Sex in the City: Shanghai's Sex Trade

A Sing-song Girl's "chit" or "dance card"

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“If God allows Shanghai to endure, He owes Sodom and Gomorrah an apology”

-attributed to a visiting missionary of the 1930s

The five-to-one imbalance between male and female citizens in Shanghai during the Nineteenth Century meant that a rise in prostitution was inevitable. For centuries the Chinese had been at ease with concubines and the presence of brothels, or “flower houses”; polygamy was acceptable in Chinese society as was homosexuality, although most homosexual Chinese males were generally bisexual in practice. Western missionaries were of course shocked by this state of affairs and the Chinese came to be thought of by the Western invaders as somehow morally deficient.

Like the Japanese geisha, the Chinese courtesan was regularly employed as a companion for formal occasions where their decorous ways, musical and conversational skills shone a positive light upon the host, earning him much status, or ‘face’. Sexual favours were bestowed by the courtesan only if she felt it to be appropriate; however, a ritual ‘courting period’ involving the giving of many expensive gifts was the usual preamble. In the early days of Western occupation, from the 1840s onwards, these women were enchanting to the fan kuei (‘foreign devils’) and there were many unfortunate episodes based on a misunderstanding of the courtesan’s function.

The elite courtesan was educated, trained in music and calligraphy and possessed of high social skills. The fees for her services were extremely high and many were able to pick and choose their clients. They employed rickshaws and bodyguards and resided in luxurious rooms, sometimes even entire houses. Clients sent their ‘tickets’ to the courtesan outlining the time and place of their dinner parties or gatherings; sometimes the courtesan would be so booked-up that the briefest of appearances was all that she could offer in the course of an evening.

The activities of these glamorous figures were eagerly followed and society pages – known as the ‘Mosquito Press’ because their reports stung – detailed their every entanglement, romantic or otherwise. The high class courtesan lived under intense scrutiny, only too aware of others waiting to take her place and of an audience tracking her slow decline into decrepitude.

“Only two days ago, there was news that Zhu Ruchun had married. This is just baseless rumour. In fact, two more young [courtesans] will be ‘entering her household’ on the twentieth of this month, one called Zhu Yichun and the other Zhu Meichun; together with Zhu Fenchun, who has been there for quite a while, they will be a foursome in the business.”

-Newspaper report from the ‘Mosquito Press’

A rung down from the elite courtesan were the prostitutes attached to an establishment and managed by a madam, herself possibly an aged courtesan in reduced circumstances or simply pragmatic about her career after the bloom of youth had faded. The girls in these establishments were variously sent out to dinner parties to entertain, or worked out of rooms in the brothel. Those girls who went out on engagements travelled by barrow or, after the International Settlement of foreign occupiers imposed a tax on wheeled chairs, perched upright, carried on the shoulders of bodyguards to their assignations. The foreigners referred to these gorgeously-dressed women as ‘sing-song girls’. While less-intensively educated than the solitary courtesan, the sing-song girl was expected to be proficient in music and conversation; her carnal favours came at a somewhat lower price however, and with a shorter, waiveable, courting period.

With the influx of sailors from the port and the rise of sexually-transmitted diseases, the nature of the sex trade in Shanghai shifted. As a means of protecting their investments, the courtesans and sing-song girls began to serve Chinese clients exclusively, seeing the problem of ‘Canton Sores’ (the local term for syphilis) as a white man’s malady. However, demand inevitably clashed with supply: other establishments of a less choosey nature opened up throughout the city.

It would be naive to think that these brothels had not existed since the beginning of the treaty ports’ opening at the end of the First Opium War in 1842; far from it: Chinese pimps and madams had smelt opportunity in the wind and had set up establishments as soon as the foreign devils began to move in. No less than the white man, whose martial introduction to China was soundly based in economic gain, the Chinese saw an opportunity to make money and they took it. Initially, the brothels were discreet and located in out-of-the-way places; later, they were sprinkled throughout the city, each identified by a ubiquitous red lantern at its front door. When all of the girls in the house were occupied, the lantern would be taken down; this was also standard practice when all of the couches were occupied in an opium den, and many such operations chose to diversify as ‘flower houses’ as well.

During the Taiping Rebellion which wracked China during the 1850s and 1860s, violent gang wars in that part of Shanghai known as the Old Chinese City took place and, with the resulting property booms which they caused, the brothels expanded commensurately. Dispossessed peoples flocking in from the countryside sought ways to earn a living and the quickest and easiest method was to sell themselves. Men were quickly absorbed into the coolie workforce; many were often coshed or drugged and thrown onto ships bound for foreign climes to work as labourers, the origin of the expression ‘to shanghai’. Women, on the other hand, were dragged into the net of prostitution. Some peasants sold their daughters to brothels, or to courtesan-training madams where true potential was discerned; some peasants thought they were apprenticing their children to intermediaries who would find them work as servants to white folk but this was rarely ever the case. The most unfortunate girls were the ones who were caught by unscrupulous pimps or madams operating out of low-grade establishments – often single rooms separated into cubicles by strung sheets – and literally dragged off the streets and into the life of a whore. Such unfortunates were known as ‘wild pheasants’, or ‘wild chickens’ and were to be found soliciting in darkened street corners or in places where the authorities might not notice them, or not care if they did. The wild pheasants were often beaten for not meeting quotas of clients or cash; they were miserably dressed, poorly fed, bruised and usually afflicted by disease. Wherever they went they were closely followed by their avaricious ‘owner’ or their hired goons.

While it may seem strange that these callow girls from the country would be seen as worthwhile for a sexually sophisticated clientele, there was a definite cash benefit to be gained from capturing these naïfs: Chinese men would pay from five- to ten-times the standard amount for the opportunity of deflowering a virgin and therefore the madams and pimps were on high alert for the possibility of ‘fresh meat’. In straitened times when offerings were few, many canny operators could recycle a deflowered girl, using some special techniques and a deft application of concealed chicken blood.

Some of these girls ran away and there was at least one place to which they could escape: an inter-denominational congregation of missionaries’ wives helped establish a hostel called the ‘Door of Hope’ and they fought for and won the legal right to claim sanctuary for any girl who could make it through the mission’s front door:

“I can still see a little crowd of furiously hurrying people that broke across my path one evening. In front of them was the flying figure of a girl, her little silken coat torn and hanging from one shoulder. She was ten paces ahead of her pursuers as she passed me, her little face drawn and blanched with terror and exhaustion. Fortunately, her pursuers were not agile. A stout madam hobbled along on little feet; two burly men in blue peasant clothes lumbered along beside her, apparently the major-domos of her establishment. And all too apparently, the scudding miss ahead was a very recent inmate of that establishment, launched on a gallant and desperate break for freedom.

The crowd parted like sheep. A few heads turned around out of curiosity, but none out of sympathy. The pursuers swept by. Suddenly the girl turned under a bright street light and began to pound with both fists against a kind of matchboard doorway. A tall Sikh policeman started across the street from his traffic post on the opposite corner. Then the crowd closed in and it was all a blur.

When I got to the fragile doorway under the light the girl was gone and the Sikh policeman was dispersing the crowd. They scattered quickly, all but the stout woman and her two strong men. The woman scolded vehemently and viciously shook her fist at the sign above the doorway through which the victim had escaped. Then the policeman moved her on in true Occidental fashion and the incident seemed to be closed.”

-Gardner Harding, 1916

Once inside the mission house, the girl was free from any attempt to return her to her baleful life. The Mission sought to cure, dress and feed such delinquents and then found them work in the wider community, usually as servants to a notable taipan, or in the capacity of a receptionist, nurse or clerk. Often such rescued girls converted to Christianity and some made their way back to their country lives.

The missionaries also sought ways to help the older, more jaded prostitutes; unfortunately, these efforts sometimes backfired. A clinic to help women who had contracted syphilis was cried down by missionary workers and the moral majority of the foreign community, who felt that such an institution was a tacit acceptance of the disease and the lifestyle which promoted it: the clinic eventually had to close its doors. During its short period of operation, a law was passed that called for every working girl to attend monthly inspections to detect the presence of Canton Sores: a clean bill of health was noted on a special card which the subject was supposed to carry with them at all times. Initially, the prostitutes baulked at the notion until they saw that such a document certified them free of disease and, as such, amounted to a tradeable asset to boost the price of their services. The scheme had a very short duration.

Male prostitutes also existed and most of these worked a very select and elite clientele. The majority of male prostitutes worked in the theatre: as in Elizabethan times in England, all of the female roles in traditional Chinese opera were played by men specially trained from youth in conveying an authentic performance. Arts that were usually the province of women were taught to these boys, along with a whole range of erotic techniques; in the modern era of the Nineteenth- and early Twentieth Centuries, much of this training derived from the millennia-old traditions of creating eunuchs for positions within the Imperial palaces. Once established in a theatre group, these men would be wooed by high level figures, mostly male, and became de facto concubines of an unofficial kind. Their role was necessarily a discreet one however, as parallels with the neutered palace servants of bygone eras could be quickly drawn and the eunuchs were a byword for bureaucratic corruption and self-interest. Despite this, such young men often rose to very prominent and powerful positions within, say, a warlord’s inner circle, albeit background positions of great authority.

The practice of keeping ‘special favourites’ was not the purview only of the Chinese; many Western grandees also enjoyed collecting a coterie of exotic mistresses to attend to them. Some attached themselves to a single local woman, a practice that was first recorded in the early days of the British Raj in India and which ever after carried a frisson of Orientalist license for Western men on foreign shores. Others surrounded themselves with veritable harems, a situation that was universally frowned upon by the missionary enclaves: Sir Robert Hart, the well-known director of the International Maritime Customs Service based in Shanghai, was known to have ‘owned’ many young girls and his career was chequered by instances where the foreign community was roused into demanding that he relinquish his Chinese mistresses. When the time came for him to return to England, he found himself in the difficult economic position of having to provide for them all in his absence.

Tawdry as the flesh trade was in Shanghai at this time, things only got worse after the beginning of the Twentieth Century. The area known as Hongkew north of the Bund became the centre of the most rudimentary brothels – often just simple bamboo screens with a waiting line called ‘nail sheds’ – and this muddy magnet for seafarers and beachcombers became known as ‘Bamboo Town’. Gambling houses and opium dens diversified their trade and offered prostitutes as well as their standard fare: these ‘flower and smoke houses’ saw prodigious turnovers in trade.

The missionaries and other social reformers won a pyrrhic victory at this time: the practice of foot-binding – a centuries-old Han tradition of hobbling women and increasing their sexual desirability by deforming their feet - was successfully lobbied against and officially denigrated by the Imperial Court. Amongst the Imperial Manchu houses, the practice was not a cultural feature, so they certainly lost nothing by currying favour with the West in opposing it; it was, by-and-large, falling out of favour anyway across the country and was officially banned under the new Chinese Republic in 1912. It is interesting to note however, that the last Shantung factory that specialised in making shoes for women with bound feet closed its doors for the last time in 2006.

After the Republican Revolution in 1911, a sense of freedom and emancipation overtook the women of Shanghai and many girls indentured to work in brothels struck out on their own to map their own path through the seamy underworld. For the time being however, the whore’s lot in Shanghai was an unendurable drudge at best, a short life with only the temporary oblivion of alcohol and opium to dull the pain.

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“...since there is no part of Shanghai that does not belong to the realm of dreams, those who enter it are without exception persons in a dream.”

-SunYusheng, Dreams of Shanghai’s Glamour (1903)

In the aftermath of the Boxer Rebellion and the deadly debacle that was the Siege at Peking in 1900, the Foreign Legations exacted reparations from the Chinese people in yet another ‘unequal treaty’ referred to as the Chefoo Convention. Amongst its more humiliating demands was the call for the cessation of the Imperial Examinations, that rite of passage which guaranteed the young men of the noble and literati classes movement into and within the Imperial Bureaucracy. This treaty set in motion several chains of events: first, the loss of ‘face’ accrued by the military defeat was held as unsupportable by the average Chinese national; secondly, anti-foreign sentiment crystallised among the Han peoples of China and came to include their Imperial rulers comprising the Qing Dynasty who, as Manchurian natives, were themselves considered foreigners. The ramifications of these events were far-reaching: by 1911 China had evicted the Emperor from the Dragon Throne and became a republic and many Chinese began to look for a sense of national identity. Simultaneously, they sought for the keys to social progress and martial success among their hated but inevitably victorious invaders, the Western nations.

Those who could not travel to foreign parts went to visit those areas within the Celestial Kingdom where the West had taken hold. These were the treaty ports wrested from the Empire by greedy foreign traders, prime among them the city of Shanghai. Here idle young men with thwarted dreams of high attainment within the government could while away their burgeoning hours, writing poetry, drinking tea and revelling in the Western novelties which were anathema to their parents, such as Homburg hats, dining suites and paned-glass windows. It was during this time that an old piece of literature came to the fore and brought about a revolution in the sex trade of Shanghai.

That book was Honglou Meng, sometimes translated as The Story of the Stone but generally known as A Dream of Red Mansions. Begun by its impoverished author Tsao Hsueh-chin in 1791, it tells the tale of a prodigal youth, Chia Paoyu, who flouts familial expectations by retiring to a large clan estate, a vast garden dotted with pavilions wherein are installed his various female cousins, with whom he embarks on a series of romantic interludes. Eventually, his dalliances with these women pale in comparison to the true love he finds with the most beautiful and accomplished of them, Lin Tai-yu. Tsao Hsueh-chin was never able to raise the funds to publish his work, despite critical and popular success during his lifetime; he died before it was completed and another writer, Kao Ngo, finished it off and had it printed. In his hands it became a tragic tale: Chia Paoyu is lured from the garden and forced to agree to an arranged marriage with a woman from another clan; Lin Tai-yu, inconsolable, dies of grief.

The book struck a chord because many male readers saw a parallel between their own lives and that of the footloose Chia Paoyu. Denied the Imperial Examination process, they became idle, seeking entertainment and distraction from the political upheavals around them. Shanghai became a metaphor for the garden of pleasures, dotted with the ‘red mansions’ of the local courtesans. A tacit arrangement emerged, where young men courted the favours of the Shanghai courtesans, requiring that they pretend to be one of the many female roles within the novel, responding to their portrayal of the romantic rebel, Chia Paoyu. In this way the entire liaison could be played out almost as a script, including the inevitable bittersweet parting.

But lest anyone think that men were the sole architects of sexual activity within the decadent city, another revolution rocked Shanghai and the after-effects were mostly orchestrated by women.

The 1917 Communist takeover in Russia left a huge population of Russian Jews and Czarist White Russians fleeing their motherland and finding refuge in Shanghai. Many of these refugees move onwards from the port city to new homes in the Americas, Europe or Australia, but a large number of them stayed in China. Under the terms of extraterritoriality, Russia citizens were stateless in Shanghai, recognised by no local law; many unscrupulous operators took advantage of this to find safe havens in the city’s underworld. The White Russian women were a novelty in Shanghai: statuesque and blonde, they captivated the attention of the locals. For men it was the possibility of sex; for women, it was their clothes. The Russian women brought with them the latest Paris fashions: figure-hugging dresses, dainty hats and, most fascinating for the Chinese women, high-heeled shoes. Overnight, local fashions changed to accommodate the possibilities: the shapeless, Manchu gown, or qipao, became figure-hugging, spun from shimmering embroidered fabric and slashed to the hip to reveal shapely calves turned by daring stilettos: the cheong-sam was born and with it the ‘Shanghai Lady’, glamorous doyenne of the Jazz Age.

The prostitutes of Shanghai reinvented themselves in the light of this new-found independence and enjoyed a greater freedom which lasted for decades until the Chinese Communist Revolution in 1949. Certainly, the old structures of sexual slavery still existed, the ‘Mosquito Press’ still churned, and any woman could easily find herself kidnapped off the street and sold to an unscrupulous brothel owner to meet the fantasy check-list of a powerful client; however, the Chinese no longer automatically saw themselves as the social or moral inferiors of the fan kuei and sought to make their own way in a new Republic which promised economic independence, medical benefits and a greater sense of equality. The situation was summed up in a local ditty from the ‘40s:

“Me no worry

Me no care

Me going to marry a millionaire

And if he die

Me no cry

Me going to get another guy.”

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