The Practical Factors in the Love Songs of Lower Class Women of Northern China During the Late Qing

Abstract

Through a study of archival collections of popular North China urban ballads this paper aims to identify and contextualise nineteenth and early twentieth century thematizations of gender and gender transgression that are not prominent in other literary forms. Adapting methods focused on drawing out common everyday experience, analysis of this popular corpus will contribute to expanding the horizon of China’s cultural and social history beyond perspectives dominated by elite cultural production. Known colloquially in parts of northern China as “bun booth books” (mantoupu ben, hereafter BBB), as the term indicates they were cheap and very small publications printed on the same paper used under steamed buns (mantou) and sold (or rented) through the same stores. While their content has been found to range across various popular song forms and themes, many BBB contain previously undocumented songs current among urban commoners (shidiao). The content of BBB popular songs ranges over most aspects of commoners’ everyday lives, but enough of them focus on the love- and sex-lives of commoner women to suggest this was the principle theme with which the songbooks were associated, and we may even consider that women were among those targeted as customers visiting mantoupu. It is this aspect of the BBB that relates to my ongoing interest in non-elite experiences of sexuality—a rich seam for investigating an otherwise historically neglected social group and topics that caught their interest. The latter includes portrayals and judgements concerning adultery, incest, illegitimate births, quarrelling couples, and many other transgressions against the standard morality of the day.