Fleecing the male customer in Shanghai brothels of the 1890s.

Late Qing novels abound in situations of transition, where classical antecedents coexist with modern departures. In this period of not-so-sure adjustment, we still encounter the love fantasy of the elite prostitute and her male patron, which has traditionally constituted a home away from the ritually defined home of marriage and family. In the 1892 novel Flowers of Shanghai (Haishanghua liezhuan), by Han Bangqing, this home away from home has now moved to the separate space of the foreign concessions of Shanghai, which is, in effect, a city away from the rest-of-China. There, where capitalism and foreign laws reign, the role of the traditional master—Confucian father, local magistrate, or the emperor himself—has weakened. Instead we have the vigorous and entrepreneurial prostitute and her male patron, the man whom she “fleeces” (qiao) as he searches for the woman with the most aura. It is the particular way Han Bangqing portrays this prostitute that makes the novel so singular. He begins by vilifying her in a manner that is common to other writings of the period, namely, that she wears beauty on the outside but is poisonous within, “The one before your eyes may be as beautiful as the legendary Xishi, but underneath she is more vicious than a yaksha” (1.1). Yet Flowers of Shanghai then quietly brackets that viewpoint as one belonging to the stymied male and instead goes on to foreground the reality of the business of the brothel, that is, the womens’ often urgent problems of getting by, about which