Public lecture: Wu Cuncun (University of Hong Kong), "Investigating a 'Late-Ming Adult Magazine': Springtime Inspirations from the Bedchamber as Transmitted Secretly by the Capital Publisher and Questions of Date, Design, Genre and Influence" (30.04.2025)

The Department of Sinology welcomes all students as well as everybody who is interested to this term's first public lecture. Prof. Wu Cuncun (University of Hong Kong) will hold a lecture on "Investigating a ‘Late-Ming Adult Magazine’: Springtime Inspirations from the Bedchamber as Transmitted Secretly by the Capital Publisher (京院秘傳洞房春意冊) and Questions of Date, Design, Genre and Influence".

The lecture will be held on April 30th (18:00 st) in room 17 (Philosophiegebäude).

Abstract

In 2008, part of the collection of the late Japanese collector of pornography Shibui Kiyoshi (澀井清, 1899-1993) resurfaced and was acquired by Christer von der Burg’s Muban Foundation (London). Muban Foundation subsequently made the most important Shibui items available to researchers, including rare late-Ming coloured woodblock print albums. One of the items was a mixed-genre volume of around sixty pages: Springtime inspirations from the bedchamber as transmitted secretly by the Capital publisher (京院秘傳洞房春意冊). This last item is interesting in containing an assortment of texts of various genres, including two short erotic tales, an album of thirty erotic woodblock prints, and a set of aphrodisiac recipes running to four pages.

An example of the popular miscellany/anthology (通俗類書, or小説雜書), this veritable late-Ming “adult magazine” appears to have been hidden from view for the entire Qing dynasty as well as the twentieth century. Beginning with questions of publication and format, I argue that the volume shows traces of a change in audience from literati with libertine sensibilities to audiences associated with urban mass consumption. I will also discuss how these observations relate to my larger project of drawing attention to the wider participation of urban commoners as a market for pornography and changes pornographic genres underwent as a result of popularization, consolidating our picture of city commoners’ public exchanges on “private life” in the late-Ming period.

Wu Cuncun is Professor of Traditional Chinese Literature in the School of Chinese, the University of Hong Kong. She has published widely on gender and sexuality in Chinese literature and history, including the books Sex and Sensibility in Ming and Qing Society (明清社會性愛風氣, People’s Literature Press, 2000), Homoerotic Sensibilities in Late Imperial China (Routledge, 2004, 2012), Homoeroticism in Imperial China: A Sourcebook (Routledge, 2013), Drama Beyond the Drama (戲外之戲, HKUP, 2017), and Sancaifu: Edited and Annotated (《三才福》校注, Shanghai Education Publishing House, 2023).