Sex in the imperial garden: an unpublished Chinese pillow book, or manual of love-making, in the Kinsey Institute is a remarkable version of a celebrated album without any erotic content painted in 1738 for Emperor Qianlong by the court painter Chen Mei, as Efrat El-Hanany reveals

Apollo, March, 2005 by Efrat El-Hanany

Princess Su'e, heroine of the erotic Ming novel The Unofficial History of the Bamboo Garden (Zhu lin ye shi), was notorious for her sexual adventures, one of which took place in a bamboo grove of the palace garden. (1) In traditional Chinese poetry, fiction, drama and painting, the garden was often seen as an appropriately intimate setting for love-making and erotic fantasy. (2) Its various components, such as flowers, trees, rocks and water, were often interpreted with an eye to their sexual implications. Blooming red flowers, for instance, were symbols of feminine beauty and sensuality, while rocks of phallic shape were not surprisingly construed to suggest male sexual satisfaction and virility. Poets, writers and artists frequently introduced these elements in order to make their imaginary gardens ideal sites for fictional erotic encounters.

Such scenes of love-making in a garden setting form the subject of an elegant twelve-leaf album in the collection of the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction at Indiana University, Bloomington. This anonymous work, painted in coloured inks on silk, has never before been published. In each leaf, court ladies appear in palace gardens swinging, embroidering, boating and admiring flowers. Each leaf also includes a depiction of ardent love-making in various positions, either within the garden itself or in one of its pavilions or studios. A private collector donated this album to the Kinsey Institute in 1973, where it is catalogued simply as Emperor and ladies of the court. Other than this general characterisation, and an estimated dating of between 1750 and 1850, absolutely nothing was known about it and it had escaped scholarly notice.

Overlooked until now is the fact that the Kinsey album closely resembles a well-known twelve-leaf album (with no explicit erotic content) known as The pursuit of pleasures in the course of the seasons (Yueman qingyou), (3) which was made in 1738 for Emperor Qianlong (who reigned from 1736 to 1795) by Chen Mei, one of his court painters. This original album has never left the Imperial Palace (now the Palace Museum) in Beijing. In the absence of textual evidence relating to the album in the Kinsey Institute, only a close comparison of the two works can shed any light on their relationship. The present study compares the twelve leaves in the Kinsey Institute with Chen's original album, and attempts to elucidate the later album's function, meaning and historical context.

Chen Mei's The pursuit of pleasures in the course of the seasons

The twelve leaves of Chen Mei's album take as their subject the conventional theme of the activities of the ladies of the imperial court. (4) This iconographic tradition was first established in the Tang dynasty under Emperor Xuanzong, when official court painters such as Zhang Xuan and Zhou Fang specialised in depictions of the beautiful concubines in their private quarters. This genre came to be known as Life in the palace (gongzhong tu). (5) A famous example of this theme is Spring morning in the Han palace (c. 1540, National Palace Museum, Taipei), traditionally attributed to Qiu Ying (c. 1501-c. 1552), which offers an imaginary tour of the forbidden inner quarters of the imperial precinct. Here the graceful court beauties promenade in elegant garden settings and engage in conventionally female activities. During the Qing dynasty (1644-1911), sets of twelve compositions illustrating beautiful women became very common, each leaf depicting an activity associated with a certain month of the year, and Chen Mei's album is just one of many which explore such imagery. (6)

Qianlong, for whom Chen's original album was painted, apparently passed much of his time in his palace gardens. (7) The painting Qianlong composing verses in his garden is a typical record of the pleasure he took in his garden, (8) where he was known to have escorted his favourite feminine companions on leisurely walks, which presumably were undertaken with erotic intent. His beautiful maidens had been carefully educated for that purpose, having been taught the Chinese classics as well as the arts of dancing, singing and playing musical instruments; in addition, many could paint pictures and compose poems. (9) The pleasure gardens of the Forbidden City were a place of female elegance, beauty and erotic charm--the Emperor's earthly paradise.

Records show that Qianlong commissioned The pursuit of pleasures in the course of the seasons from Chen Mei in 1738. (10) Chen came from the region of Shanghai and worked for the imperial household between the years 1720 and 1740, mainly under Emperor Yongzheng, and into the beginning of Qianlong's reign. It was a period when vivid and realistic means of representation were being introduced into the court by European missionaries, among them the Italian Jesuit painter Giuseppe Castiglione (1688-1766), who came to Beijing in 1713, shortly before the arrival of Chen Mei. Castiglione remained there for fifty years, working under the Chinese name Lang Shih-ning. Qing academic painters, Chen amongst them, were impressed by Western techniques such as the representation of space through linear perspective, a novelty which makes itself apparent in Chen's compositions of the Pursuit of pleasures leaves. (11)