in 1914, questions were raised about one title, An Amorous Autopsy 風流分屍案. Eventually the authorities concluded that the book was not “utterly licentious,” being merely “interspersed with licentious words” 間有淫邪之詞.21 No such scrutiny, though, was given to Intercourse between the Sexes. Similarly, when officers tallied up the contraband that Zhang Peilin’s information had helped them find in 1918, they commented that, excluding Essentials of Hygiene for the Sexes and Dreams of Splendor 繁華夢,22 “among the rest of the books only The Streetwalker’s Inside Story (淌牌黑幕), originally titled A Licentious Woman’s Dire Straits (淫婦狼狽記), and Short Biographies of Thirty-six Enchanting Maids (三十六妖姬小傳) have words and phrases that slightly touch on the licentious and obscene.” That is, Essentials of Hygiene for the Sexes required no further inspection because it was regarded by the police to be at least as obviously “licentious and obscene” as stories about prostitutes.

Nonetheless, by the thirties, turn-of-the-century xingxue did give rise to new ways of publicly talking about sex.23 Most notably, government authori-ties began to exploit the dual, contradictory appeal of sexual nature to nation and individual, a necessarily (if not wholly) legitimating process (Dikötter, 1995). When Magnus Hirschfeld, German founder of the Institute of Sexual Research and leading activist for the decriminalization of homosexuality, vis-ited Beijing and delivered a “public lecture on sexology” in 1931, Peking University Medical College administrators expected such heavy attendance that they asked the Education Bureau for police officers to keep order (BJMA, 1931: 029-003-00550). The auditorium ended up so jammed that “more than ten people” crowded outside each window (Wuliao, 1931). Freely chosen marriage partners and eugenics-influenced attempts to harness reproduction,

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two major tenets of early twentieth-century sexual science, have continued to shape standards of sexual citizenship in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) (Hershatter, 2004: 999–1001, 1004–9).

Yet much older modes of framing and consuming sex retained so much of their power that they could assimilate and subvert sexological ideas, to the point that even police officers found it necessary to look over books to deter-mine just how “wicked” they were. Meanwhile, peddlers continued to insist into the 1940s that they had not known that their books were licentious 不知道是淫書, though the materials in question were usually well-known drum-songs that even the illiterate could access through performance (BJMA, 1913: 181-019-00477 and 181-019-03191; 1941: 184-002-01419). All three night market stall owners arrested in 1914 professed ignorance, as did four of the five middle-aged Tianqiao sellers caught in 1918, one adding that he had never really looked carefully at his goods. Only one, a former lantern maker, admitted that he had begun to sell lyric books, xiaoshuo, and A Textbook of Licentious Desire because he was “greedy for gain” 貪便宜; at the same time, he was also the only among the five who pointedly told interrogators that his income supported an elderly mother and young sons, an implicit jus-tification for his “greed.” Corresponding to suspects’ constant declarations of simply being unaware of illegal content, police raised the possibility that some suspects might not be literate enough to recognize their own wares as contraband (BJMA, 1915: 181-019-10794).

Since the late imperial period, condemnations of explicit media had piv-oted on versions of the stereotype of “ignorant hooligans out for easy money” 愚氓圖漁利 (Wang, 1981: 142; BJMA, 1913: 181-019-03192). In early twentieth-century Beijing, most of the sellers, buyers, and producers of books and pictures brought before the authorities did not dispute the judgment passed on their goods or on their own foolishness and lust for profit. As in the erstwhile lantern-maker’s plea, the exigencies of poverty formed the most routine attempt at self-justification. Destitution was also a commonly self-ascribed motive in cases unrelated to selling illicit sexual depictions; in a city in which, by various estimates, as much as half of the population lived below the poverty line, professed hardship was surely not merely rhetorical camou-flage for most suspects (Chen, 2012: 4, 49).

Moreover, by brandishing the trope of the greedy, foolish commoner with-out probing more deeply into why dealing in illicit media might make a better living than other trades or how these items were used by consumers, both interrogator and suspect could skirt the more complex and problematic moti-vations of private pleasure, sexual enlightenment, aesthetic expression, and freedom from censorship involved in representations of sex—precisely the issues being increasingly and heatedly discussed by the likes of Kang Youwei

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and Sun Baoxuan. In a reprise of how Plum in the Golden Vase became a byword for the illicit in spite of attempts by late Ming connoisseurs to reclaim its worth, efforts from fin-de-siècle elites to use sexology to expand the arena of acceptable sexual representation could not prevent exactly the opposite development once it left their elevated sphere for the marketplace. Why was the birth of the reproductive citizen so slow and fitful? The answer lay in great part in the instrument that the sexual scientists used to deliver their pre-cious brainchild: the technologies of mass reproduction.

Unspeakable Images

Sexological titles that proliferated in the Beijing’s markets were among the works being produced en masse by modern technology in Shanghai publish-ing houses and promoted through advertisements in the similarly innovative medium of nationally distributed newspapers (Reed, 2003; Des Forges, 2007). Sellers of sexological books in fact made the physical properties of their titles a selling point: “printed on foreign-style paper and bound in for-eign style,” a majority of these also included illustrations, some even ren-dered in color. Unsurprisingly, such lavish productions were costly (Shibao, [1909] 2009).24 The originality of format associated with imported texts could overshadow their content; as one dealer remarked derisively, consum-ers tended to have questionable priorities.

They first select based on the printing: “foreign” binding and large characters. . . . Next is the consideration of price. . . . Those with slightly better judgment see if the translation is easily understandable. Whether the facts are really as put forth is of no concern. (Gong, [1902] 2003: 391).

Meanwhile, economic logic ensured that manuscript and xylography sur-vived well into the Republican period. The simultaneity of forms was obvi-ous for lyric books. From the 1910s on, Damochang shops packaged drumsong in tinted, lithographed covers featuring reproductions of fashion photos, yet crude, hand-carved woodblock booklets were being printed into the 1930s (FB 19F0400Z406; FB 19F0400M117). Cheap versions of late imperial xiaoshuo, such as those on offer at Zhang Peilin’s Dong’an market stall, seem to have been similarly split between media of reproduction.

Accordingly, woodblock and manuscript took on new worth as the age of mass reproduction dawned. Enormous sums began to be paid for rare manu-scripts and high-quality prints; circa 1922, the Peking University Library bought an edition of Plum in the Golden Vase for 800 dollars. This sum would have exceeded two months’ wages paid to Professor Lu Xun (Lu, [1923]

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2005: 348; Zhang, 2010: 37). In the same period, Zhou Yueran 周越然, critic and book collector, paid as much as 450 dollars for an antique woodblock copy of Plum (Zhou, [1942] 2005); by contrast, the cheapest xiaoshuo and lyric books sold for between ten and forty cents (BJMA, 1918: 181-019-22193; FSN ATc12-170; FB 19F0400Z330; Qi, 1998: 227; Wang, [1989] 2005). But even lyric books in shoddy hand-copied or block-printed editions began to acquire unprecedented value as lingering vestiges of a rapidly van-ishing Old Peking, emblems of a “natural and unconstrained” folk culture (Yin, [1927] 1972: 3). Drumsongs formerly condemned as “licentious words” especially attracted progressive intellectuals, whose determination to rescue these expressions of authenticity from feudal repression and long-standing elite disdain formed part of their greater quest for personal liberation through the recovery of natural sexuality. By the late twenties, this quest had actually caused the prices for lyric books to rise dramatically as new folksong devo-tees bought up vast quantities at the capital’s night markets and streetside bookstalls (Zhang, 2010: 38)—yet another of the many profound ironies in the recasting of sex and the nostalgic reinvention of Old Peking, indeed in the late Qing and early Republican intellectual milieu as a whole.25

The logic of the market and novel cultural politics thus combined with the demand for explicit sexual content to abet technologies of mass reproduction in eroding barriers: products of state-of-the-art technology came together with cheap pamphlets in the subterranean market for pornographic texts, and the fluidity of forms enabled new vocabularies of sexual science to collide and merge with the classic terms of illicit fantasy to attract buyers in incon-gruous ways. From this tumult slowly rose “pornography,” a creature distinct from (if undeniably shaped by) the late imperial Chinese inheritance of yin-licentiousness. To study its gradual emergence more closely, let us look to the images that the capital’s police seized, which even more clearly embodied tensions between content and medium, convention and novelty in turn-of-the-century portrayals of sex.

Midwinter, 1918: Zhang Peilin recited name after name to the police. One of these was Zhang Huiting 張惠亭, a Shandong sojourner in his late twen-ties who admitted to selling Zhang Peilin thirteen photographs from his sta-tionery stall. Of interest is how suspects and police referred to these images: Zhang Peilin’s testimony called them photographs 照片; the police listed them, without comment, as “licentious pictures” 淫畫. The police then cata-logued the stationery-seller’s unsold inventory as three albums 冊 of “spring photographs” 春照片 and 136 “individual photos” 单片. In other words, the late imperial vocabulary of yin, in which explicit paintings and prints, like “spring” lyric books, became “spring pictures” 春畫 and “spring palaces” 春

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宮, continued to be commonly applied even when the medium was radically changed.26

Before the twentieth century, the Beijing market for titillating images had already become bifurcated between older hand-drawn pictures and wood-block prints and the products of early photography. A memorial from the Shaanxi Investigating Censor Wen Yu 文鬱 to the Guangxu emperor in 1892 began by complaining, in typical terms, of “foolish people” 愚人 preying upon one another, “hoping to extract gain” 希圖取利 by printing and circu-lating xiaoshuo and licentious books. Wen raised the usual alarum about the damage they posed to the “hearts of the people”; especially shockingly, even “scholars and officials” picked up such printed matter “without knowing them to be prohibited by law.”

But licentious words “cannot constitute a peril to all, being known only to the literate,” continued Wen. The “most damnable of all” were the “foreign photographs (洋照) of unspeakable images filling the markets and streets; though called ‘beautiful scenes from West Lake,’ they are actually inter-spersed with filth” (FHAa, 1892: 03-1632-027). Wen’s agitation over “for-eign photographs, ‘powder’ portraits (粉像), and large-format spring pictures” was probably stimulated in part by the capital’s streetside picture-shows, the cheapest way of all to access explicit images.

Called variously “Western Ocean scenes” 西洋景, “West Lake scenes” 西湖景, or, more simply, “big foreign pictures” 大洋片, these entertainments were usually set up at temple fairs or markets (Lian, 1995: 288–91). The show consisted of a wooden box with peepholes at which spectators sat, look-ing on as the operator chanted or sang to accompany a changing series of photographs or hand-drawn pictures (Lian, 1995: 267–68, 289–90). It was well known that audiences could expect a “spring picture” or two among the slides: as a late Qing poet mused, “How funny that folk both hoary and green / together gaze at the ‘spring palace’ screen” (Le, [1909] 1917: 331). In spite of Wen Yu’s entreaty that Guangxu command all of the capital’s law enforce-ment agencies to crack down on these “unspeakable images,” the low cost of putting on and enjoying a show combined with the growing ubiquity of pho-tographs to preserve the immense popularity of “West Lake scenes” long after the debut of motion pictures (BJMA, 1933: 181-021-19347).27 And, judging from surviving scripts, titillating pictures probably appeared even more frequently than the indignant censor imagined. Five out of six slides in one show were of women in some state of eroticized distress or dishabille; the frankest depicted “eighteen girlies taking a bath” (FSN ATs-005). In Figure 1, an illustration from a 1909 pictorial, a mixed audience gathers around a show featuring explicit images (Anon., 1909).28

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Modern photographic technologies had appeared in China shortly after their invention in Europe, beginning in 1839 with the daguerreotype. By the 1850s, a portrait was made of the rebellion-quashing Mongol commander Sengge Richen 僧格林沁; photographs of Dowager Empress Cixi 慈禧 and imperial kinswomen could be bought in Shanghai soon after the turn of the

Figure 1. A crowd watching a peepshow (1909).Source. Beijing xingshi huabao, Dec. 19, 1909.

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century.29 Although Republican authorities were still using “spring” or “licentious” as blanket terms for the sexually explicit images that they con-fiscated well into the thirties, Wen Yu’s memorial suggests the pivotal importance of photography’s late Qing debut to pornography’s eventual emergence. The photograph was not only a new, popular, and thus lucrative way to package images, but the trigger of a twofold redefinition—of the content within those images as well as of the relationship between pictures and people who produced, consumed, and talked about them. Despite their repeated edicts against written and performative genres, Qing rulers seem for most of the dynasty to have been silent on the matter of titillating visual media; a curious omission, since many late imperial xiaoshuo at all values of production were illustrated (Wang, 1981: 18–86; Hegel, 1998). Besides, the emperors apparently commissioned their own lavishly painted albums of scenes from Plum in the Golden Vase (Cahill, 2012). The same concern underlay Wen’s memorial and the unprecedented expansion of “wicked words” to include “unspeakable images” of possibly foreign origins by the Draft New Criminal Code: photographs somehow made the explicit image more dangerous than it had ever been.

There was some evidence to corroborate official ideas of photography’s particular perils. Its prurient potential had been quickly noticed by profit-hungry “ignorant hooligans.” Rapidly made and easily circulated, they were the most common form of explicit media documented in the police records by the late 1910s. One 1919 case offered a cross-section of the Beijing market for explicit photos (BJMA, 1919: 181-019-26250). At the Flower Market, a plainclothes detective found Yao Fengming 姚鳳鳴, a 37-year-old former farm hand from Shandong, tending a ground stall with “spring photograph mirrors” 春片镜子—photographs inserted between pieces of silvered glass, the seams sealed with gum rosin. As he later confessed, Yao had survived the winter by hawking peanuts and sundries, barely scraping by, so that when a fellow peddler showed some mirror-mounted photos to Yao and told him of the “pretty good profits” 頗能得利 to be made, Yao bought the mirrors and found out that there was a glassware shop whose owner could make him more. It was to this man, 55-year-old Henanese Wang Shun 王順, that Yao turned when the plainclothes detective put in an ersatz order for 30 mirrors.

Wang Shun and his apprentice, a teenaged kinsman, were soon visited again by the police, who turned up nearly 200 mirrors in four sizes, some still unfinished. All but six of the mirrors contained multiple “real person photo-graphs” (zhenren zhaopian 真人照片) under a single piece of glass—up to a total of seventeen. These, according to Wang, had been purchased from a pair of traveling salesmen from Tianjin. The docket concluded that sales of the mirrors were dangerous enough to “customs,” but that taking photographs of

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“real people” was an act “especially shameless.” Neither of the Tianjin trad-ers was in town, however, making it impossible to trace the men and women depicted or the studio that had shot them.

Thus, on the one hand, early Republican networks for producing and dis-tributing explicit photographs resembled those for texts. Both involved sojourning “bare sticks” who took up the trade as their latest bid for a steady income: Wang Shun formerly managed a tobacco stall before taking over the glass shop from an acquaintance, and his young relative had started out as a hatter’s apprentice. Systems built on personal acquaintance, kinship, and shared native place linked retailers and producers. The police record empha-sized the need to trace both “wicked words” and “unspeakable images” to their original producers, but usually did not—most likely could not—follow through.

On the other hand, much about the photograph trade was distinctive, owing to their physical properties. Most moved through the capital as large, uncut sheets on which a number of smaller images were printed; these could be circulated, as Wang’s merchandise shows, in staggering quantities: the manager of one photography studio distributed his wares to retailers in “buckets” 桶, each containing 432 rolled-up sheets of images (BJMA, 1914: 181-019-07098). Other dealers were found with similarly massive batches of photos, some numbering in the thousands (BJMA, 1919: 181-019-26247; 1934: 181-021-29045). This ease of transport probably contributed to the fact that the police archives contained many more large-scale busts of photo deal-ers than purveyors of other media. Consumers might carry tiny individual photographs mounted on the backs of hand mirrors or concealed between candies and their wrappers (BJMA, 1914: 181-019-07101 and 181-019-07907; 1934: 181-031-01348, 183-002-05047, and 181-020-14407); their portability was extraordinary. And, at as little as a tenth of the price of an explicit xiaoshuo, even those on the economic margins—cooks and errand-boys—could afford them (BJMA, 1913: 181-019-3195 and 181-019-03198; 1914: 181-019-07907).

Photographic technology did not merely make sexual depictions more widely and cheaply available, it also began to change how titillation operated. By concealing “the evidence of its own mediation,” the photograph could stake unprecedented claims to reflecting pure reality, offering viewers an alluring “illusion of personal address” (Solomon-Godeau, 1991: 224). That the police dwelt on how Wang Shun’s mirrors contained images of “real” couples indicates how disturbing photography’s rearrangement of the rela-tionship between representation and reality could be: by its mere existence, the photograph multiplied the number of individuals involved in making a profit from damaging “custom.” In a case recorded the year after Yao and

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Wang were arrested, Beijing newspapers carried sensational reports that sev-eral studios had paid a leatherworker and his wife, who moonlighted as an unlicensed prostitute, to pose in “real-thing spring photos” 實事春片 (BJMA, 1920: 181-019-29848). One of the exposés raised what might have been an alternative to the “real thing”: in the past, its author lamented, explicit photos had merely featured “clay figurines” 泥人, but as “the lives of the poor are daily growing harder, many sacrifice face and integrity” to pose in such pho-tos themselves.

Perhaps these copulating figurines were only an indignant rhetorical device intended to highlight moral decay. In any case, the leathersmith rumor suggests that the “spring photographs” so far discussed were, or at least were imagined to be, depictions of coitus. In a new medium, they perpetuated the aesthetic vocabulary of late imperial “spring pictures,” most of which had depicted action—multiple individuals engaged in flirtation and intercourse rather than the nude body per se (Cahill, 2012). Photos of the leathersmith and his wife, moreover, purportedly tapped a venerable voyeuristic trope by including “a young girl who stands by, looking on.”

However, photographs were also beginning to shift the market toward a previously atypical subject in Chinese sexual imagery: the solitary female nude. Some of these novel images might have been directly imported from foreign sources, exactly as framed by the Draft New Criminal Code. In 1915, for instance, a clerk told police that he had bought the offending materials discovered in his shop—7 matte paintings, 16 oil paintings, and 33 mimeo-graphs—from “a foreigner in Dongjiaomin Alley” 東交民巷—that is, the Legation Quarter just southeast of the Forbidden City (BJMA, 1915: 181-019-10795). Yet only by the thirties did police regularly explicitly identify the images that they confiscated as photographs of naked bodies. In the records I have collected, seven of seventeen cases in which police arrested men for carrying, selling, or publicly displaying “spring pictures” between the summer of 1928 and the Japanese occupation of the city nine years later referred to the contents as nudes 裸體. By contrast, only one of twenty-four cases in the nine-year period up to 1928 did so. While this trend probably reflected an actual increase in the quantities of nude photos being circulated in Beijing, it more importantly demonstrated the naturalization of the isolated female body as a quintessentially erotic image.

Two overlapping developments of the period met in the cheap and ever more available form of the photograph. One was the notion of sexual nature as it gradually assimilated into print markets, statecraft, and the general con-sciousness during the early Republic. At once conducive to private consump-tion and undeniably linked to the public world of the “real,” a photo invited the viewer to identify and interact with its subject even as it isolated and objectified what it depicted. These qualities made the photograph a kind of

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visual analogue to xingxue-as-sexology, parsed in the objective terms of evo-lutionism and taxonomy, torn between the obligations of personal enlighten-ment and rescuing China.

A second factor was the general proliferation of public discussions and representations of women’s bodies. From late Qing anti-footbinding and “natural breast” movements on, the female form suffused all genres of ico-nography—from politicized portraits of women athletes to advertisements for the luxuries of modern life (Finnane, 2008). As early as 1914, nude mod-els were introduced in new-style art curricula. Through the following decade, stentorian debates on the matter raged in the press. Proponents vaunted the naked body, especially feminine “curvilinear beauty” 曲線美, as the ultimate embodiment of aesthetic, even ethical enlightenment; critics accused the artistic avant-garde of shamelessly exploiting marginal women and corrupt-ing youths (Andrews, 2005). Meanwhile, the female body steadily took on commercial utility and ubiquity, so that self-proclaimed defenders of the “true meaning of the nude” railed against those who, in numbers “daily increasing, steal the beautiful name of nude art to make money . . . thus taint-ing [its] purity” (Ni, 1925). To borrow a description of France a half-century earlier, in fin-de-siècle China “the female body’s monopoly of the role of image of desire” was a “characteristically modern” fusion of “aesthetics, sexuality, and difference” through a technology enabling visually driven indi-vidualist consumerism on an unprecedented scale (Solomon-Godeau, 1996: 116–17).30 In the end, the state, too, acknowledged and redeployed the nude as it had done with sexology: by 1932, a new junior high curriculum com-bined full-frontal images of women with detailed descriptions of conception in textbooks aimed at students as young as thirteen (Lee, 2012).

Apposite, then, that two tiny images reproduced as Figure 2 were found hidden inside wrappers for candies branded Modern Beauties 摩登美人 (BJMA, 1934: 183-002-05047). The women’s bobbed hair and the divan on which one reclines obviously alluded to the globalized fashions and con-sumer lifestyles prevalent in urban China by the thirties. Posed in their cos-mopolitan habitats, the women were not only alone but also not engaged in any sexual act, in contrast to a genre of late imperial “spring pictures” in which women masturbated under the gaze of peeping witnesses (Cahill, 2012). Some have argued that the naked woman in photographic stills or moving pictures has redefined pornography by monopolizing it; by this account, she has largely rid explicit writing of its “quasi-magical aura,” tam-ing text so thoroughly that, in the contemporary West, “sexually, the printed word is dead” (Kendrick, 1996: 178, 243). The speed with which “spring photographs” flooded the early twentieth-century Beijing markets hints at their comparable ascendancy in China; certainly, contemporary crackdowns

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in the PRC have netted vast quantities of “real people” represented in every-thing from videocassettes to web sites (Lynch, 1999). Yet, as in the case of texts, new bottles also lent fresh meaning and vitality to older vintages of visual media that continued to circulate in the capital’s markets.31

At the turn of the century, Beijing markets for handmade pictures, like the trade in books, had developed a degree of spatial specialization. The subur-ban counties of Tianjin were outlets for relatively uncontroversial pictures, such as those commemorating the Lunar New Year (BJMA, 1912: 004-001-00063), but also came to be associated with their “spring” counterparts. An anecdote about the Tongzhi emperor described him and a favorite perusing an album of explicit images “in the delicate, meticulous style sold in Fengrun (豐潤) county” (Liangxi, 1925: 13–14). As late as the 1940s, a commentator claimed that Fengrun and its neighbor, Yangliuqing 楊柳青 county, were “famous for their hand-drawn pictures of ‘secret games’ (繪密戲圖)”: local women habitually “painted at their windows, heedless of passerby stopping to watch,” and even “young girls knew how to sketch such things” (Yao, 1941: 4). Police records from the very first years of the Republic through the Japanese occupation corroborate the strength of this link between Tianjin’s hinterlands and explicit artwork (BJMA, 1913: 181-019-03190; 1920: 181-019-57013; 1932: 181-021-15545; 1940: 181-023-09539).

But handmade “spring pictures” appeared infrequently in the police records. Recall, too, that despite clear evidence of their availability during the Qing, explicit paintings and prints were not condemned along with “wicked words” by the Great Qing Code. One cause for their relative absence from the

Figure 2. Miniature photos hidden under candy wrappers (1934).Source. BJMA, 1934: 183-002-05047.

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legal purview was that artists producing paintings and prints appear to have operated on a much smaller scale, rarely selling their own work directly to the consumer. The training and skill required of those who drew “spring pic-tures” also no doubt limited their total numbers. Arrests seem to have been fortuitous: several unlucky painters were caught with their artwork during routine household registration inspections; another, who hand-colored litho-graphs, was arrested in 1919 only after the police received an accusatory tip letter giving his address (BJMA, 1914:181-019-07092 and 181-019-07100; 1919: 181-019-26249.)

Much like the resurrection of lyric books as examples of untainted folk culture, the manual production of “spring pictures” took on new meaning and value with the assimilation of mechanized reproduction. Handmade albums and miniature screens continued to appear on the market even though they tended to be costly and bulky: an eight-panel painted screen could command three or four times as much as a single photograph (BJMA, 1914: J181-019-07096; 1920: 181-019-57013). Foreigners, though typically identified with the newfangled photograph, seem to have been active consumers of hand-crafted artwork—in a way the counterparts of Chinese intellectuals collecting translated treatises on eugenics and sexology.32 A man who made a living by selling drawings to adorn calendars, fans, and lanterns told police that he intended to sell the “spring pictures” among his creations directly to foreign-ers “without exhibiting them in public” (BJMA, 1923: 181-019-39249). Explicit pictures backed by bronze mirrors or etched into coins and marketed as antiques, not to mention paintings and prints mounted on silk or bound into albums, remained in demand well into the 1930s (BJMA, 1933: 181-021-19654; 1938: 181-023-04474).

Ignorant Hooligans Talk Back

It was not only foreign collectors who recognized a new aura surrounding old-fashioned, hand-painted “spring pictures.” Police officers of the Outer Right First District entered a small Daoist temple in a twisting alley just outside Qianmen gate in 1914 to check that all inhabitants had been recorded on the household registers (BJMA, 1914: 181-019-07100). Instead, they found 62-year-old Yang Xiangqing 楊相清 working on a painting as another lay on the table next to him. Both were unmistakably “spring pictures,” so Yang and his three roommates—Zhan Fangpu 詹芳圃, also in his sixties, and two men in their mid-thirties, all from Fengrun county—were brought in for interrogation. Zhan denied that he had anything to do with the explicit images: he only painted flowers and (innocent) figures for picture-screens. Cornered, Yang and his younger collaborators admitted to binding their

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paintings into albums for “visits by regular customers.” Their testimonies took an unusual turn when one of the younger men, Ma Shida 馬世達, began describing his professional development: after his formal apprenticeship in an art shop had already ended, he saw his master painting “spring pictures” and learned to make his own by copying them. People bought these in twelve-page albums for two or three dollars apiece, said Ma, “mostly putting them at the bottom of their trunks” as “fire-averting pictures” 避火圖. In Beijing, Ma also illustrated and sold fans; he conceded that this was illegal, but insisted that poverty had left him no choice. Next, Yang took up the long history of explicit art in his hometown, reminiscing about a long-dead mas-ter and about making erotic albums to commemorate the emperor’s birth-days during the Qing. The aged artist’s tale grew mournful. He only knew of twenty or thirty left in the business; “many of those who came before us in Fengrun were so famous (多有名望),” the old man confided, “but now no one will be as good as them.” Like Ma, Yang capped his confession by pleading that penury kept him in the business.

The Fengrun painters’ narratives hint at how the swiftly attained domi-nance of new technologies began to break down not only the canon of sexual titillation but also chipped away at the authority to define illicitness. Although their testimonies ended with routine appeals to the trope of the destitute, des-perate “ignorant hooligan out for easy money,” Yang and Ma reached far beyond this stereotype, indeed implicitly negating it in their self-defense. Threatened by new formats, hand-painted “spring pictures” became the prod-ucts of a venerable, endangered artistic tradition, an exclusive accomplish-ment that few were lucky enough to attain. Furthermore, the men tried to reclaim apparently illicit material by imputing to them a pragmatic, even mystical value. Robert van Gulik, pioneering scholar of the “bedchamber arts,” cited a folk belief in the pictures’ ability to dispel “the forces of dark-ness” as an explanation for their purported talismanic uses (2003: 332); in Japan, too, discourse linked explicit pictures to protection against fire (Screech, 1999: 34–35). To some extent, such attributions might have been a rhetorical crutch used by authors seeking to legitimate their discussions of explicit images (Cahill, 2012). But what matters more in the case of the Fengrun painters is that their attempt at self-legitimation sundered the carica-ture of the “ignorant hooligan.” They failed to convince the authorities—all four received fifteen days’ detention—but by narrating Fengrun’s “spring picture” tradition, Yang and Ma implicitly countered the judgment and authoritative knowledge of their interrogators. In yet another twist of the irony that has permeated our story so far, four painters making a difficult liv-ing in an alley came to sound very much like the self-authorizing New Culture intelligentsia. Both groups tried to stake a place for older modes of sexually

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explicit representation against their imminent demise under the eyes of authorities that saw not precious authentic traditions, but “wicked words” and “unspeakable images” instead.

Nostalgia for a time before mechanized media was not the only tactic taken by those outside the purview of highbrow cultural authority to contra-dict the state’s judgment on depictions of sex. The ascendancy of the nude, inextricable from either new technology or new formulations of sexual nature, anchored a 1930 petition from the Global Store. The letter argued that the “aesthetic nudes” the police found among the store’s merchandise were “in modern times held to be works of art and therefore accepted pub-licly by the respective national governments of the West . . . not the usual so-called spring palaces, which injure and damage customs” (BJMA, 1930: 181-021-09827). Again, ironically, these were the same appeals to cosmo-politan civilization as those stridently made by avant-garde artists—would-be pioneers of aesthetic purity denouncing the corruptive commercialization of nudes.33 An even humbler petitioner, a man making a living by showing a single reel of film in the streets, asked for the safe return of his livelihood in similar terms: “there is a plaster cast in this film, but in Western art such things are not unusual. These days, our own nation’s pictorial magazines and plaster sculptors depict plenty of nudes. Besides, this humble citizen had borrowed the film from elsewhere” (BJMA, 1933: 181-021-19347). This petition particularly demonstrated how deeply new, globalized standards for bodily representation and their concomitant ethical and aesthetic values had been assimilated through new forms of media in Beijing by the 1930s—suf-ficient to allow a street showman (or, more likely, the barely better-off scribe he had hired to write his petition) to deploy them against agents of the law. But, more broadly, the Global Store and the itinerant movie-screener were protesting in the same subversive mode as the tradition-inventing Fengrun painters and New Culture folklorists: they elevated the suspect’s superior knowledge while reducing the police to “ignorant hooligans.”

Thus Beijing’s market for explicit media from the late Qing through the early Republic was inflected by two critical transformations: one was the appearance of new ideas about the sexual body, its desires, and its relation-ship to identity, individual as well as national. The other was the introduc-tion of modern technologies of reproduction into a long tradition of print culture. These novel technologies were critical to the quantitative expan-sion of information, but they built on the late imperial foundation of wide-spread circulation, production, and consumption that had been facilitated by woodblock and manuscript. Older formats did not simply disappear. In fact, they gained strength and appeal by incorporating new forms and con-tent, as in the assimilation of sexological jargon, or by setting themselves,

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like hand-painted “spring albums,” against innovation as repositories of historical and cultural significance, an ars erotica whose looming demise heightened its value.34

The police archives suggest that the emergence of “pornography” against an older backdrop of yin licentiousness in turn-of-the-century China, con-sidered from the material, quotidian perspective of Beijing’s middling and marginal denizens as well as that of officers seldom living much more com-fortably than their suspects, looked less like an invention than a repackag-ing. New technologies and content were the latest stage in a long history of manufacturing, buying, and selling depictions of sex despite the condemna-tions of government authorities and cultural arbiters. Modern print tech-niques and sexual science did not transform Beijing’s milieu of illicit sexual media immediately or cleanly. Instead, they injected an unprecedented ele-ment of fluidity into every facet of life by opening spaces of plural possibil-ity, a change that would only gradually come to reveal its potency. Late imperial Chinese authorities had long censured “wicked words” and “unspeakable images.” But only with the simultaneous appearance of new media and new content was explicit sexual representation loosened from the confines of rote, undifferentiated condemnation, its definition becom-ing subject to new intensities of contestation by new groups of people even as sexual nature became a singular, definitive bond between personal iden-tity and the body politic.

In the rise of pornography, packaging was key. The union of new ideas about reproduction and new forms of reproduction did not simply enable sexual images and words to be circulated in unparalleled quantities, but also introduced a shiftiness, a subversive potential, into the category of licentious-ness, irrevocably undermining the finality of government authority. There were already too many potentially suspect people and objects moving too quickly through the streets of fin-de-siècle Beijing for the law, itself inconsis-tent, to be thoroughly enforced. The concatenation of transportation, printing, and economies at new scales on top of ongoing sociopolitical turmoil only sped up the frenetic pace.35 Repeat offenders seldom appeared in police records, but the audacity of the few who did hinted at widespread willingness to gamble against a police force far too preoccupied to detect, much less pun-ish, every transgression. Zhang Peilin, who gave away half a dozen of his associates in 1918, was arrested again in Dong’an market for selling copies of Plum in the Golden Vase less than six months later (BJMA, 1919: 181-019-29847). A young Henanese man who had snuck over the wall of Beihai Park in the fall of 1926 to peddle his cache of “spring photographs” to tourists was found at it again the following summer (BJMA, 1926: 181-019-29847; 1927: 181-019-56478).

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As particles accelerate to the point of a chemical transformation upon the application of heat, so too did the twin flames of modern media and sexual science act upon the explicit representation of sex. The quantitative explosion of speed became a qualitative change: redoubled fluidity motivated people to produce and sell illicit media as a way to survive, helped to shield the market from attempts to enforce an ideal vision of sexual order, and, most remark-ably, opened new avenues by which even a marginal hawker might assert himself against the condemnation of those in power.

The instability of print did not necessarily make it a liberational weapon against authority, however. The Republican government increasingly deployed new technologies of reproduction and ideologies of reproductive citizenship toward its own ends. Furthermore, as the case record has shown, the Beijing press, even while being censured for items like an essay comparing geological formations to genitalia (BJMA, 1927: 181-018-21021),36 was also routinely exploited by law enforcement as a source of tips on where illicit media and the people circulating them could be found. After all,

there is something whorish about the very act of representing, since its product . . . is promiscuously available to all eyes. . . . The author or painter, no matter how loudly he protests his good intentions, has no control over his work once he has made it public. (Kendrick, 1996: 13)

The whorishness of representation was finally let loose in turn-of-the-century Beijing, in a milieu that allowed the boundaries of legitimate knowledge to be contested by individuals outside the institutions of political and intellectual power. Thus pornography, defined by constant controversy over its meaning, fully materialized. Perhaps more so than any trend toward personal freedom, democratic government, or market economies, the infusion of a volatility into the nature and authority of truth by modern technologies of publicizing infor-mation might be the most modern thing about modernity, Chinese or other-wise. Pornography’s surfacing around the world, with its invocation of primal drives and submerged desires, has been a fraught instance of this pervasive and ongoing process.

Let us conclude by considering the fates of two men: first, Orson Squire Fowler, alias Fowler of America, author of A New Discussion of Intercourse between the Sexes, so highly praised by Kang Youwei and Sun Baoxuan. When first published in 1870, Creative and Sexual Science: or, Manhood, Womanhood, and Their Mutual Interrelations; Love, Its Laws, Power, Etc.; Selection, Or Mutual Adaptation: Courtship, Married Life, And Perfect Children; Their Generation, Endowment, Paternity, Maternity, Bearing,

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Nursing and Reading; Together With Puberty, Boyhood, Girlhood, Etc.; Sexual Impairments Restored, Male Vigor And Female Health And Beauty Perpetuated And Augmented, Etc., As Taught By Phrenology and Physiology had run over a thousand pages. Between its marbled endpapers the phrenolo-gist, octagonal-house architect, and publisher of Leaves of Grass offered advice on topics from proper grooming to the “mental specialties of races” (Young, 1990; Horowitz, 2002: 115, 273).

Fowler would no doubt have been flabbergasted at the twice-translated versions of his magnum opus confiscated by Beijing police three decades later: these flimsy booklets were a fraction of the original’s length, and only topics directly pertinent to intercourse, such as “Passion Absolutely Necessary in Woman,” survived the journey to Chinese markets.37 But the skull-reading sexologist had already died in obscurity. Creative and Sexual Science had destroyed his reputation: the American press lambasted Fowler as “the foul-est man on Earth,” who “under the cloak of science . . . disseminate[d] the seeds of vice” (Young, 1990: 127).

Some 50 years after Creative and Sexual Science appeared in the United States, French-educated Peking University professor Zhang Jingsheng 張競生 published Sex Histories Part I 性史第一集 in Beijing. The slim volume contained six autobiographical essays purportedly submitted in response to an advertisement that Zhang had placed in the Literary Supplement of the Morning Post 晨報副刊, a journal popular among the capital’s intelligentsia. Sex Histories was the culmination of Zhang’s efforts to establish himself as a Chinese Magnus Hirschfeld, a public authority on the means of bettering society and the self by improving sex. Since the early 1920s, he had written copiously on “free love” and the ideal modern life, offering a self-consciously radical purée of eugenicist sexology, social medicine, and aesthetic theory, topped with nationalistic politics to the point of fascism (Leary, 1994; Lee, 2006; Rocha, 2010a).

The explosive controversy detonated by Sex Histories exemplified how specters of the yin-licentious past continued to haunt even the most icono-clastic discourses on xingxue-as-sexology. Instead of helping to complete Zhang’s transformation into a pioneer of enlightened sexual science, the book cost him his job, provoked the rejection of his former colleagues, and brought him national notoriety. Among its intended audience of progressive intellec-tuals, less attention was directed at the contents than at Zhang’s character after his alleged abuse of his estranged wife came to light. Zhang had time and again drawn upon his European-certified sexological and aesthetic exper-tise for ammunition against the “Confucian moralists”; lapses in his personal sexual ethics therefore undermined his entire claim to authority. “[He] had something protecting him left over from France, so we couldn’t see his true

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self. . . . Perhaps his theories of the ‘beautiful life’ and ‘beautiful social orga-nization’ aren’t even his own, but a hodgepodge black-market import from France,” ran a public letter from a professed friend of Zhang’s ex-wife (Ye, [1927] 1998: 439–40). Zhou Zuoren, a former ally, concluded that Zhang was at heart no more than a stubborn vestige of “the old Confucian ritual teach-ings” (Zhou, [1927] 1998: 440–41).

The burden of proof for establishing authoritative knowledge, already high, had been raised further by Zhang’s claims to the mantle of expertise. All the consequences fell on him when his peers denied those claims; worse, their rejection left Zhang undefended against condemnations from the state and society at large. An intelligence officer found Sex Histories at a post office mere weeks after its publication and reported it to police headquarters as “a xiaoshuo title” with “words and meanings obscene and impinging on custom, deeply feared to poison society and harm young people” (BJMA, 1926: 181-018-18727).

Nonetheless, the Beijing press continued to report covertly circulated cop-ies of the book. By December, the Global Daily 世界日報 announced that stores throughout the city had begun selling Sex Histories Part II 性史第二集: “bound very poorly but priced very highly,” the sequel was “wicked, crude and hardly fit for the eyes” 惡劣不堪寓目. Zhang, exiled to the Shanghai Concessions, denounced these as “the work of merchants falsely borrowing his name in the hopes of profit (假托姓名, 希圖漁利), and that he had taken the matter to court” (BJMA, 1926: 181-018-18727); soon after-ward, he editorialized in his own new periodical about a settlement mandat-ing the destruction of all copies of the false sequel (Peng, 2002: 160). But the damage was not so easily repaired. The original Sex Histories, Sex Histories Part II, and other spurious sequels remained on Beijing’s markets through Nationalist rule and Japanese occupation, resurfacing again in the 1990s (BJMA, 1926: 181-018-18727; 1932, 181-017-01714; 1937, 181-023-01111; 1942, J183-002-24001; Peng, 2002: 163). Even as Zhang struggled to clear his name, it branded him: he was “Dr. Sex” 性學博士 until his death in 1970. Like O. S. Fowler, Zhang was only lauded posthumously as the sexual revo-lutionary he had endeavored to become (Leary, 1994; Rocha, 2010a).

Ever fickle, “whorish representation” on a modern, global scale could undermine the apparently radically liberating potential of sexual science while opening unexpected outlets for “ignorant hooligans” to voice their dis-sent. The mechanical reproduction of information transformed those who most earnestly strove to use its undeniable power to propagate enlightened knowledge into villains, only to resurrect them as heroes decades later and ten thousand miles away.

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Acknowledgments

I am very grateful for the guidance and support of Matthew Sommer throughout my studies and research, including the writing of this article. I am further indebted to Emily Baum, James Cahill, Wesley Chaney, Jon Felt, Annelise Heinz, Haiyan Lee, Sean Lei, Thomas Mullaney, Leon Rocha, Gina Russo, Laura Stokes, Alexander Statman, and Fei-Ling Wang as well as an anonymous referee for their many helpful comments. The Institute for Modern History at the Academia Sinica generously pro-vided me the comfortable and convenient workspace where much of this article was drafted. Finally, my thanks to the staff of the Beijing Municipal Archives, who have permitted me to reproduce the archival photographs that appear in this article.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: The author received financial support from the Stanford Center for East Asian Studies, the Freeman Spongli Institute for International Studies, and the Clayman Institute for Gender Research for the research of this article.

Notes

1. Although xiaoshuo 小說 is often translated as “fiction” or “novel,” the genre ranged from bits of hearsay to supernatural sagas; thus I prefer the unique term.

2. There is a growing parallel body of work on pornography in Japan: e.g., Screech, 1999; Frühstück, 2003.

3. For the debate over Chinese modernity, see, for example, Huang, 1993. 4. Frühstück, 2003, and Silverberg, 2007, outline controversies over sexual repre-

sentation in Japan; for erotic books and censors in New York, see, for example, Gertzman, 1999; Horowitz, 2002.

5. Late Qing records at the First Historical Archives are currently inaccessible, though some cases have been reproduced in a collection held at the Academia Sinica. More than 81,000 files generated by the city police before 1928 are housed at the Beijing Municipal Archives; they remain underused in research, but notable exceptions include Dray-Novey, 1993 and 2007, and Ding, 2011.

6. See Martin Huang for background on The Candlewick Monk, The Biography of a Foolish Woman, and The Pearl-Sewn Shirt (2001: 115–36, 126n18).

7. Price instability as well as the proliferation of poorly regulated currencies plagues attempts at reckoning prices in this period. Prices in yuan 元 are here given as “dollars” by the much-simplified rate of 50 大錢, 京錢, 銅子, 大子, or 文 (“big coppers”) to 10 铜元 (copper cents) to 1 吊 (strand) to 0.10 两 (tael) to 0.10 元 (silver dollar) (Gamble, 1921: 215–16).

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8. Other laws, such as the 1908 Regulations on Newspapers 報律 and the 1914 Publication Law 出版法, also only made vague references to “damaging cus-toms”; more importantly, I have seen no police case involving sexually explicit media citing these codes. Even in the case of a newspaper item deemed sala-cious, the Police Ordinances were invoked (BJMA, 1927:181-018-21021).

9. For the plight of individual police officers and the general predicament of the early Republican force, see Dray-Novey, 1993 and 2007; and Ding, 2011.

10. Yao 妖 may also be rendered as “bewitching” or “beguiling”; it implies unnatu-ralness, as in 人妖, “human prodigy” (Zeitlin, 1993: 110).

11. Official censure of sexually explicit materials was hardly limited to early twentieth-century China: U.S. Customs had banned Confessions in 1929, while Life and Loves, which Harris began self-publishing in 1922, was not legally released in full until 1963 (Adams, 2006; Ockerbloom, 2012). For more on American attempts to control “obscenity,” see Gertzman, 1999; Horowitz, 2002.

12. “Powder” may connote a woman’s boudoir.13. According to Zhang Keji, these were the four major categories for erotic drum-

songs (Zhang, 2000: 116–17). For detailed readings of erotic late imperial fic-tion, see McMahon, 1995; and Huang, 2001.

14. A focus on women’s pleasure also characterized explicit European and American texts from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries (Hunt, 1993: 41–44; Horowitz, 2002: 221–22).

15. For example, the 1868 lists of banned xiaoshuo and lyric books including “Little Nun” and Plum in the Golden Vase by the governor of Jiangsu (Wang, 1981: 142–49). As Goldman notes, the “dramatic text is so often mediated by per-formers”; though the text of “Little Nun” might seem relatively innocuous, live performance could alter its effect (Goldman, 2001: 122).

16. I have found only one woman among more than 120 sellers of explicit texts and images from 1912 to 1947 for whom police supplied biographical infor-mation (BJMA, 1925: 181-019-47834). As a measure of how mixed the wares of low-end sellers could be, one man was detained for peddling contraband books along with lunar calendars banned under the new Republic (BJMA, 1913: 181-019-03185).

17. A similar erotic canon had long existed in European minds. Early modern works such as Aretino’s sonnets and Aristotle’s Master-piece remained linked with pornography into the nineteenth century (Hunt, 1993: 15–30; Kendrick, 1996: 59–66; Horowitz, 2002: 19–31).

18. Xiaoshuo in simplified recensions 簡本 were likely abbreviated, with little if any of the copious supplementary materials of full editions 繁本. Nonetheless, authors and critics seem to have shared the “supposition . . . that not-so-well-educated ‘general readers’ of all ages and both genders could read their vernacu-lar narratives” (Hegel, 1998: 300).

19. Thus, when the Jesuit Giulio Aleni wrote on Aristotelian psychology in the late Ming, he titled the book A Cursory Account of the Study of Human Nature 性學粗述 (Ricci Institute Library, 2012).

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20. See Zhang Zhongmin’s reprints of similar book advertisements (2009: 151–83, 248–60). A conflation of sexology and pornography, with concomitant efforts by sellers and sexological experts to distinguish the two, was also prominent in American markets of the period (Gertzman, 1999: 61–74, 135–77; Horowitz, 2002: 272–96).

21. Unmentioned in bibliographies of late Qing fiction, this may refer to an illus-trated 1909 narrative about a sensational murder case (Liao, 2011).

22. One of many popular late Qing “red-light” novels (Des Forges, 2007: 23).23. Among others, periodicals like the Ladies’ Journal 婦女雜誌 and New Woman

新女性, edited by Zhang Xichen 張錫琛, became fora for the open and con-tentious discussion of sexual topics under the leadership of public intellectuals. Such bold discourse often brought about its own downfall; Zhang was forced from his editorship at the Ladies’ Journal, and his New Woman ran only from 1926 to 1929 (Lee, 2007; Rocha, 2010a: 229–34).

24. The full retail price for one title with “several tens of illustrations made with polychrome electroplating” ran to 2.6 dollars, many times the price of lithograph or manuscript lyric books (Shibao, [1909] 2009).

25. For instance, Haiyan Lee, 2005, describes how folklorists rewrote “traditional” kinship and sexuality in the Meng Jiang Nü 孟姜女 legend into forms they con-sidered more fittingly iconoclastic.

26. For the association between explicit images and the palace, see Cahill, 2012.27. In 1933, one could enjoy a picture-show for as little as one cent; the cheap-

est movie ticket cost 12 times that (Zhonghua tushuguan bianjibu, 1916: 9–10). There were also initial concerns over the “electric opera” 電戲 as a threat to “custom” (FHAb, 1906: 37-1501-006, vol. 6, 1611-1617).

28. While late imperial authorities had taken for granted the particular vulnerability of women to the lures of illicit sex, in legal and secular condemnations the con-sumer of explicit media seems to have been generally imagined as male. This stood in distinct contrast to the situation in England and the United States during the same period; see a discussion in Kendrick, 1996: chap. 3, of the feminized “young person” put at risk by sexual content.

29. See essays in Cody and Terpak, 2011, on the origins of Chinese photography; see Naquin, 2000: 692, for the Cixi portraits.

30. Arguably, masturbation was also quintessentially modern, becoming the target of fearful censure in the eighteenth century along with the rise of consumer capital-ism (Laqueur, 2003). My focus here on the supply side of pornography’s emer-gence requires that I reserve for the future a discussion of its “usefulness” to the consumer.

31. Pornography in China after 1949 is beyond my present scope, but explicit texts continued to be both widely popular and regularly condemned, contra Kendrick’s conclusions about the Euro-American milieu.

32. See above; also, for example, BJMA181-019-34345 (1922), which refers to “for-eign spring picture glass boards” 外國春畫玻璃板—prints mounted between glass, perhaps depicting foreign subjects. Yangpian 洋片 (foreign photo) was

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also a common phrase since the late Qing (FHAb, 1906: 37-1501-302, vol. 6, 1645-1647).

33. Ni Yide 倪貽德, quoted above roundly castigating “nude art” used for profit, was a prominent member of modernist painting circles in the 1930s (Shih, 2001: 124).

34. Neither early Republican police nor suspects in Beijing ever seem to have raised older ideas about extending lifespans and producing healthy heirs through proper conjugal activity as a justification for explicit representations of sex, likely because the sexual cosmology and epistemological authority that the “bedcham-ber arts” represented were at odds with attempts by producers and vendors to rebut legal censure. The oeuvre of the bibliophile and ultra-conservative scholar Ye Dehui 葉德輝 was a rare exception; I will address it in a future work.

35. Though political turmoil, socioeconomic instability, and armed violence were endemic in the early Republic, historians no longer simply regard the period as a “failure” (Rankin, 1997; Strauss, 1997).

36. The BJMA online database recorded this case erroneously as 181-018-21020.37. Unable to personally examine the title catalogued as Nannü jiaohe xinlun 男女

交合新論 in the collection of the National Library of China, I referred to listings on the secondhand bookseller website Kongfuzi with metadata matching that given in advertisements and the comments made by Kang and Sun (Kongfuzi.cn 2012a, 2012b).

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Author Biography

Y. Yvon Wang is a PhD candidate in Stanford University’s Department of History. She is currently completing a dissertation on the emergence of pornography as con-cept and commodity in China across the turn of the twentieth century, with a focus on Beijing.

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