Download or read book Courtesans and Opium written by Hanshangmengren and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2009 with total page 346 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A chilling tale of seduction and vice set in the illiciit world of nineteenth-century China.
Download or read book Courtesans and Opium written by Anonymous and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2009-06-23 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In his preface, the anonymous author of Courtesans and Opium describes his book as an act of penance for thirty years spent patronizing the brothels of Yangzhou. Written in the 1840s, his story is filled with vice and dark consequence, portraying the hazards of the city's seedy underbelly and warning others against the example of the Fool. Chinese literature's first true "city novel," Courtesans and Opium recounts the illustrious career of a debauched soul enveloped by enthralling pursuits and romantic illusions. While socially acceptable marriages were arranged and often loveless, brothels offered men accomplished courtesans who served as both enchanting companions and sensual lovers. These professional sirens dressed in the latest styles and dripped with gold, silver, and jewels. From an early age, they were taught to excel at various arts and graces, which transformed the brothel into a kind of club for men to meet, exchange gossip, and smoke opium at their leisure. The Fool's fable follows five sworn brothers and their respective relationships with Yangzhou courtesans, revealing in acute detail the lurid materialism of this dangerous world—its violence and corruption as well as its seductive but illusory promise. Never before translated into English, Courtesans and Opium offers a brilliant window into the decadence of nineteenth-century China.
Download or read book Prostitution and Sexuality in Shanghai written by Christian Henriot and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2001-04-23 with total page 496 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Henriot portrays the sex trade in Shanghai, from the life of the courtesan to street prostitution.
Download or read book Living the Good Life written by Elif Akçetin and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2017-10-02 with total page 591 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Eighteenth-century consumers of the Qing and Ottoman empires had access to an increasingly diverse array of goods, from home furnishings to fashionable clothes and new foodstuffs. While this tendency was of shorter duration and intensity in the Ottoman world, some urbanites of the sultans’ realm did enjoy silks, coffee, and Chinese porcelain. By contrast, a vibrant consumer culture flourished in Qing China, where many consumers flaunted their fur coats and indulged in gourmet dining. Living the Good Life explores how goods furthered the expansion of social networks, alliance-building between rulers and regional elites, and the expression of elite, urban, and gender identities. The scholarship in the present volume highlights the recently emerging “material turn” in Qing and Ottoman historiographies and provides a framework for future research. Contributors: Arif Bilgin, Michael G. Chang, Edhem Eldem, Colette Establet, Antonia Finnane, Selim Karahasanoglu, Lai Hui-min, Amanda Phillips, Hedda Reindl-Kiel, Martina Siebert, Su Te-Cheng, Joanna Waley-Cohen, Wang Dagang, Wu Jen-shu, Yıldız Yılmaz, and Yun Yan.
Download or read book Red Light Novels of the Late Qing written by Chloë F. Starr and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2007 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Chloe Starr's book offers a comprehensive literary reading of six nineteenth-century Chinese red-light novels and assesses how and why they alter our view of late Qing fiction and the authorial self.
Download or read book Moral Nation written by Miriam Kingsberg and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2013-12-07 with total page 325 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This trailblazing study examines the history of narcotics in Japan to explain the development of global criteria for political legitimacy in nations and empires in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Japan underwent three distinct crises of sovereignty in its modern history: in the 1890s, during the interwar period, and in the 1950s. Each crisis provoked successively escalating crusades against opium and other drugs, in which moral entrepreneurs--bureaucrats, cultural producers, merchants, law enforcement, scientists, and doctors, among others--focused on drug use as a means of distinguishing between populations fit and unfit for self-rule. Moral Nation traces the instrumental role of ideologies about narcotics in the country's efforts to reestablish its legitimacy as a nation and empire. As Kingsberg demonstrates, Japan's growing status as an Asian power and a "moral nation" expanded the notion of "civilization" from an exclusively Western value to a universal one. Scholars and students of Japanese history, Asian studies, world history, and global studies will gain an in-depth understanding of how Japan's experience with narcotics influenced global standards for sovereignty and shifted the aim of nation building, making it no longer a strictly political activity but also a moral obligation to society.
Download or read book A Cultural History of Dress and Fashion in the Age of Empire written by Denise Amy Baxter and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2018-11-01 with total page 545 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the production of dress shifted dramatically from being predominantly hand-crafted in small quantities to machine-manufactured in bulk. The increasing democratization of appearances made new fashions more widely available, but at the same time made the need to differentiate social rank seem more pressing. In this age of empire, the coding of class, gender and race was frequently negotiated through dress in complex ways, from fashionable dress which restricted or exaggerated the female body to liberating reform dress, from self-defining black dandies to the oppressions and resistances of slave dress. Richly illustrated with over 100 images and drawing on a plethora of visual, textual and object sources, A Cultural History of Dress and Fashion in the Age of Empire presents essays on textiles, production and distribution, the body, belief, gender and sexuality, status, ethnicity, and visual and literary representations to illustrate the diversity and cultural significance of dress and fashion in the period.
Download or read book Dangerous Pleasures written by Gail Hershatter and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2023-09-01 with total page 631 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This pioneering work examines prostitution in Shanghai from the late nineteenth century to the present. Drawn mostly from the daughters and wives of the working poor and declassé elites, prostitutes in Shanghai were near the bottom of class and gender hierarchies. Yet they were central figures in Shanghai urban life, entering the historical record whenever others wanted to appreciate, castigate, count, regulate, cure, pathologize, warn about, rescue, eliminate, or deploy them as a symbol in a larger social panorama. Over the past century, prostitution has been understood in many ways: as a source of urbanized pleasures, a profession full of unscrupulous and greedy schemers, a changing site of work for women, a source of moral danger and physical disease, a marker of national decay, and a sign of modernity. For the Communist leadership of the 1950s, the elimination of prostitution symbolized China's emergence as a strong, healthy, and modern nation. In the past decade, as prostitution once again has become a recognized feature of Chinese society, it has been incorporated into a larger public discussion about what kind of modernity China should seek and what kind of sex and gender arrangements should characterize that modernity. Prostitutes, like every other non-elite group, did not record their own lives. How can sources generated by intense public argument about the "larger" meanings of prostitution be read for clues to those lives? Hershatter makes use of a broad range of materials: guidebooks to the pleasure quarters, collections of anecdotes about high-class courtesans, tabloid gossip columns, municipal regulations prohibiting street soliciting, police interrogations of streetwalkers and those accused of trafficking in women, newspaper reports on court cases involving both courtesans and streetwalkers, polemics by Chinese and foreign reformers, learned articles by Chinese scholars commenting on the world history of prostitution and analyzing its local causes, surveys by doctors and social workers on sexually transmitted disease in various Shanghai populations, relief agency records, fictionalized accounts of the scams and sufferings of prostitutes, memoirs by former courtesan house patrons, and interviews with former officials and reformers. Although a courtesan may never set pen to paper, we can infer a great deal about her strategizing and working of the system through the vast cautionary literature that tells her customers how not to be defrauded by her. Newspaper accounts of the arrests and brief court testimonies of Shanghai streetwalkers let us glimpse the way that prostitutes positioned themselves to get the most they could from the legal system. Without recourse to direct speech, Hershatter argues, these women have nevertheless left an audible trace. Central to this study is the investigation of how things are known and later remembered, and how, later still, they are simultaneously apprehended and reinvented by the historian.
Download or read book That Woman written by Anne Sebba and published by St. Martin's Press. This book was released on 2012-02-14 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first full scale biography of Wallis Simpson to be written by a woman, exploring the mind of one of the most glamorous and reviled figures of the Twentieth Century, a character who played prominently in the blockbuster film The King's Speech. This is the story of the American divorcee notorious for allegedly seducing a British king off his throne. "That woman," so called by Queen Elizabeth, The Queen Mother, was born Bessie Wallis Warfield in 1896 in Baltimore. Neither beautiful nor brilliant, she endured an impoverished childhood, which fostered in her a burning desire to rise above her circumstances. Acclaimed biographer Anne Sebba offers an eye-opening account of one of the most talked about women of her generation. It explores the obsessive nature of Simpson's relationship with Prince Edward, the suggestion that she may have had a Disorder of Sexual Development, and new evidence showing she may never have wanted to marry Edward at all. Since her death, Simpson has become a symbol of female empowerment as well as a style icon. But her psychology remains an enigma. Drawing from interviews and newly discovered letters, That Woman shines a light on this captivating and complex woman, an object of fascination that has only grown with the years.
Download or read book The Sing song Girls of Shanghai written by Bangqing Han and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2007-11-30 with total page 593 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Desire, virtue, courtesans (also known as sing-song girls), and the denizens of Shanghai's pleasure quarters are just some of the elements that constitute Han Bangqing's extraordinary novel of late imperial China. Han's richly textured, panoramic view of late-nineteenth-century Shanghai follows a range of characters from beautiful sing-song girls to lower-class prostitutes and from men in positions of social authority to criminals and ambitious young men recently arrived from the country. Considered one of the greatest works of Chinese fiction, The Sing-song Girls of Shanghai is now available for the first time in English. Neither sentimental nor sensationalistic in its portrayal of courtesans and their male patrons, Han's work inquires into the moral and psychological consequences of desire. Han, himself a frequent habitué of Shanghai brothels, reveals a world populated by lonely souls who seek consolation amid the pleasures and decadence of Shanghai's demimonde. He describes the romantic games played by sing-song girls to lure men, as well as the tragic consequences faced by those who unexpectedly fall in love with their customers. Han also tells the stories of male patrons who find themselves emotionally trapped between desire and their sense of propriety. First published in 1892, and made into a film by Hou Hsiao-hsien in 1998, The Sing-song Girls of Shanghai is recognized as a pioneering work of Chinese fiction in its use of psychological realism and its infusion of modernist sensibilities into the traditional genre of courtesan fiction. The novel's stature has grown with the recent discovery of Eileen Chang's previously unknown translation, which was unearthed among her papers at the University of Southern California. Chang, who lived in Shanghai until 1956 when she moved to California and began to write in English, is one of the most acclaimed Chinese writers of the twentieth century.
Download or read book Lost Bodies Prostitution and Masculinity in Chinese Fiction written by Paola Zamperini and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2010-06-28 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This important contribution to the study of early modern Chinese fiction and representation of gender relations focuses on literary representations of the prostitute produced in the Ming and Qing periods. Following her heavily symbolic body, the present work maps this fictional heroine's journey from innocence to sex-work and beyond. This crucial angle allows the author to paint a picture of gender identity, sexuality, and desire that is at once unitary and multi-layered, and that comes to illuminate some of the major themes in the construction of Chinese modernity.
Download or read book A Newspaper for China written by Barbara Mittler and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2020-03-23 with total page 533 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1872 in the treaty port of Shanghai, British merchant Ernest Major founded one of the longest-lived and most successful of modern Chinese-language newspapers, the Shenbao. His publication quickly became a leading newspaper in China and won praise as a "department store of news," a "forum for intellectual discussion and moral challenge," and an "independent mouthpiece of the public voice." Located in the International Settlement of Shanghai, it was free of government regulation. Paradoxically, in a country where the government monopolized the public sphere, it became one of the world's most independent newspapers. As a private venture, the Shenbao was free of the ideologies that constrained missionary papers published in China during the nineteenth century. But it also lacked the subsidies that allowed these papers to survive without a large readership. As a purely commercial venture, the foreign-managed Shenbao depended on the acceptance of educated Chinese, who would write for it, read it, and buy it. This book sets out to analyze how the managers of the Shenbao made their alien product acceptable to Chinese readers and how foreign-style newspapers became alternative modes of communication acknowledged as a powerful part of the Chinese public sphere within a few years. In short, it describes how the foreign Shenbao became a "newspaper for China."
Download or read book Understanding Canton written by Virgil K. Y. Ho and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2005 with total page 537 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: By studying six different aspects of culture in Canton in the period between the two World Wars, this book helps broaden our limited knowledge of the social and cultural lives of the common people in this largest city of South China. The author examines how the Cantonese in this periodindulged in their imagined cultural superiority as "modern" citizens, ushering in a cult of the modern city. During this period, Cantonese opera was also emerging and evolving into a widely accepted form of commercialised mass entertainment. The process of social and cultural change and its impacton the development of this city and its people are revealed throughout the book. This book also aims to redress some major misconceptions of the socio-cultural realities as seen in official rhetoric or academic discourse on the matters of patriotism and anti-foreignism, gambling, prostitution, and opium consumption. Contemporary non-official and folk materials reveal that thecommon people were much more pro-Western than xenophobic in attitude, and the alleged social and political "calamities" of gambling, opium consumption and prostitution were more rhetorical than real. Understanding Canton provides us with, not only a fuller and more comprehensive picture of city lifeand popular mentalities, but also an important clue to understand how and why the social history of this city was distorted and constructed in ways that suited the political ideology and nation-building agenda of the ruling regimes.
Download or read book L c X written by Vu Trong Phung and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2010-11-30 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What does it mean when a city of 180,000 people has more than 5,000 women working as prostitutes? This question frames Vu Trong Phung’s 1937 classic reportage Luc Xi. In the late 1930s, Hanoi had a burgeoning commercial sex industry that involved thousands of people and hundreds of businesses. It was the center of the city’s nightlife and the source of suffering, violence, exploitation, and a venereal disease epidemic. For Phung, a popular writer and intellectual, it also raised disturbing questions about the state of Vietnamese society and culture and whether his country really was "progressing" under French colonial rule. Translator Shaun Kingsley Malarney’s thoughtful and multifaceted introduction provides historical background on colonialism, prostitution, and venereal disease in Vietnam and discusses reportage as a literary genre, political tool, and historical source. A fully annotated translation of Luc Xi follows, in which Phung takes readers into the heart of colonial Hanoi’s sex industry, portraying its female workers, the officials who attempted to regulate it, the doctors who treated its victims, and the secretive medical facility known as the Nha Luc Xi ("The Dispensary"), which examined prostitutes for venereal diseases and held them for treatment. Drawing from his interviews with doctors, officials, and prostitutes and the writings of French doctors on prostitution and venereal disease, Phung provides a rare, firsthand look at the damage caused by the commercial sex industry. His sympathetic portrayal of the Vietnamese underclass is considered one of the most accurate, but he also provides one of the most acerbic, humorous, and critical views of the changes wrought by colonialism in Southeast Asia.
Download or read book Narcotic Culture written by Frank Dikötter and published by C. HURST & CO. PUBLISHERS. This book was released on 2004 with total page 350 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: China was turned into a nation of opium addicts by the pernicious forces of imperialist trade. This study systematically questions this assertion on the basis of abundant archives from China, Europe and the US, showing that opium had few harmful effects on either health or longevity.
Download or read book Polygamy and Sublime Passion written by Keith McMahon and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2009-11-24 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For centuries of Chinese history, polygamy and prostitution were closely linked practices that legitimized the 'polygynous male'. This title introduces a fresh concept, 'passive polygamy', to explain the unusual number of Qing stories in which women take charge of a man's desires, turning him into an instrument of female will.
Download or read book Yoshiwara written by Stephen Longstreet and published by Tuttle Publishing. This book was released on 2011-05-07 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Lust will not keep…Something must be done about it."--inscription at the entrance to Yoshiwara For over a hundred years the Western world has heard whispers of the pleasure city, Yoshiwara, set behind its walls in the city of Edo itself, which is today called Tokyo. Here was an eastern red light district, the place for the hedonists, the woman-seekers, the sensual plasure-hunters of old Japan. There, behind moated walls, an erotic Japanese world unmatched by the West was created by beautiful courtesans, geishas, dancers, actors, and artists. To this "floating world" came the hedonists and the sensual pleasure hunters of old Japan. Many myths and legends encircled the secrets of the Yoshiwara, and still do. In time other Japanese cities tried to copy the original, sometimes even calling their district for geishas and courtesans and pretty waitress girls a Yoshiwara. Stephen and Ethel Longstreet use prints and fascinating original sources to trace the rise and fall of this city within a city, a sanctioned preserve of teahouses and brothels that was not abolished until 1958, sketching a vivid, no-holds-bared portrait of social and sexual mores in Japan's capital.
