Taking Pleasure from the Weather
Red lanterns still raised in certain quarters of Běijīng
Part of A Better Guide to Beijing
Just as I was getting into my rickshaw I heard him engage another to take him to Ch’ien Mên Wai! At some other time Ch’ien Mên Wai might have meant anywhere at all beyond the great central gate leading into the southern part of the city; but so late at night, with the shops shut, the restaurants closed and the operas drawing to their noisy climax, it clearly meant that Pao was bound for the lanes of ‘flowers and willows’ where people go only to enjoy the companionship of courtesans and the pleasures of ‘clouds and rain’.
John Blofeld, City of Lingering Splendour, 1961
In the early days of the Republic, before President Yuán Shìkǎi decided to mount the throne and when the National Assembly still met, there was a discussion as to what allowances for expenses should be given to its members. The foreign-run Peking Daily News gleefully suggested a long list that would not be inappropriate for many officials today, including the latest carriage and immense sums for feasting and drinking, mistresses, and prostitutes. The Chinese press, which clearly found none of this surprising, reported with approval that a bell-ringer was sent daily round the Qián Mén brothels to call the members back to their duties.
The detailed accounts of Blofeld and others suggest that while facilities at these houses, which came in four grades, might be modest, at the first-class ones the girls were highly educated and knowledgeable and had a limited number of long-term customers who came to them for their wit and culture as well as for other services, and a certain courtship was necessary before these were made available.
There are many accounts in novels and memoirs of groups of foreigners, both male and female, who, in the company of some Mandarin-speaking friend, went to the lanes just as ‘tea guests’, which meant that they were given fleeting introductions to the house’s pool of talent — the ‘flowers and willows’ — without moving on to any activity requiring meteorological metaphors. Blofeld himself apparently took on the role of guide on more than one occasion, and appears as such in others’ books.
In a society in which unwanted daughters were often sold (and there is a large underground traffic in children to this day, including ones for sale to orphanages for overseas adoption), the picture of the happy, pampered, cultured courtesan must have been a tiny part of a truth less palatable as a whole, as some of Blofeld’s companions admitted.
The new communist rulers of China decided that prostitutes were the most exploited class of all, and engineered an upswell of demand for their emancipation on which they could then righteously take action. During a 12-hour period 224 brothels were shut down, and the girls were rounded up and sent for re-education. Once another triumph of socialist progress had been announced and a propaganda victory scored, many went back to their old profession, albeit independently.
Today, less decorous prostitution is omnipresent, and reports of hundreds of places with sexual entertainment of one sort or other being shut down can frequently be found in the Chinese press, although most reopen within days — being seen to do something is more important than actually doing it, especially when there are kickbacks to be earned from turning a blind eye, or when senior officials themselves have investments in the businesses.
Nevertheless, prostitution’s ‘return’, as well as the increase in divorce and the keeping of mistresses, has sometimes been ludicrously blamed on Western ‘spiritual pollution’ (精神污染, jīngshén wūrǎn), as if China’s supposed ‘5000 years of culture’ hadn’t included at least 4950 of legal polygamy, concubine-keeping, and, as in other cultures, prostitution.
Indeed, immediately before the communist take-over, prostitution in Běijīng was not only legal but tax-paying, and in 1917 the city government collected revenue from 377 brothels and 3130 registered prostitutes. In 1918 these payments accounted for 30% of the city government’s tax income.
Brothels were divided into four classes, and all of the first and most of the second class of establishment could be found in the Qián Mén area. Despite orders to keep themselves unostentatious, many were two-storey buildings in a primarily one-storey city, with unusual architectural details and hints of the West. During the Republic it was illegal to stay the night, but now some of these buildings with their characteristic rows of rooms on two storeys around a central roofed courtyard have been opened as budget hotels, and whereas it was once illegal to stay past midnight, now that’s actively encouraged. Vast amounts of public money were once spent here, just as it is by government officials at the karaoke bars and saunas that perform the same function today: illegal, but protected.
In moves of stunning cynicism they are told to shutter themselves or become very low-key during the period of the ‘two meetings’, the March gatherings of 5000 Party delegates from across China for the sham democracy of the National People’s Congress and Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference. The country’s capital must apparently pretend to be free of immorality, even though officials are acknowledged to be among the biggest consumers of such services, usually on someone else’s tab.
The Běijīng vendors of genuine Western luxury goods see a boom during this period, as officials, their family members, and their mistresses shop for logo-laden objects of desire, from watches to clothes to cars, giving prearranged code-names to send the charges to the accounts of those buying their goodwill. Some estimate that more than 50% of China’s annual US$7.6 billion spend on luxury items is by officials whose normal salaries certainly could not support such purchases.
The new rich (大款, dà kuǎn) graze on the meadows of young girls who are always at the bottom of the income ladder, who face increasing difficulties with employment as state-run enterprises are shut down and private enterprises collapse with the rest of the global economy, and who are considered even more surplus to requirements in the countryside than the men, but who are desperate for the formerly forbidden glittering girly goodies the new economy has brought to the shelves of shops. Becoming some rich punk’s xiǎo mì (小蜜, little honey) or bāo èrnǎi (包二奶, second wife or mistress) is one way to achieve this.
Why, you may wonder as you wander along the hútòng here and in other parts of the city, do there seem to be almost as many hairdressing salons in Běijīng as there are heads of hair to cut? Yet why, in many, is no haircutting going on? For the working class, the question, ‘Have you had your hair cut recently?’ may have more than one meaning.
Next in South of Qián Mén: Máo’s Maze (story)
Previous: Introduction to South of Qián Mén — The Old Chinese City
Main Index of A Better Guide to Beijing.
For discussion of China travel, see The Oriental-List.
