{"id":114,"date":"2006-11-26T14:48:20","date_gmt":"2006-11-26T18:48:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/wll\/?p=114"},"modified":"2021-09-08T16:07:02","modified_gmt":"2021-09-08T20:07:02","slug":"catherine-yeh-shanghai-love-courtesans-intellectuals-and-entertainment-culture-1850-1910","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/wll\/2006\/11\/26\/catherine-yeh-shanghai-love-courtesans-intellectuals-and-entertainment-culture-1850-1910\/","title":{"rendered":"Catherine Yeh. Shanghai Love: Courtesans, Intellectuals, and Entertainment Culture, 1850 &#8211; 1910"},"content":{"rendered":"<div>\n<p>In this fascinating book, Catherine Yeh, Associate  Professor  of Chinese, explores the Shanghai  entertainment world at the  close of the Qing dynasty. Established in the 1850s  outside of the old  walled city, the Shanghai Foreign Settlements were  administered by  Westerners and so were not subject to the strict authority of  the  Chinese government. At the center of the dynamic new culture that  emerged  was the courtesan, whose flamboyant public lifestyle and  conspicuous  consumption of modern goods set a style that was emulated  by other women as  they emerged from the &#8220;inner quarters&#8221; of traditional  Chinese  society.<\/p>\n<p>Many Chinese visitors and sojourners were  drawn to the Foreign Settlements.  Men of letters seeking a living  outside of the government bureaucracy found  work in the Settlements\u2019  burgeoning print industry and formed the new class of  urban  intellectuals. Courtesans fled from oppressive treatment and the turmoil   of uprisings elsewhere in China  and found unprecedented freedom in  Shanghai  to redefine themselves and their profession.<\/p>\n<p>As the  entertainment industry developed, publications sprang up to report on   and promote it. Journalists and courtesans found that their interests   increasingly coincided, and the Settlements became a cosmopolitan  playground.  Ritualized role-play based on novels such as Dream of the  Red Chamber elevated  the status of courtesan entertainment and led to  culturally rich interactions  between courtesans and their clients. As  participants acted out the stories in  public, they introduced modern  notions of love and romance that were radically  at odds with the  traditional roles of men and women. Yet because social change  arrived  in the form of entertainment, it met with little resistance.<\/p>\n<p>Yeh  shows how this fortuitous combination of people and circumstances,   rather than official decisions or acts, created the first multicultural  modern  city in China.  With illustrations from newspapers, novels,  travel guides, and postcards, as  well as contemporary written  descriptions of life in foreign-driven,  fast-paced, cutting-edge  Shanghai, this study  traces the mutual influences among courtesans,  intellectuals, and the city  itself in creating a modern,  market-oriented leisure culture in China.  Historians, literary  specialists, art critics, and social scientists will  welcome this  captivating foray into the world of late nineteenth-century  popular  culture.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In this fascinating book, Catherine Yeh, Associate Professor of Chinese, explores the Shanghai entertainment world at the close of the Qing dynasty. Established in the 1850s outside of the old walled city, the Shanghai Foreign Settlements were administered by Westerners and so were not subject to the strict authority of the Chinese government. At the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2184,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[22865],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/wll\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/114"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/wll\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/wll\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/wll\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2184"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/wll\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=114"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/wll\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/114\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":115,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/wll\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/114\/revisions\/115"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/wll\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=114"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/wll\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=114"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/wll\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=114"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}