ABSTRACT
The nineteenth century is not an obvious stamping ground for genteel courtesans. Dorothy Ko writes of the vulgarization of courtesan culture in that era, when ‘not only did the courtesan turn out to be a shadow of her glamorous past, [but] the Scholar himself was at best an impersonator of a literatus’.1 Yet, in the series of nineteenth-century texts that Lu Xun labelled xiaxie xiaoshuo,2 and we might term red-light fi ction, a rich vein runs which celebrates the high-brow, looks back to the past, and beyond towards the ideal. It is not the only reading, but even in the world of protection money, loan sharks and opium raids of the more realist works we see glimpses of longings, and of genteel desires. This vein needs exploring: were the women aspiring to commoner (liang) morality, a gentry lifestyle, or some imperial vision of ideal womanhood? Expressions of gentility within the courtesan profession might, perversely, delineate more sharply the values of mainstream society.
