Few settings in China's modern history have been explored in greater depth than Shanghai. Moreover, sexuality has been a 'sexy' topic in Chinese history for the better part of the past decade. And significantly, the French original 1 was published hot on the heels of another major publication by Gail Hershatter 2 on exactly the same topic.
All this naturally prompts the question as to why we need yet another book on aspects of sexual life in China. To reduce such a wealth of information to a publishable monograph undoubtedly required mature editorial judgement and structural discipline.
The author begins his quest by placing the topic within a historiographical framework. Within the first few paragraphs, the author rejects the idea of prostitution as an exotic theme of research, emphasising instead its quality as a marker of modernity.
Drawing his inspiration from works by Louis Chevalier 3 and Alain Corbin 4 on prostitution and crime in nineteenth-century France, the notion of prostitutes as a socially and politically subversive element needed to be tested against the background of Shanghai society, over a century of momentous change. The eventual result of the revolutionary turmoil would be the forced closure of the city's brothels by a victorious Mao Zedong in While the phenomenon itself โ and prostitutes as a social group โ differed in many ways from the European experience, any study into prostitution in Shanghai promises deepened insight into the history of the city's women, its criminal underworld and spheres of entertainment.
Henriot's challenge was to integrate these specific aspects into a cohesive and dynamic reflection of the social transformations Shanghai and by extension also China, as the French title suggests was undergoing. The desire to capture the wider social reality of the period under scrutiny is already evident from the structure. The monograph is subdivided into four parts and fourteen chapters.
