Selling Scandal in the Republican Era: Folk Opera in Performance and Print

Abstract

The publication of vernacular texts in regional languages is a vibrant but relatively little-known niche in the history of Chinese print culture. This study will draw from extant opera texts (tanhuang) produced in Shanghai for Wu-speaking audiences and readers in the Republican era. In the nineteenth and early twentieth-centuries, tanhuang performances were regularly proscribed by local authorities because of their erotic and scandalous content. By the early twentieth century publishers attempted to adapt traditional tanhuang material to keep up with radical changes in society and to avoid prohibition. The term “reformed” (gailiang) appeared in story titles to signify new notions of modernity. Considered ephemeral reading in their day, very few tanhuang booklets remain in mainland China. This study will take advantage of the rich corpus preserved in the Fu Ssu-nien Library in Taibei’s Academia Sinica to investigate tanhuang texts published in 1920s Shanghai. The intention is to examine the strategies of authors and publishers in the adaptation of this conventional folk genre. A particular focus will be the clash between the traditional corpus and new notions of gender equality.

Keywords:

• Chinese print culture
• performance texts
• tanhuang
• folk opera
• Chinese modernity
• status of women in China

Acknowledgements

The author is pleased to acknowledge receipt of funding for this project from the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation for International Scholarly Exchange (“The Cultural Heritage of the Lower Yangzi Delta”, 2012–2015). I would also like to thank my research assistant, Dr. Yuxing Zhou, for assisting me with summarizing and interpreting the tanhuang texts. I am grateful to Bick-har Yeung, former librarian of the East Asian Collection at the University of Melbourne, who arranged for the purchase of the 500 volumes of Su wenxue congkan on which this research is based. Comments from anonymous referees assisted me to clarify a number of points made here. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the University of Sydney at a China Studies Centre Symposium on June 1st 2017. I would like to thank Stephen Whiteman for inviting me to present and fellow-panelists Antonia Finnane and Paola Zamperini for their collegiality and valuable comments.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on Contributor

Anne McLaren is Professor in Chinese Studies, University of Melbourne, Australia. She is the author of Chinese Popular Culture & Ming Chantefables (Brill, 1998), Performing Grief: Bridal Laments in Rural China (University of Hawaii Press, 2008), and numerous studies on Chinese narratives, oral traditions and storytelling of the late imperial and early modern eras. A recent publication is an edited special issue of Asian Ethnology, “Interpreting the Sinitic Heritage: Ethnography and Identity in China and Southeast Asia” (2017) 76:1. Recent projects have received funding from the Australian Research Council (2009–2012) and the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation (2012–2015).

ORCID

Anne E. Mclaren http://orcid.org/0000-0001-8234-2255

Notes

1 For a recent collection of scholarly essays on these issues see Michel Hockx, Joan Judge, and Barbara Mittler, eds., Women and the Periodical Press in China’s Long Twentieth Century: A Space of their Own? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018).

2 Li Jiarui 李家瑞 completed a study on tanhuang in the 1930s. On the perceived status of the (some) tanhuang as “obscene” see Wang Ch’iu-kuei 王秋桂, ed., Li Jiarui xiansheng tongsu wenxue lunwenji 李家瑞先生通俗文學論文集 (The collected writings of Mr. Li Jiarui on popular literature; Taibei: Taiwan xuesheng shuju, 1982), “Tanhuang,” 1st published in 1935, pp. 63–65.

3 For a succinct description and history of tanhuang see Colin Mackerras, The Chinese Theatre in Modern Times: From 1840 to the Present Day (London: Thames and Hudson, 1975), pp. 107–111. For more detail see the studies of Zhu Hengfu 朱恒夫 cited here and his monograph, Tanhuang kaolun 灘簧考論 (Investigations and studies of tanhuang; Shanghai: Shanghai guji, 2008).

4 According to Liao Ben 廖奔, the tan of tanhuang refers to “speech” and huang to “song,” see his Zhongguo xiqu shengqiang yuanliu shi 中國戲曲聲腔源流史 (The origin and development of Chinese musical theater; Taibei: Guanya wenhua, 1992), pp. 243–44. Zhu Hengfu has proposed another interpretation where tan is read as 攤 in the sense of “to unfold or repeat” a tune and huang 簧 is read 黄, homophonous with a Wu idiom meaning “fictional.” See Zhu Hengfu, “Quanguo yishu kexue guihua zhuan’an (xiju xiqu lei) chengguo xuanjie” 全國藝術科學規劃專案 (戲劇戲曲類) 成果選介 (A selection of the achievements from the National Arts and Science Plan specific items: [Category of spoken and musical theater]), Xiju yishu lei yuekan 戲劇藝術類月刊 2017.5: 152.

5 Here I seek to distinguish between performance forms that had a restricted circulation due to language and geographical barriers and those that were comprehensible to broader audiences. The earlier tanhuang circulated in rural areas for mostly illiterate populations. It could be deemed “folk” as distinct from the adapted tanhuang that was performed for broader urban audiences at a later stage. The latter could be deemed “popular” urban entertainment. For notions of “the folk” see “Folklore,” in Richard Bauman, ed., Folklore, Cultural Performances, and Popular Entertainments (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. 29–40. Features of “folk” culture are oral transmission, face-to-face communication, a shared mother-tongue, and shared traditions.

6 For the influence of shan’ge on tanhuang, see Zheng Tuyou 鄭土有, Wuyu xushi shan’ge yanchang chuantong yanjiu 吳語敘事山歌演唱傳統研究 (Studies in the performance tradition of narrative folk songs in the Wu language; Shanghai: Shanghai cishu, 2005), pp. 113–19; Wang Fang 王仿 and Zheng Shuoren 鄭碩人, Minjian xushi shi de chuangzuo 民間敘事詩的創作 (The creation of folk narrative poetry; Shanghai: Shanghai wenyi, 1993), pp. 180–213.

7 For the five zones see Zhou Zhenhe 周振鶴 and You Rujie 游汝傑, Fangyan yu Zhongguo wenhua 方言與中國文化 (Regional languages and Chinese culture; Shanghai: Shanghai renmin, 1986), pp. 97–98. In the contemporary period six linguistic zones have been identified. The Wu language form spoken in the northern sector (the Lake Tai region) and the five southern language forms are mutually unintelligible, see Wang Ping 汪平, Wujiang shi fangyan zhi 吳江市方言志 (A Study of the Regional Speech of Wujiang; Shanghai: Shanghai shehui kexue yuan, 2009), p. 10.

8 As noted in Li, “Tanhuang,” pp. 63–64.

9 The Shanghai entertainment world sought to attract the various sojourning communities residing within the city. See Jin Jiang, Women Playing Men in Yue Opera: Social Change in Twentieth-century Shanghai (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2008), pp. 9–12.

10 For siqing stories amongst delta shan’ge see Anne E. McLaren, “Gossip, Scandal, and the Wanton Woman in Chinese Song-cycles,” in Cuncun Wu and Mark Stevens, eds., Wanton Women in Late Imperial Chinese Literature: Models, Genres, Subversion and Traditions (Leiden: Brill, 2017), pp. 184–228.

11 Cited in Hong Yu 洪煜 and Liu Yongguang 劉永廣, “Huayu, xushu yu lishi jiyi—Jindai Wuxi tanhuang xingxiang jiangou yu ziwo jiushu” 話語, 敘述與歷史記憶—近代無錫灘簧形象建構與自我救贖 (Discourse, narrative, and historical memory—The image construction of modern Wuxi tanhuang and self-redemption), Jiangnan daxue xuebao 江南大學學報 14.1 (2015): 25. The term yin 淫 can be variously translated as lewd, licentious, obscene or illicit. By the mid nineteenth century, the Manchu court had begun to relax earlier prohibitions on Chinese musical theater. However, after the Taiping Rebellion (or Taiping Civil War) prohibitions returned in the region of Suzhou (see discussion below). On prohibitions against Chinese drama see Chen Fan Pen, “Forbidden Fruits: Ethnicity and Gender in Prohibitions on Performances in Late Imperial China,” CHINOPERL Journal of Chinese Oral and Performing Literature (2004) 25: 1, 35–85. The term mixi 秘戲 refers to lewd or obscene games belonging to the bedroom. One could infer that this critic is referring to the enactment of lewd actions in performances of tanhuang. A common term for pornographic pictures is mixi tu 秘戲圖。

12 Ibid., p. 26.

13 Li, “Tanhuang,” p. 63.

14 Jonathan P. J. Stock, “Place and Music: Institutions and Cosmopolitanism in ‘Shenqu’, Shanghai Traditional Local Opera, 1912–1949,” Music & Letters 83.4 (2002): 546.

15 Ibid.

16 Dong Jianbo 董建波 and Li Xuechang 李學昌, 20 shiji Jiang Zhe Hu nongcun shehui bianqian zhong de wenhua yanjin 20 世紀江浙滬農村社會變遷中的文化演進 (Cultural progress in the social transformation of twentieth-century Jiangsu, Zhejiang, and Shanghai rural society; Shanghai, Huadong shifan daxue, 2010), p. 154.

17 Hong and Liu, “Huayu, xushu yu lishi ji,” pp. 31–32. Zhu Hengfu 朱恒夫, “Xinhai geming hou de Chang Xi tanhuang” 辛亥革命後的常錫灘簧 (Changzhou and Wuxi tanhuang after the 1911 revolution), Zhejiang yishu zhiye xueyuan xuebao 浙江藝術職業學院學報 13.2 (2015): 9–10.

18 In the final decades of the nineteenth century women began to appear on stage in urban centers such as Beijing, Tianjin and Shanghai. However, polite society regarded them as on a par with prostitutes, see Weikun Cheng, “The Challenge of the Actresses: Female Performers and Cultural Alternatives in Early Twentieth Century Beijing and Tianjin,” Modern China 22.2 (1996): 197–233; and Luo Suwen, “Gender on the Stage: Actresses in an Actor’s World,” in Gender in Motion: Divisions of Labor and Cultural Change in Late Imperial and Modern China, ed. Bryna Goodman and Wendy Larson (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005), pp. 75–95.

19 Hong and Liu, “Huayu, xushu yu lishi ji,” p. 23.

20 As Wei Shang has pointed out, the May Fourth reformist movement advocated a form of plain writing (baihua 白話) based on the guanhua language form used in transregional communication across the country. This meant that it was not the true vernacular of any single region, see Wei Shang, “Writing and Speech: Rethinking the Issue of Vernaculars in Early Modern China,” in Benjamin A. Elman, ed., Rethinking East Asian Languages, Vernaculars, and Literacies, 1000–1919 (Leiden: Brill, 2014), p. 260. The new baihua literature was later criticized as a literary language removed from common speech (p. 264).

21 See Gu Jiegang 顧頡剛 et al., Wuge. Wuge xiaoshi 吳歌·吳歌小史 (Wu songs; A brief history of Wu songs), ed. Wang Xuhua 王煦華 (Nanjing: Jiangsu guji, 1999), p. 17. Yu Pingbo was an advocate of literature based on Guoyu (國語), or the national language, as well as literature based on “fangyan” (方言), or the spoken language of communities and regions. Ibid., p. 16.

22 Jonathan P.J. Stock, “Learning ‘Huju’ in Shanghai, 1900–1950: Apprenticeship and the Acquisition of Expertise in a Chinese Local Opera Tradition,” Asian Music 33.2 (2002): 12.

23 Stock, “Place and Music,” p. 556.

24 For discussion of a shan’ge manuscript from the mid-nineteenth century see Anne E. McLaren, “Folk Epics from the Lower Yangzi Delta Region: Oral and Written Traditions,” in The Interplay of the Oral and the Written in Chinese Popular Literature, ed. Vibeke Børdahl and Margaret Wan (Copenhagen: Nordic Institute of Asiatic Studies Press, 2010), pp. 157–86.

25 For example, in 1914 a publishing house known as the Xinju xiaoshuo she 新劇小說社 (Fiction based on new plays) was set up in the Shanghai Sima Road (Fuzhou Road) entertainment quarters to publish fiction based on play performances. See Liu Hecheng 柳和城, “Xinju xiaoshuo she yu ta de chubanwu” 新劇小說社與它的出版物 (The new plays and fiction society and its publications), Chuban shiliao 出版史料 2007.3: 119–25.

26 During this transitional era one finds the simultaneous use of older and newer forms of printing. See Cynthia Brokaw, “Commercial Woodblock Publishing in the Qing (1644–1911) and the Transition to Modern Print Technology,” in From Woodblocks to the Internet: Chinese Publishing and Print Culture in Transition, circa 1800 to 2008, ed. Cynthia Brokaw and Christopher A. Reed (Leiden: Brill, 2010), pp. 39–57.

27 Li, “Tanhuang,” p. 65.

28 For example, the pioneering study on the relationship between tanhuang and folk songs by Wang Fang and Zheng Shuoren relies entirely on this recently recorded material. See their Minjian xushi shi de chuangzuo, pp. 180–213.

29 Christopher Reed, “Gutenberg and Modern Chinese Print Culture: The State of the Discipline II,” Book History 10 (2007): 303.

30 The tanhuang holdings can be found in volumes 278–283 of Huang Kuanzhong 黃寬重, Li Xiaoti 李孝悌, and Wu Zhengshang 吳政上, eds., Su wenxue congkan 俗文學叢刊 (Folk literature collection), 500 vols. (Taibei: Xin wenfeng, 2001–2006). An online version of the same collection is available in some libraries in North America, such as the University of California Berkeley and Harvard University libraries. A final installment appeared in 2016.

31 On the role of Liu Fu in this intellectual movement see Chang-tai Hung, Going to the People: Chinese Intellectuals and Folk Literature, 1918–1937 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), pp. 33–40.

32 See Tseng Yong-Yih 曾永義, Shuo su wenxue 說俗文學 (Speaking of popular literature; Taibei: Liangjing chuban shiye, 1980), pp. 1–10. For a report in English on the collection see Vibeke Børdahl, “Re: Popular Literature in the Fu Ssu-nien Library of the Academia Sinica,” Asian Folklore Studies 58.1 (1999): 231–35.

33 It should be noted that the photo prints in Su wenxue congkan do not necessarily represent fully the material circumstances of the original item. In November 2011, I had the opportunity to view a number of the Fu Ssu-nien song booklets and noted that there were various anomalies in how they had been rebound. For example, parts of one text were rebound in fragmentary form together with other texts with no indication in the catalogue. Sometimes manuscript and imprints of diverse origins were bound in the same volume without identification in the book title or the Su wenxue congkan catalogue.

34 Ma Youyu 馬幼漁 published a call to reform plays in the Ningbo baihua bao 寧波白話報 (Ningbo vernacular language paper) in that year, see discussion in Dong and Li, 20 shiji Jiang Zhe Hu nongcun shehui, p. 154.

35 See Bryna Goodman, “The Locality as Microcosm of the Nation?: Native Place Networks and Early Urban Regionalism in China,” Modern China 21.4 (1995): 387–419.

36 Wang Liqi 王利器, Yuan Ming Qing sandai jinhui xiaoshuo xiqu shiliao 元明請三代禁毀小說戲曲史料 (Historical material on banned fiction and plays in the Yuan, Ming, and Qing dynasties; Shanghai: Shanghai guji, 1981), p. 146.

37 Han Bangqing 韓邦慶, Haishang hua liezhuan 海上花列傳 (Biographies of outstanding courtesans of Shanghai; Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 1982), p. 55.

38 Gu Jiegang and Wu Limo 吳立模, “Suzhou changben yulu” 蘇州唱本余錄 (Supplementary record of Suzhou song booklets), Geyao zhoukan 歌谣周刊 60 (1924), included in Gu et al., Wuge. Wuge xiaoshi, p. 686.

39 Zhu Hengfu 朱恒夫, “Minguo shiba nian yiyue qiri ‘Shenbao’ shang de tanhuang xinxi de jiazhi” 民國十八年一月七日’申報’上的灘簧資訊的價值 (The value of the information on tanhuang in the Shenbao report of January 7 1929), Dongnan daxue xuebao 東南大學學報 9.1 (2007): 117.

40 Antoinet Schimmelpenninck, Chinese Folk Songs and Folk Singers: Shan`ge Traditions in Southern Jiangsu (Leiden: CHIME Foundation, 1997), p. 97.

41 As noted in the online catalogue for Su wenxue congkan. The same tale is sometimes known as Wenzi shan’ge 蚊子山歌 (Song about mosquitos).

42 Huang et al., Su wenxue congkan, vol. 276, pp. 487–99.

43 Sir Frederick Maze, “Notes on the Chinese ‘Yuloh,’” The Mariner’s Mirror 36.1 (1950): 55–57.

44 According to Li Jiarui, who viewed tanhuang in the 1930s, tanhuang comprised a number of different styles of songs (fast, slow, falling, and so on). Li, “Tanhuang”; see Wang, Li Jiarui xiansheng, p. 65.

45 Huang et al., Su wenxue congkan, vol. 276, p. 494. Note that in the case of all citations from tanhuang in this article, I preserve the original character forms of the characters. Tanhuang texts commonly contain a mixture of alternative and conventional characters.

46 Huang et al., Su wenxue congkan, vol. 276, p. 494.

47 “By day it lingered behind the gauze curtains / By night it hid deep in the lady’s bosom. / Even though the lady used her ten finger-tips to squash it to death / The mosquito thought it was worth it!” 日裡裏躲在青紗帳, 夜轉躲在姐胸膛, 被那姐姐十指尖尖來拍死, 蚊子死了也風光. Chong Jiu 重九, “Suzhou changben” 蘇州唱本 (Suzhou songbook; 1924). See Gu et al., Wuge. Wuge xiaoshi, p. 705.

48 “The Eighteen Gropes” could be accompanied by actual groping. An illustration to another song booklet has a picture entitled “Li Junfu sings ‘The Eighteen Gropes.’” This performance takes place inside a room (or possibly on a stage). There are screens to the rear. The illustration depicts the male player half-kneeling on the floor with his right hand on the lower back of the female player. In his left hand he holds upright a phallic-looking prop standing in for the rudder. The young woman, clothed in a waist-length striped jacket with a mandarin-collar and calf-length striped trousers, is stepping forward wielding a curved paddle as if on a boat. She appears to have unbound feet. See the Shan’ge category, Shidiao daguan 時調大觀 (Compendium of popular songs), opening illustrations, p. 2; viewed in the Academia Sinica Fu Ssu-nien Library, TC19-233. The costume the woman is shown wearing is said to be characteristic of that worn by women from the late 1910s to early 1920s; see Antonia Finnane, Changing Clothes in China: Fashion, History, Nation (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), pp. 124, 139. For another example of an image of the rocking boat story see the New Year print from Suzhou in Wang Shucun 王樹村, Xichu nianhua 戲齣年畫 (Theatrical new year prints), 2 Vols. (Taibei: Yingwen Hansheng, 1990), 1: 76–77. This rendition features two costumed ladies on the boat and is entitled “Rocking Boat Duo” (“Shuang dang huchuan” 雙蕩湖船). The male, sporting a moustache and glasses, is groping the back of the beautifully costumed lady wielding the sculling oar. In this version, a man from outside the region who is observing the scene from the bank accepts the loan of binoculars from a helpful onlooker. He is so engrossed in the spectacle of the Eighteen Gropes that the helpful onlooker manages to steal his money.

49 The Tianzu hui was an association set up in Shanghai in 1895 by Chinese reformers to discourage foot-binding. See Dorothy Ko, Cinderella’s Sisters: A Revisionist History of Footbinding (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), p. 40. Ko points out that the term first came to public notice in 1875 when the Reverend John McGowan tried to set up an association of that name in Amoy (p. 14). She also notes that tianzu was a neologism of the era (p. 17).

50 Huang et al., Su wenxue congkan, vol. 276, p. 499.

51 The bride lamenting in coastal Nanhui, south of Shanghai, would bewail her “large” [natural] feet, a sure sign of poverty and unworthiness for marriage. See Anne E. McLaren, Performing Grief: Bridal Laments in Rural China (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2008), p. 56.

52 Lydia H. Liu, Translingual Practice: Literature, National Culture, and Translated Modernity, China 1900–1937 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), p. 308.

53 Developmental Fairy Tales: Evolutionary Thinking and Modern Chinese Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), p. 17.

54 The male refers to his lover as Amei 阿妹 (little sister) and the woman to her lover (qinglang 情郎) as Age 阿哥 (older brother). These terms of address are commonplace between lovers in folk performance genres.

55 Huang et al., Su wenxue congkan, vol. 276, p. 462.

56 Ibid., p. 471.

57 This is an apparent reference to a two-part allegorical saying where the real message is left unspoken (xiehouyu 歇後語): “like a tiger trying to swallow a stone lion—impossible to swallow” 老虎吞石獅—吃不消. Note that this text does not use the feminized version of ta 她 to refer to “she/her.” The feminized ta was first adopted by certain writers in the 1920s (see Liu, Translingual Practice, pp. 36–37).

58 Huang et al., Su wenxue congkan, vol. 276, p. 471.

59 Ibid., p. 472.

60 Zheng, Wuyu xushi shan’ge, p. 80

61 Ibid., pp. 60–61.

62 Viewed at the Fu Ssu-nien Library. This text is A Sg4-065 in the catalogue. It is undated and contains an illustration of a male figure in prison, his hands in a cangue and his feet manacled. A tearful woman is depicted visiting him.

63 Huang et al., Su wenxue congkan, vol. 275, pp. 238–45.

64 Ko, Cinderella’s Sisters, pp. 38–68. Ko also notes the “misogyny” with which women with bound feet were treated in the opening decades of the twentieth century, ibid., p. 68.

65 For definitions of these terms see Sarah E. Stevens, “Figuring Modernity: The New Woman and the Modern Girl in Republican China,” NWSA Journal 15.3 (Autumn 2003): 82–103. Both the so-called New Woman and the Modern Girl had short bobbed hair and modern attire. However, the New Woman was associated with the politically-aware educated woman and the Modern Girl appears as either “a female character actively seeking romance” or “as a sinister and dangerous figure” (p. 89).

66 See Matthew H. Sommer, “Abortion in Late Imperial China: Routine Birth Control or Crisis Intervention?” Late Imperial China 31.2 (2010): 97–165. Traditional Chinese medicine used poisonous beetles and other toxic material such as musk. Particularly common was striped blister beetle (mylabris or banmao). These were highly toxic. Fei Xiaotong mentions folk remedies used by villagers of the Yangzi delta such as snails, fish, and birds eggs. Shanghai prostitutes ate tadpoles. None of this worked but frequently injured or killed the woman. See discussion in Sommer.

67 The term wenming was associated with “free marriage,” that is, free choice of partners, anathema to conservative forces. It could be applied to female students in a derogatory way; see Joan Judge, The Precious Raft of History: The Past, the West, and the Woman Question in China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), p. 73.

68 See discussion in Louise Edwards, “Policing the Modern Woman in Republican China.” Modern China 26.2 (2000): 124 and passim.

69 On the emergence of notions of gender equality in China see Louise Edwards, Gender, Politics, and Democracy: Women’s Suffrage in China (Stanford.: Stanford University Press, 2008), pp. 35–38. For a succinct history of these issues see Gail Hershatter, Women in China’s Long Twentieth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), pp. 79–88.

70 For a discussion of a “scandalous” magazine directed at women readers see Michael Hockx, “Raising Eyebrows: The Journal Eyebrow Talk and the Regulation of ‘Harmful Fiction’ in Modern China,” in Hockx et al., Women and the Periodical Press, pp. 74–92.

71 Edwards, “Policing the Modern Woman in Republican China.” The moral status of women suffragettes came under attack, Edwards, Gender, Politics, and Democracy, p. 105.

72 “ ‘Women Behaving Badly’: Crime, Transgressive Behaviour and Gender in Early Twentieth Century China,” Nan Nü: Men, Women and Gender in China 8.1 (2006): 159.

73 According to Amy D. Dooling, leading women writers of the early twentieth century “expressed deep ambivalence about the contemporary realities of modern sexual relations,” Women’s Literary Feminism in Twentieth Century China (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), pp. 79–80. She adds that women who followed notions of free love “typically end up disappointed, if not utterly devastated, by what they find instead” (p. 80).

74 He Qiliang, “Scandal and the New Woman: Identities and Mass Culture in 1920s China,” Studies on Asia, 4th series, 1.1 (2010): 1–28; “Between Sensationalism and Didacticism: News Coverage of the Huang-Lu affair and the Chinese Press in the Late 1920s,” Sungkyun Journal of East Asian Studies 12.1 (2012): 19–40; and Feminism, Women’s Agency, and Communication in Early Twentieth-Century China: The Case of the Huang-Lu Elopement (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018).

75 According to He, the elopement was first reported in the press (Suzhou mingbao) on August 10 1928, see “Scandal and the New Woman,” p. 6 n 15.

76 She even made an appeal to the Shanghai press using the discourse of “freedom” and “romantic love,” terms she apparently borrowed from news articles she had read the previous week. For this she was hailed in the Shanghai press as a brave revolutionary woman. Her gifts of winter clothing to the imprisoned Lu Genrong were likened to the actions of a paragon of the faithful wife, Meng Jiangnű. See discussion in He, Feminism, Women’s Agency, pp. 51–53.

77 See He, “Scandal and the New Woman,” p. 13.

78 He, Feminism, Women’s Agency, pp. 185–87.

79 Zhu,“Minguo shiba nian,” pp. 117–18.

80 Ibid., p. 118.

81 Huang et al., Su wenxue congkan, vol. 275, pp. 59–142.

82 Ibid., p. 61.

83 Ibid., p. 62.

84 Ibid., p. 63.

85 The illustration is in line with the actual costume worn by Huang in court in October 1928; see He, Feminism, Women’s Agency, p. 54. In 1927 the cheongsam was endorsed by government authorities and quickly became the height of fashion; see Ellen Johnston Laing, “Visual Evidence for the Evolution of ‘Politically Correct’ Dress for Women in Early Twentieth Century Shanghai,” Nan Nü: Men, Women and Gender in Early and Imperial China 5.1 (2003): 69–114, see especially pp. 97, 102. Antonia Finnane observes of the qipao that it gained “absolute ascendancy” in the 1930s, Changing Clothes in China, p. 141.

86 In Suzhou mingbao, August 10 and 11, 1928, Lu Genrong is said to be “an evil servant” who seduced and kidnapped Huang Huiru “out of his desire for sex and wealth” and an “evil bond slave,” summarized in He, “Scandal and the New Woman,” p. 7. Two films (both 1929) on the affair also portrayed Lu Genrong as a villain; see He, “Between Sensationalism and Didacticism,” p. 33. As He points out, the issue was Lu’s lower class status, particularly, his “lack of proper education” (p. 33). He Qiliang further notes that in a 1930 farce drama Lu Genrong is depicted as deliberately using feminist discourse to seduce the young woman (see his Feminism, Women’s Agency, p. 188).

87 Weijing Lu observes that suicides of betrothed women continued to be commended by the state and celebrated in literati writings well into the early twentieth century; see True to Her Word: The Faithful Maiden Cult in Late Imperial China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008), pp. 252–53.

88 Judge, The Precious Raft of History, pp. 29–31.

89 Peter Carroll notes that the Shanghai press, in particular, had “a fascination with the self-murder of the ‘New Woman,’” “Fate-Bound Mandarin Ducks: Newspaper Coverage of the ‘Fashion’ for Suicide in 1931 Suzhou,” Twentieth Century China 31.1 (2006): 74. See also Bryna Goodman, “The New Woman Commits Suicide: The Press, Cultural Memory, and the New Republic,” The Journal of Asian Studies 64.1 (2005): 67–101.

90 Huang et al., Su wenxue, vol. 275, p. 68. The expression nannü pingdeng emerged at least as early as 1907, see Beijing nübao 592 (April 27, 1907), cited in Bailey, “‘Women Behaving Badly,’” p. 177 n. 68. Lydia Liu does not list pingdeng in her appendices but includes the term pingquan 平權 (Liu, Translingual Practice, Appendix B, p. 288). This is a loan word from the Japanese to translate the English word “equal rights.” Ziyou, used to translate the Western notion of “freedom,” appeared quite early (see ibid, p. 37). Quanli 權利 (rights) was used as early as the 1860s (ibid, p. 279).

91 Huang et al., Su wenxue congkan, vol. 275, p. 92.

92 For further discussion see He, Feminism, Women’s Agency, p. 19.

93 Huang et al., Su wenxue congkan, vol. 275, p. 142.

94 A dictionary of Wu regional speech cites the use of Wu expressions going back to the Shishuo xinyu 世說新語 of Liu Yiqing 劉義慶 (403–444 CE); see Wu Liansheng 吳連生 et al., Wu fangyan cidian 吳方言詞典 (Dictionary of Wu regional language; Shanghai: Hanyu da cidian, 1995), p. 605. The earliest extant example of a recorded song in Wu idiom is the victory song sung by the first king of the Wu-Yue kingdom, Qian Liu 錢鏐 (852–932), on his return home from battle, included in Gu et al., Wuge. Wuge xiaoshi, p. 608. Zhang Xiumin 張秀民notes that lute ballads (tanci 彈詞) of the late imperial era could be published in either the lingua franca (Mandarin, Guoyin 國音) or in Wu language (Wuyin 吳音), Zhongguo yinshua shi 中國印刷史 (The history of Chinese printing), illustrated expanded edition edited by Han Qi 韓琦 2 vols. (Hangzhou: Zhejiang guji, 2006), 2: 482. Apart from Wu literature, there existed rich Minnanese and Cantonese performance text cultures in the last centuries of the imperial era. Authors of nineteenth-century fiction exploited the existence of regional script forms to highlight the rural or regional identity of their characters. Paize Keulemans discusses how Beijing-based fiction “mimicked” an array of regional dialects for literary effect; see “Printing the Sound of Cosmopolitan Beijing: Dialect Accents in Nineteenth-Century Martial Arts Fiction,” in Brokaw and Reed, From Woodblocks to the Internet, pp. 159–84. Regional script forms played a role in the advocacy for China’s national language; see Jin Liu, Signifying the Local: Media Productions Rendered in Local Languages in Mainland China in the New Millenium (Leiden & Boston: Brill, 2013), pp. 19–57. In the late twentieth century, folklorists of the Shanghai hinterland returned to the by now well-established character forms used to record Wu idiom in producing their own transcripts of shan’ge and similar folk forms.

95 Edward M. Gunn, Rendering the Regional: Local Language in Contemporary Chinese Media (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2006), p. 4, has observed of Chinese regional languages that they have been stereotyped as “the signifier of the historical past, the intimate and domestic, the humorous, the mundane and philistine, the uncultured, crude emotions, and primitive behavior.” When Beijing University intellectuals first began collecting folk songs in the 1920s they met with derision from conservative quarters; see Wang Xuhua, preface to Wuge. Wuge xiaoshi, p. 4.

96 Lydia Liu observes that when foreign concepts were translated into Chinese, often through the medium of post-Meiji Japanese, this often led to a novel interpretation of the term “within the local environment” of the host language (Translingual Practice, p. 26).