Sex in the imperial garden: an unpublished Chinese pillow book, or manual of love-making, in the Kinsey Institute is a remarkable version of a celebrated album without any erotic content painted in 1738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

[FIGURES 2 & 4 OMITTED]

Without wishing to overly complicate my argument, I think it is important to point out that in order to create this composition the Kinsey artist had to be familiar not only with the original silk leaves by Chen Mei (1738), but also with its ivory duplicate (1741) (Fig. 3). There are several minor discrepancies between Chen Mei's work and the ivory album, including (in this scene) the number of figures, certain architectural elements and parts of the garden: in the back wall of the pavilion in Chen's leaf, for example, we see a door with a curtain pulled to the side. The Kinsey artist copies this detail exactly, although in the ivory version this opening is blocked by a decorative screen. On the other hand, in Chen's composition only one women stands in the far right-hand corner of the room, while in the Kinsey version we find two women in her place. These two women appear in the ivory duplicate. I would therefore suggest that the Kinsey artist clearly had access to both albums (or perhaps further unknown copies of these), since he was able to introduce elements from both sources into his own scenes with great accuracy. Such combinations can also be found in other leaves of the erotic album.

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The third month

Swinging under the willow trees heralds the beginning of spring, the season of erotic awakening. Here six court ladies are seated on a garden bench. They avidly observe one of their companions, who is standing on a swing that has been set up in front of a low balustrade (Fig. 6). The women are located on an upper terrace of the garden; a stone wall marks the border of a lower level. In the Kinsey leaf, however, this wall has been removed to make room for a second bench, where love-making is in progress (Fig. 5). Yet the removal of the wall and the addition of the love-making couple with their everpresent eunuch are not the only alterations: the bench on which the women are seated in Chen's original composition now assumes the character of a large rock, a familiar feature in Chinese garden architecture. Nevertheless, this changed emphasis implicitly enhances the erotic ambience of the scene: romantic usage of rocks can be found in many erotic texts, such as the influential dramatic narrative of Ming times written by Tang Xianzu (1598), the Mudan Ting (The Peony Pavilion). This tells the story of a scholar's daughter who falls asleep in the garden on a hot spring day and dreams of a passionate rendezvous with a young gentleman. After she wakes up, she pines for her dream-lover until she eventually falls ill and dies. One of the scenes in the story describes a fantasy encounter with her imagined paramour in the garden:

   How my longings stir to recall that
   moment!/ Against the weathered
   rock/ He leaned my wilting body,/
   Then as he laid my jade limbs
   down/ 'smoke issued from jade in
   warmth of sun'/ by balustrade/ past
   swing/ there I spread the folds of
   my skirt,/ a covering for earth/ for
   fear of the eyes of heaven/ then it
   was we knew/perfect mystery / of
   joy ineffable (16)