SERIES: Books to better understand China
Part V : Tang and Song, two really different tones?
Even if mentalities have changed a little among young Chinese, there is still a certain discretion, reservations about talking about the subject. And so much the better. In the West, the subject goes beyond the private sphere and sprawls back and forth in all the media … But where would come from what we wrongly call taboos, and which are cultural codes that are simply different from ours? A long time ago, but the book remains a benchmark, a great lover of China, great novelist and essayist, Robert van Gulik, tackled the complex question of the history of sexuality in China. Here is the 5th and penultimate part of the presentation of this essential book.
Tang Dynasty: splendor but not misery of courtesans
The Tang Dynasty is distinguished by a rich and colorful life in its large and colorful cities, very multicultural with influences from Central Asia and India. Manners were more relaxed, by the young students, a little “bohemian”, the rich tradesmen and part of the nobility. They drink a lot of alcohol; They love luxury; women have slim waists, but thick hips and busty shapes that they like to show off. It is the birth of the courtesan as a social institution and of an eroticism in literature, alongside more traditional sexuality textbooks. For our foreign eyes, we think a little of 19th century Paris.
We must imagine the cultures resulting from the foreign dynasties of the first centuries of our era; the arrival of Buddhism and Tantrism; the many traders of the Silk Road; ethnic minorities: “a whole mixed crowd, eager for fun,” says van Gulik, “flocking to cosmopolitan cities”. Above all, Chang’an, of course, the capital.
Before talking seriously about the links between “Taoist” sexuality and Chinese medicine, let’s explore a kind of “sociology of the courtesan”, quite developed by our author.
A true social institution, the Chinese courtesan is far from Western fantasies. We will even see a link with the most refined and cultivated geishas.
Central for almost all strata of society, especially merchants and officials, social organizer, helpers in concluding contracts, the courtesan is absolutely not a prostitute, even a luxury one! The more it is cultivated, the more money is spent.
But sex has only a secondary role. The courtesan is a true confidante, a ladies-in-waiting of the highest rank, a friend. She is socially free. Unattached in love, the object of a very often platonic love, she rests men from their sexual obligations at home. We’ve seen it before. The richer a man, the more wives and concubines he has to manage socially and… physically! For the sake of future children, for the harmony of the cosmos and of society. It’s a duty.
The courtesan, on the other hand, doesn’t demand anything and you listen over a cup of tea. It allows a man to escape, in a way, his marital and social obligations.
Let’s not talk about the different types of courtesans, let alone the different types of prostitution, even those organized by the military or the state.
Van Gulik tells us about two great Chinese poets who were originally very literate courtesans. Remember, before the Song, married women generally did not have access to learning to read and write.
The Tang Dynasty was the golden age of Chinese poetry. And Yu Xuan Ji and Xue Tao, despite their very different characters (Yu Xuan Ji organized banquets in her Buddhist temple where she lived!), these two great ladies sang of difficult loves because they were fragile and pure linked to their singular condition.
Van Gulik also covers the beauties of the Court, the luxury of banquets, celebrations, the magnificence of the decorations and objects at the court … A “new comfort” from Central Asia was expressed thanks to the luxury goods of Samarkand, exchanged with Suzhou Silk, a whole fantasized Orientalism for us today. But we are not going to expand because it does not add much depth to the theme that interests us in this series of articles.
We will also pass on the thousand intrigues of the imperial harems which have become immense (3000 women for a Tang emperor). We have also already spoken in our articles of the great Wu Ze Tian, concubine, sometimes cruel upstart, become empress and… Buddhist.
Bedroom Art and Chinese Medicine
Any textbook of medicine under the Tang included a chapter dedicated to detailed techniques of sexuality. An astonishing contrast to the beginning of literature actually Chinese eroticism, “without a didactic goal”, specifies van Gulik.
But what concerns us is the idea of ”healing a human being through another human being”, therefore with sexuality. Especially for men over 40: physical intercourse is becoming the “real cure”.
Textbooks have become highly technical, scientific, “soulless” (for us). We are shocked. A man to maintain his health, past 40, “must spend a night with 10 different women”, one reads in a manual! “But without emitting his seed even once.” The doctor specifies: “A man must not engage in the sex intercourse for the sole purpose of satisfying his desires. He must strive to contain his sexual desire, thus making himself able to nourish his vital essence “.
We have already seen this in past centuries. But here we must understand these indications as real prescriptions to a doctor to keep “away from diseases”.
The act is consumed according to a specific ritual where preparation (the “preliminaries”) is essential. Everything except the bestial act; but a skillfully calculated and balanced sequence of gestures and movements.
As we have already seen, here these recommendations, even if they take into account the female orgasm, often use the woman as a medicine (her saliva, her secretions, her Qi, etc.).
Otherwise, for Chinese doctors, passion, unchecked, is a waste, “stripping” of the vital essence. All the technical tricks exist to “compress” the urethra and prevent a man from losing his precious semen. We are in full medicine with protocols to follow, exercises, obligations.
We also come close to the philosophy of Plato with the idea that the masculine and feminine essence by the return of the seed in the “brain”, will recreate a primordial hermaphrodite, who will have both sexes as at the beginning and will become, by there, “immortal”.
New, again, for the Tang, a rapprochement between Buddhist and Chinese sexual mysticisms. Kundalini-Yoga, even Tantrism, is not far from this Taoist philosophy of the sexual seed which “goes up towards the spirit while passing by the spinal column”.
Another contrast, this one striking: the superstitions which ran parallel to the learned books of medicine. For example, the legendary figure of the fox. Or rather… the cunning, playful female fox with superior life energy. The attitudes, the postures, the speed, the strategies of the foxes were fascinating at the time. A domestic cult was born. Fertility rites too. We have already seen these “becoming-animals” in Kung Fu, Qigong, sexual poses … here, it is about a becoming-succubus, demonic of the woman into a fox and conversely, the foxes “were transformed into incubates and debauchery men and women ”.
There was talk in those days of female foxes choosing to live in the grave of a dead girl whom they resurrected so that she could play tricks on the man.
Song Dynasty: Neo-Confucianist Puritanism Only for the People?
Despite the short duration, 50 years, of the period of the “Five Dynasties”, between the end of the Tang and the beginning of the Song, van Gulik tells us about the existence of an immense poet who will sing about romantic love like never before and one of these women who would have launched the fashion for bandaged feet (at the request of the husband…).
Li Yu, ruler of the short “Southern Tang” dynasty and sublime poet of Ci verse, was more interested in poems, women and dance than in power. He paid for it with his defeat to the Song and his imprisonment in Kaifeng. But he left us with sung and rhythmic verses, extraordinary. Li Yu has created a poetic style, a subtle rhythm (unexpected pauses, accelerations, decelerations), unfortunately almost untranslatable in English or French.
Bandaged feet
The romantic poet would still have asked his wife or concubine Yao Niang to severely bandage his feet to dance in the middle of a huge lotus that he had built for her. The foot becomes an “erotic object”, a real taboo among the Song then. It is the symbol of femininity, of female sexuality. In some paintings, Yao Niang is shown bandaging his feet. But you never see his feet! It will become a style afterwards.
Under the Song, you can see the vaginas of women in detail, but never feet, except those of the Buddhist goddess Guan Yin or those of a servant, sometimes.
The feet then become central in sexual foreplay. In the courtship parade, if a man managed to graze the feet, even when dressed, of a woman at a dinner party, pretending to drop a handkerchief or a wand, and if that woman was not conspicuously indignant at this gesture, he then had chances of conquering his heart.
On the level of the “sexual” utility of these mini deformed ankle feet, the hypotheses are numerous … Mechanically, this atrophy, through difficult walking, tightened the muscles of the female sex? Or, already a sign of Confucian severity, the bandaged feet prevented women from going far from their home, limited and unsurpassable territory for a “good wife”?
Here, we quickly criticized without trying to understand, explains van Gulik. Have we forgotten the appalling corsets of the 19th century in Europe? Lung and heart disease were often the lot of these poor women locked in these more severe than aesthetic frames.
Also, according to some writings, despite evidently the discomfort of this practice, in 1664, when the Manchu invaders prevented their wives from bandaging their feet like the Chinese, these Manchu women expressed their discontent strongly.
New standards of decency?
The conventions vary according to the fashions. At the beginning of the Song, the somewhat sensual and relaxed Tang fashion (women could show the upper chest, for example), seemed to continue. But very quickly, the Confucianist or rather neo-Confucianist reaction arrives.
The Song will forbid open-breasted women and encourage them to adopt high collars. Why ?
Zhu Xi was a statesman and a great philosopher who finalized the creation of Neo-Confucianism, adopting certain concepts of Taoism, those of Yi Jing, and those of Chan Buddhism (Zen in Japan).
It is a speculative and somewhat esoteric philosophy that has won over scholars and artists. The neo-Confucians thought of Tai Ji, the primordial Unit from which emerge, wrapped in one another, Yi and Yang.
You all know the white and black circle of Yin and Yang, Tai Ji, the Ultimate, surrounded by the 8 trigrams: it was created under the Song. Unfortunately, this has become a very well-known “decoration motif”.
But, paradoxically, these heights of thought were counterbalanced by a strictly Confucian reading of the great Chinese Classics, adopting an orthodoxy even more severe than under the Han!
At the moral level, rigor is required. Especially for women … considered inferior and necessarily docile. Meetings between men and women are monitored and limited. No more mixed public baths. There are many restrictions on the level of more “free” relationships. The habit, still today, of some Chinese women not to allow themselves to be kissed in public comes from this period.
Everything had to be limited to privacy in the marital bed.
Zhu Xi, who lived 70 years, is also known for his critical commentaries on the Book of Odes.
The “Images of Spring”
Another paradox, despite the fact that this neo-Confucianism became a real “state religion”, therefore an official ideology, van Gulik teaches us (this is his vision therefore) that the nobility preferred to follow a more natural Taoism, even more lax. Poets, shocked by the customs of the court of the time, would attest to this.
So, “for the people”, censorship, surveillance, moral rigor of great severity; and, “for the court”, a more fulfilling sexuality in the harems, aimed at enrichment of the vital essence and immortality, in a rather pragmatic way. ? The famous capture of women’s Qi Yin. Return of Taoist textbooks, abundantly illustrated with “Chuan Gong hua”, “images of the spring palace” or, shorter: “The images of spring”.
Caricatural? You would have to read more recent historical studies to compare. But according to van Gulik, the Song invented a heterodoxy which will then be used by my Ming and the Qing.
But the “Art of the Bedroom” still seems very studied under the Song.
Prostitution also still exists in this paradoxical Song dynasty. We find the three levels of the Tang, with at the top of the kinds of rich “courtesans”, very well educated, cultivated, skillful players of all the musical instruments, who would have been the models of the Japanese geishas, according to comparisons of tables Song and Japanese (19th century!). Moreover, the Ge Guan, very luxurious meeting houses, were also discreetly called, as later in Japan, Cha Fang … Or “tea houses”.
Having said that, it seems that these descriptions illustrate places in the very beautiful and rich city of Hangzhou, capital of the Southern Song, with undoubtedly different customs, “softer” than those of the North, in Kaifeng?
Modernity of the Song: unisex clothing and printing
Van Gulik speaks, finally, of the dresses that covered the clothes, dresses with wide sleeves (especially in the south): they would have been almost unisex. This is fashion in Europe today!
The Song still invented Xylography or the printing of Chinese characters with coins and n wood. This will increase the use of the book and finally allow married women, and no longer just high-ranking courtesans, to learn to read and write.
It is not about sexuality here but about a more marked (cultural) equality between men and women. Here, the appearance of female painters when painting, thanks to its monochrome and refined use, becomes the equal of calligraphy, once considered superior and only possible for scholars or high officials.
Despite strict rules for women, the Song saw the birth of extraordinary female poets and / or painters.
Van Gulik ends this chapter with beautiful melancholy poems by the great Song poet, Li Qing Zhao, when she fled to Hangzhou, fleeing the Jin barbarians who had just arrived in Kaifeng…
