Courtesans and Opium: Romantic Illusions of the Fool of Yangzhou

2. The finest is Han Bangqing’s Haishang hua liezhuan, translated by Eileen Chang and Eva Hung as The Sing-song Girls of Shanghai (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005). On the courtesans of the Foreign Settlements of Shanghai, see Catherine Vance Yeh, Shanghai Love: Courtesans, Intellectuals, and Entertainment Culture (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2006).

3. Lin Yutang, My Country and My People (New York: John Day, 1935), 161.

4. The Yangzhou huafang lu’s detailed listings of streets with their locations may have even suggested the novel’s explicit itineraries See, for example, juan 9, pp. 178–190, in the Jiangsu Guangling guji keyinshe edition (Yangzhou, 1984). On the history and geography of Yangzhou, see Antonia Finnane, Speaking of Yangzhou: A Chinese City, 1550–1850 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004).

5. It is contained in a manuscript collection entitled Yangzhou fengtu cicui that is preserved in the Yangzhou Library. It is reprinted in Yangzhou zhuzhici, comp. Xia Youlan et al., 82–90 (Yangzhou: privately printed, 1992). Only the author’s studio name is given: Hanpu jiying of Yizheng.

6. For example, there are poems on the young men who take a small boat and follow the others (chap. 16), on mimics (chap. 13), on the mapi (chap. 16), on the impounding of boats (chap. 4), on the tea kiosk (chap. 16), as well as other poems on clothes, hairstyles, pipes, venereal disease, gambling, teashops, and opium. Fengyue meng is also related to some earlier oral and vernacular literature that deals with courtesans, loan-sharking, and gambling (Hanan, “Illusion of Romance,” 41–42).

7. Yan Duanshu et al., eds., Xuzuan Yangzhoufu zhi (1874), juan 17 and 18. A widow’s suicide for love is also very rare in fiction. A story in the late-Ming collection Xing shi yan (no. 10) is one example. The case in Rulin waishi (The Scholars), chap. 48, is of a young widow pressured by her father into killing herself.

8. Hu Shi, “Zhencao wenti,” Xin Qingnian 5, no. 1 (July 15, 1918): 11.

9. It was first entitled Mengyou Shanghai mingji zheng feng zhuan. It has been reprinted several times since, sometimes under different titles. Fengyue meng was also utilized in other ways in the same period. The novel Shenlou waishi, of which there is an 1895 edition, reprints without acknowledgment the whole of the vaudeville section (chap. 10) as its own chap. 8.

10. This translation is based principally on the edition edited by Wang Junnian in Xiaoshuo erjuan, Zhongguo jindai wenxue zuopin xilie (Fuzhou: Haixia wenyi chubanshe, 1990) and secondarily on that edited by Hua Yun and published by Beijing University Press in 1990. Use has also been made of the 1883 Shenbaoguan edition in the Harvard-Yenching Library.

1. “Flowers” stands for prostitutes.

2. In Ming and Qing dynasty literature Guan Zhong (725–645 B.C.E.) was often credited with creating the brothel as an institution. The belief was apparently based, erroneously, on a reference in the early historical text Zhan guo ce (Intrigues of the Warring States).

3. I.e., of romantic excess.

4. The text has Jiaochang (the Parade) before Lower Commerce Street, which is a mistake, presumably by an editor.

5. A widespread brothel custom. Potential clients could visit a brothel and be given a tea party at which they would meet the prostitutes. The party was nominally free of charge.

6. The name is a pun on guolai ren (old hand, veteran).

1. I.e., the borrower received ten or twenty percent less than the face amount, but had to repay the face amount when the loan fell due. This kind of loan was designed to hide the fact that the true interest rate was being set at an illegally high level.

2. The Parade (Jiaochang) was the main entertainment center of the New City. Yangzhou at this time was composed of two walled cities situated side by side, with the New City to the east.

3. Yangzhou was the center of the rich Lianghuai region of the government salt monopoly.

4. A famous fan maker, whose shop was on Fan Lane (Shanzi xiang) in Hangzhou.

5. Mexican silver dollars, acquired through foreign trade, were in wide circulation as a second currency.

6. The origin was foreign, but it had long been copied by Chinese artisans.

7. A prose-and-verse genre in which the performer accompanied himself with drum and gong.

8. I.e., he was in line to take the post.

9. Tang-dynasty coins.

10. Fenzhang, by which a prostitute’s earnings were shared with the brothel. Kunzhang, the other type of contract found in this novel, meant that the woman was sold to the brothel in return for a periodic payment made to her family. I translate the latter term as “indentured.”

11. Raw opium was used by women, especially, as a means of committing suicide.

12. Lizhentang. It was established in 1840 through private funds donated by a merchant. It was intended for the reclamation of young prostitutes.

13. I.e., dupes or suckers.

1. When the original Daichunlin shop proved highly successful, it was imitated by other shops set up nearby that called themselves by the same name.

2. On the eastern wall of the Old City, between the Old and New Cities.

3. A hardwood much used in furniture, ranging in color from red to gold.

4. A Yangzhou artist who flourished in the first half of the nineteenth century. Most of the artists mentioned in these pages were the author’s contemporaries and, quite possibly, his acquaintances.

5. A hardwood used for furniture in the Yangzhou region, especially in the nineteenth century.

6. A Yangzhou artist.

7. The recipient may possibly have been Yuan You’s father or grandfather.

8. A calligrapher from Yizheng, near Yangzhou city (Yan Duanshu et al., Xuzuan Yangzhoufu zhi [1874], 16.4b).

9. Meaning long life.

10. The character bo is explained by Lin Sumen as wood stuck on a brick base (Hanjiang sanbai yin [Yangzhou, 1808], 3.12a). It was apparently a Yangzhou specialty. I translate it according to context as either paneled or veneered.

11. Fang Hua lived in Yangzhou during the first half of the nineteenth century. He was a friend of Wang Yingxiang.

12. Yu Chan, style Buqing (Yan, Xuzuan Yangzhoufu zhi, 16.1b). Large landscapes were his specialty.

13. Wang Su, style Xiaomou (1794–1877).

14. Not yet identified.

15. Ni Can, style Yantian, of Yangzhou (1764–1841).

16. Liu Yi, style Guzun, of Yangzhou.

17. The rhapsody, by the Tang poet Du Mu, was a piece much favored by calligraphers. Qian Wenshan has not yet been identified.

18. A detailed account of this kind of opium smoking is quoted in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1911 ed., s.v. “Opium.”

19. The styles of Lu Shu and Yuan You, respectively.

20. The islet of Little Gold Hill is set in the scenic system of lakes and waterways to the north and northwest of the city.

2. I.e., the borrower receives a loan of only twenty-seven taels but has to repay (and pay interest on) the nominal sum of thirty taels.

3. Jie and Zhou were infamous tyrants of the Xia and Shang dynasties, respectively.

4. The original loan was for thirty taels (of which he actually received twenty-seven). The interest was three. Two months’ interest in arrears comes to one eighty, and an extra three months’ interest to four fifty. Closing charges come to four, and the so-called discount (10 percent of fifty) to five. The total by Yuan’s calculations: forty-eight thirty.

5. The quality of noodles was distinguished by price. Yangzhou meng, by Zhou Sheng, describes the author’s experiences in Yangzhou from about 1840 ([Taipei: Shijie shuju, 1959], juan 3, p. 47).

6. Li Dou gives this as the name of one of the large pleasure boats (Yangzhou huafang lu [The Pleasure Boats of Yangzhou] [author’s preface dated 1795]; see 1984 ed., Jiangsu Guangling keyinshe, 18.404). It may have been a traditional name.

7. The Cangjingyuan (Scripture Repository) was one of four monasteries in the grounds of the famous Tianning Temple, which was just north of the city wall. The author did not find it necessary to point out the irony of a brothel’s leasing part of a monastery for its business. What is remarkable is that the name he gives the brothel—Jinyulou, or Advancing-the-Jade Hall—is that of another of the four monasteries attached to the temple. See Li, Yangzhou huafang lu, 4.91, on the monasteries.

8. On the northern wall of the New City.

1. I.e., rectangular but with rounded ends.

2. The pear-shaped pipa, a plucked instrument.

3. Auspicious objects such as a pearl, an old coin, a mirror, and so forth.

4. The original West Chamber story of Yingying and Zhang, by Yuan Zhen (779–831).

5. An incident in Story of the Stone, chap. 62.

6. An incident involving characters from Story of the Stone. The Naiad’s House was Lin Daiyu’s.

7. A commonplace in fiction from at least the Ming dynasty.

8. A kind of firework.

9. These sites were south of the city wall. Lu Shu and Fragrance were high enough up to see over the whole of the walled city.

10. Counters of ivory or bone were often used in drinking games. In this novel, they are used by courtesans when singing songs as a substitute for drinking.

11. The song is based on an incident in chap. 50 of Story of the Stone. The poetry society is meeting in Li Yan’s Snowy Rushes Retreat. Baoyu has performed abysmally in composing linked verses, and as a penalty Li Yan has sent him to ask the prickly nun Miaoyu (Adamantina) in her Green Bower Hermitage for some sprigs of plum blossom from her tree.

12. A song from Tang Xianzu’s play Handanji, scene 3. Perhaps more significant, it is sung in chap. 63 of Story of the Stone by the young actress Fangguan (Parfumée).

13. Huqin, a single-stringed bowed instrument.

14. Erhuang and Xipi were two independent kinds of music that, in the nineteenth century, were combined to form the music of what is now known as Beijing opera.

15. A species of magnolia.

16. The first words in the lines of the Chinese text make up the courtesan’s name. “Moon” (yue) and “fragrance” (xiang) combine to form Fragrance’s name, Yuexiang.

17. The Jinyulou was outside the city wall, and the gates were closed late at night.

18. A common topic, usually on the West Chamber theme.

1. In the Old City. The wall mentioned is the one dividing the Old and New Cities.

2. An S-shaped design that symbolized good luck.

3. I.e., beauty patches.

4. A symbol of good luck.

5. The reader has to imagine that Mu Zhu takes “courtesan,” a word he doesn’t know, as “cousin.” The Chinese word biaozi (prostitute) is a homonym of biaozi (female cousin).

1. The famous early novel Shuihu zhuan.

2. The Four Books of Confucian doctrine: The Analects, The Doctrine of the Mean, The Great Learning, and Mencius.

3. The famous early opera Xixiang ji. The quotations are drawn from the songs, not the dialogue.

4. Lu Junyi, whose nickname was Jade Unicorn; Analects, 11.9; West Chamber (the Jin Shengtan version, popular at the time), act 4, scene 3.

5. The song may be conventional in the sense that it is full of stock imagery. Note, however, that Wu Zhen constantly belittles his mistress.

6. Xiao Rang; Analects, 7.37; West Chamber, act 2, scene 1.

7. Lu Zhishen; Great Learning, 1.4; West Chamber, act 2, scene1. The “Penitence” is a Buddhist work that is said to have been composed by Emperor Wu of the Liang for his deceased wife.

8. Yan Qing; Mencius, 3A.3.6; West Chamber, act 2, scene 3.

9. Nü xiao jing, by a Tang-dynasty author.

10. A contemporary popular song tune. There are examples in juan 12 of Zhuxiang Zhuren’s Xiao hui ji, of which there is an 1837 edition.

11. This line is found in a number of songs on the West Chamber theme.

12. This joke still circulates in a variety of forms. The speaker is usually a rich man with cultural aspirations, and, having used the word “mother,” he has to balance it with “father.” Note that “fortune’ and “father” are near homonyms (fu).

13. Song Jiang; Analects, 10.16.5; West Chamber, act 4, scene1.

14. Many popular songs were structured on the sequence of the five watches into which the night was divided.

15. A strong type of opium produced in Bengal.

16. Literally, foster fathers, a term of respect used by the courtesans when addressing gang members, runners, and the like.

17. A common idiom, meaning that they will take notice only of force, not virtue.

1. See the Meng xiang ci in Yangzhou zhuzhici liuzhong, ed. Du Zhaotang (Taipei: Jianguo shudian, 1951), 7b. According to the editor’s note, it was the custom when seeing off visiting women or children to give them benzoin scent.

2. To drive out evil influences.

3. A deity who reforms the wicked.

4. When debts had to be settled.

5. “String of cash” puns on Guanzhi.

1. I.e., find a good client for her.

2. On the twenty-third of the twelfth month.

2. In the Chinese text a list of the slips is given, including the sources and the prizes, but not, of course, the solutions.

3. “No sacrifices on yin days” (Yin bu ji si) is identical in sound to “Silver won’t help in the matter” (Yin bu ji shi), of which the clue is “Only gold can help in a crisis.” (Note that si and shi are pronounced alike in Yangzhou dialect.) All of the riddles here, known as the Zhaoyang type, are on this principle. The contestant is given the clue and the title or source and asked to come up with the original quotation.

4. The source is given as yan (proverb, popular saying). The quotation is Wu ying wu ye and the clue Wu yin wu ye. Yin and ying are pronounced the same in Yangzhou dialect.

5. All of the listed riddles appear to be of the Zhaoyang type. (Zhaoyang is an early name for Xinghua, in the vicinity of Yangzhou, where this type is said to have originated.) Note the number of the Zhaoyang type in the publications of the Zhushu chunshe poetry society (Aisu Sheng [Lover of Simplicity], ed., Zhushu chunshe chao, reprinted in Zhonghua mishu jicheng, ed. Gao Boyu et al. [Beijing: Renmin ribao chubanshe, 1991], 1:367–423). The explanation of this riddle is given in the Zhushu chunshe chao, 371 (fanli). It involves two moves, first via synonyms, then via homonyms. Shang xin (brokenhearted) is read as bei (sad); xi wen (ask about) is read as pan (question); erfu (husband) is read as lang (husband); and bing (illness) is read as ji (illness). Then the new version, bei pan lang ji, is read as homonyms in the common phrase “empty cups and dishes scattered about.” Note that we have been given a clue as to the general area of the answer.

6. Another characteristic Yangzhou type. Dan (true, red), dai (age), and chuan (hand down) are read as the homonyms “worried,” “bring,” and “boat,” respectively. The area of the answer is “human activity,” and the answer proves to be “pulling a boat upstream.”

7. Shi shuo xinyu, 11.3. This is the founding example of the type. Cao E was a famous filial daughter. As Cao Cao and a companion were passing by the stele erected in her honor, they saw this inscription on the back of the stele. Cao Cao guessed that the riddle meant “Utterly wonderful, lovely words.” For example, “yellow pongee” means “colored silk,” and the characters for “colored” (se) and “silk” (si), when combined, form the character for “utterly” (jue). “Youthful wife” means “young [shao] woman [nü],” which, when combined together, form “lovely” (miao), and so forth.

8. The type was supposedly invented by the Song poets Su Shi and Huang Tingjian. Only a couple of samples exist, perhaps because of its inherent difficulty. To the best of my knowledge, this riddle, using a sentence from Mencius, appears only in the Yangzhou riddle collection Zhushu chunshe chao (1:375). The solution is given, but the intermediate stage is not clear, to the translator at least.

9. Jia Ming separates the word for riddle into its component parts as “mystifying words.”

10. Jiang Taigong, who became adviser to the founders of the Zhou dynasty, is said to have fished with a straight piece of metal instead of a hook. In fact, he was waiting to be “discovered” by the Zhou kings. See the Yuan-dynasty historical tale Wu Wang fa Zhou.

11. I.e., the life of prostitution.

1. The first characters in the words translated as “brush” and “mirror” are homonyms or near homonyms of the characters for Paria’s name.

2. The mirror is referred to in a common image as a caltrop flower. Paria’s forced interpretation is, of course, designed to provoke Yuan You.

3. The Thousand Poems (Qian jia shi) is a popular Song-dynasty anthology. However, these much-quoted lines were actually written by the early-Ming poet Gao Qi, in one of his “Nine Poems in Praise of the Plum Tree.” “Hermit” and “Beauty” are both images applied to the plum tree and its blossom, which makes Yuan You’s choice of the lines seem even more ludicrous.

4. Paria pretends to take the lines as descriptive of her genitalia.

5. I.e., deflowering.

1. The Prince of Spring means the first month of spring. The emperor was traditionally hailed as living for ten thousand years.

2. A kind of tael that “had a more or less national range” (Lien-sheng Yang, Money and Credit in China [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1952], 47).

3. Both lines refer to examination success, but their meaning is here extended to another sphere.

4. A particular character is chosen. The leader quotes a line with that character in it. If, for example, that character is in the third place in the line, the person sitting in the third place at the table has to respond, and so on.

5. Shi Kefa (1602–1645), the general who tried to defend Yangzhou against the invading Manchu army.

6. Debts were settled three times a year, at major festivals, of which this was one.

7. The festivals were held in the summer, on the fifth of the fifth month, the eighteenth of the sixth month, and the fifteenth of the seventh month.

1. In the text it is Lu Shu who watches the boats and Fragrance who lays on the feast—clearly a mistake.

2. Zongzi, glutinous rice mixed with other ingredients and wrapped in bamboo leaves.

3. Types of fireworks.

4. The text refers to Huizhou, from which many of the Yangzhou pawnbrokers came.

5. Li Dou, Yangzhou huafang lu (The Pleasure Boats of Yangzhou) (Yangzhou: Jiangsu Guangling keyinshe, 1984), 11.245.

6. See the Xiyouji (Journey to the West), chaps. 40–42, in which the Red Boy monster is subdued by Guanyin. Yangzhou huafang lu describes it as one of the acts performed by boys on the stern of the dragon boats (11.240).

7. Carp trying to leap up the Dragon’s Gate symbolize candidates attempting to succeed in the civil service examinations.

8. A story about Zhang Fei, one of the warrior heroes of the Sanguo tongsu yanyi (Romance of the Three Kingdoms).

9. According to the nineteenth-century Suzhou writer Gu Lü, vaudeville reached Suzhou from Yangzhou. He lists a number of the turns described here (Tong qiao yi zhou lu [Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1980], 12.163).

10. The strategist Su Qin in the third century B.C.E. helped to form an alliance of six states against the powerful state of Qin. He is said to have been honored by all six states.

11. There is a pun on fengyue (romance) in this line.

12. This refers to the homonymous shi hu (ten pots), a card game.

13. There is a contradiction in the text with regard to time; the clock strikes twice now and also at the end of the chapter. This hour should no doubt be earlier than two.

14. A widespread type of entertainment performed by two or three people, one of whom performed with a fan while another played the fiddle. The titles belong to a standard repertoire.

15. The title is Da lianxiang. “Prodigal” refers to its subject matter.

1. One qian is equal to 1/10 ounce.

2. A listing of common surnames that served as elementary reading material.

3. Meaning “light.”

4. A martial Daoist deity, whose image is often the guardian at the gate of a Daoist temple.

1. This story has not been identified.

2. In this dance a shaman dresses up as a god and drives away the demons of illness.

3. In the Huayan sutra Sudhana (Shancai) visits fifty-three sages and other worthies.

4. It is not known what kind of trick this referred to.

1. In fact, Emperor Qianlong gave the temple its name during his visit in 1765.

3. I.e., they knelt down with the stool in front of them. A joss stick would have been attached to it.

4. Li Dou, Yangzhou huafang lu (The Pleasure Boats of Yangzhou) (Yangzhou: Jiangsu Guangling keyinshe, 1984), 13.290.

5. A dish of eggs was traditionally provided to friends and family when a woman was pregnant or gave birth.

6. See Li, Yangzhou huafang lu, 16.347, for a description of the mapi and their activities.

7. The Classic of Filial Piety (Xiao jing), first section.

8. A traditional card game known as shi hu (ten pots), also known as shi hu (ten lakes). It was often accompanied by gambling. By picking up and discarding cards, the aim was to collect sequences of numbers in the same suit. Since the suits were much the same as in mahjong, I have used the common English mahjong terms here.

9. The first line of a song in Hong Sheng’s (1605–1704) famous play Chang sheng dian (The Palace of Eternal Youth). In the play the singer is the musician Li Guinian, who is recounting the history of the emperors’ power for the benefit of his favorite, Yang Guifei.

10. The song is from the play Mudan ting (Peony Pavilion), by the Ming play-wright Tang Xianxu. It is also one of the songs that Lin Daiyu overhears, and is strangely moved by, in chap. 23 of Story of the Stone.

1. A woman’s jealousy.

1. Xinsi is one of the terms in the sixty-year cycle.

2. The styles of Jia Ming, Wu Zhen, and Wei Bi, respectively.

3. The reference is to the story “Shenxian zhuan” (Tales of Immortals), in which two young men, Liu and Ruan, meet and fall in love with two divine maidens. See the Taiping guangji, 61.

4. I.e., the number of years is not a multiple of ten.

1. Piao feizi, meaning literally something like sluice out your insides.

1. Mount Ling, in Henan province, was famous for its ancient Buddhist temples.

1. Jin means “gold” and is also a surname. The surname Yin is a near homonym of the word for “silver.”

1. The chief officer, or jail warden.

2. Instead of the nominal one thousand. Yuan You was in fact taking a commission on top of the extra money he had obtained from Wu Zhen’s wife.

1. A jian is not the same thing as a room; it is a division of a house, usually measuring about nine by twelve feet, within the uprights supporting the roof.

1. He was eighth in seniority in the male line in his generation of the family. His name, Wangba, is also a common term of abuse.

2. The word translated as “married” is cong liang. Used of a prostitute, it means she has shed her inferior status by marrying, usually as a concubine.

3. Si means four or fourth.

4. Possibly meaning a male prostitute.

5. Tinfoil sacrificial offerings.

6. The house was evidently on the west side of Ridge Street, backing onto the moat. The Taiping Dock was at the southern end of Ridge Street.

1. This refers to a popular belief that if you adopt you will shortly afterward bear a child yourself.

2. Supposedly the best time for conception.

1. Souls held in limbo until released by such services.

2. The text puts Mistress Dai at the head of this list, evidently by mistake. She was still in Suzhou.

3. I.e., been forced to take clients.

4. Literally, drum song verse.

5. Kinds of decorative lantern.

6. With willow branches.

7. I.e., the Duanyang Festival.

1. Denoting an official of the fifth rank or above.

2. A form of patronage seeking.

3. Many northerners had migrated to Qingjiang (later known as Huaiyin).

1. Chong xi. The term usually means to banish the demons of illness by arranging some joyous experience, such as a wedding. Here it is extended to mean banishing the demons of illness by anticipating the worst.