Shanghai Love: Courtesans, Intellectuals, and Entertainment Culture, 1850-1910

by Catherine Vance Yeh

In this fascinating book, Catherine Yeh explores the Shanghai entertainment world at the close of the Qing dynasty. Established in the 1850s outside of the old walled city, the Shanghai Foreign Settlements were administered by Westerners and so were not subject to the strict authority of the Chinese government. At the center of the dynamic new culture that emerged was the courtesan, whose flamboyant public lifestyle and conspicuous consumption of modern goods set a style that was emulated by other women as they emerged from the "inner quarters" of traditional Chinese society.

Many Chinese visitors and sojourners were drawn to the Foreign Settlements. Men of letters seeking a living outside of the government bureaucracy found work in the Settlements' burgeoning print industry and formed the new class of urban intellectuals. Courtesans fled from oppressive treatment and the turmoil of uprisings elsewhere in China and found unprecedented freedom in Shanghai to redefine themselves and their profession.

As the entertainment industry developed, publications sprang up to report on and promote it. Journalists and courtesans found that their interests increasingly coincided, and the Settlements became a cosmopolitan playground. Ritualized role-play based on novels such as Dream of the Red Chamber elevated the status of courtesan entertainment and led to culturally rich interactions between courtesans and their clients. As participants acted out the stories in public, they introduced modern notions of love and romance that were radically at odds with the traditional roles of men and women. Yet because social change arrived in the form of entertainment, it met with little resistance.

Yeh shows how this fortuitous combination of people and circumstances, rather than official decisions or acts, created the first multicultural modern city in China. With illustrations from newspapers, novels, travel guides, and postcards, as well as contemporary written descriptions of life in foreign-driven, fast-paced, cutting-edge Shanghai, this study traces the mutual influences among courtesans, intellectuals, and the city itself in creating a modern, market-oriented leisure culture in China. Historians, literary specialists, art critics, and social scientists will welcome this captivating foray into the world of late nineteenth-century popular culture.

Genres: China, Gender

440 pages, Hardcover

First published April 1, 2006

Reviews

[Silvio Curtis · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this as a follow-up to The Valley of Amazement, since Amy Tan cited it in her introduction, and it does help to put the novel in context. In particular it makes it a lot more clear how exceptional Shanghai courtesans were geographically and chronologically. Although there were other periods in Chinese history where courtesans had a lot of visibility, the Qing dynasty made them illegal and drove them partly underground. What made Shanghai different was the founding of the Foreign Settlements there, which were governed by more permissive Western laws. This book discusses the influence of the courtesan business that sprang up there on Chinese society in general, usually from a celebratory viewpoint. The opening chapters describe the courtesans' role in making Western material culture fashionable, like Western-style furniture, and later ones are about journalists' and writers' complicated but mostly symbiotic interaction with them. Gossipy entertainment journalism sprang up in the Foreign settlements at the same time, and famous courtesans became the celebrities for them to gossip about until movie stars and fashion models displaced them from the niche. If you're more interested in how people react to writing than how writing reacts to people, there's a chapter on how courtesan personas were based on creative role-playing from the famous novel Dream of the Red Chamber. In my current location next door to Hollywood, I'm less oblivious than I used to be to how big a deal "star culture" is, and it's fascinating to read this perspective on how it came to exist.