Eight
Prostitution and the Market in Women in Early Twentieth-Century Shanghai

Gail Hershatter

In 1917 a man named Huang brought an eleven-year-old girl named Hsueh Feng to Shanghai. There he took her to the House of Pearls (Han-chu chia), an elegant brothel run by Old Three Wang, a madam who was "unsurpassed in rounding up talent for her house." Huang pawned Hsueh Feng to the brothel for 350 yuan, the pawn period being set at eight years. It is not clear whether Huang was a relative of the girl, a professional trafficker in women, or both. But apparently the girl's family knew where she was, for soon afterward some relatives appeared at the brothel and asked to see the madam. Explaining that Hsueh's parents had died and there was no money to bury them properly, the relatives asked Old Three Wang to increase the pawn price and buy Hsueh Feng outright. The madam agreed; henceforth Hsueh Feng became the permanent property of the brothel.

Eleven years passed, during which Hsueh, as a beautiful adolescent, served as a prostitute-in-training (ch'u-chi ). The details of her duties in the brothel in those years are not recorded, but she was not yet expected to have sexual relations with the customers or to entertain them alone. In 1928 she began to entertain guests, taking the professional name of Old Seven, since she was the seventh prostitute in the House of Pearls. Even then her work appears to have consisted of singing for rich men at parties; she was referred to as a "small teacher" (hsiao hsien-sheng ), a term that in the trade meant "virgin prostitute."

At one of these parties, Old Seven caught the eye of a wealthy young man named Lu Min-kang, who was a partner in an export firm with offices on the Shanghai docks. Lu, age twenty-three, was from Ch'ung-ming, north of Shanghai. Though he showed up at work only occasionally, his position in the firm was secure because his father owned substantial amounts of stock. Lu paid several formal calls on Old Seven, observing the elaborate courtesies

required of patrons in upper-class brothels. But the madam, Old Three Wang, looked on him with disfavor because she felt he did not give generous-enough tips when Old Seven sang. Protecting her investment, perhaps hoping to sell Old Seven's first night to someone who was freer with his money, the madam kept a close eye on Old Seven and refused to let her out alone.

Nevertheless, Lu found an opportunity to meet Old Seven secretly one night, and during their encounter Old Seven "broke with the behavior of a virgin prostitute." The two decided they wanted to spend their lives together, but Lu did not follow the usual procedure of offering to buy Old Seven from the madam. Instead, the couple fled the brothel one day in 1929, taking with them several suitcases of clothing and gold jewelry. The madam looked for them in vain. The next day she received a letter from a lawyer. The letter said that Old Seven had been pawned as a prostitute, but that her pawn period had long ago expired. She had been young, ignorant, and trampled underfoot, the letter continued, and now that she was grown she wanted to regain her freedom and break relations with the brothel. The lawyer gave Old Three Wang two days to produce the "illegal" contract that bound Old Seven to the brothel so that it could be invalidated. If she did not meet the deadline, the letter warned, she would be dealt with according to law.

Undaunted, Old Three Wang retained a lawyer of her own. She also located Lu and Old Seven in their hiding place in the southern part of the city and sent someone there to talk to (and perhaps threaten) them. When he saw the visitor, Lu "raged and roared," and the encounter concluded on worse terms than it had begun. Shortly thereafter the courts undertook an investigation of the case (SP July 10, 1929:7).

The legal disposition of this case was not reported in the press, and it is not clear what became of Old Seven. But her story contains many elements common to the lives of prostitutes in Republican-era Shanghai: the poverty and crisis in Hsueh Feng's family, the pawning or sale of daughters into prostitution, the long training period and close guarding of prostitutes in the more exclusive brothels, and the elaborate rituals of entertainment and negotiation that preceded any sexual encounter with an upper-class prostitute. In finding a young patron who was willing to free her from the life, Hsueh was fulfilling the dream of many young women who hoped to leave the brothels on the arm of a rich man. The resort to litigation was characteristic of both madams and prostitutes. And the use of violence and intimidation, though only hinted at in this particular case, was an integral part of work relations in the trade.

Recent scholars and activists writing on prostitution have renamed it "sex work" (Delacoste and Alexander 1987), reminding us that it must be understood in the context of other forms of paid labor available to women. In Shanghai prostitution was indeed one of just a few situations in which women could earn an income. But the Shanghai market in female labor was

not a free one, in two senses. First, women had little choice about where they worked because the female labor market was structured by regional and family connections. Second, women themselves often were not free workers; that is, they were frequently kidnapped or purchased by contractors who then sold their labor to factories or sold them outright as maids, concubines, and prostitutes. An even more common arrangement for prostitutes was to be pawned to a brothel by their families or by traffickers for a specified period of time. Whether sold or pawned, a woman had limited or no control over her income and working conditions, nor did she have the right to leave a brothel unless she redeemed the pawn pledge. In placing Shanghai prostitution on the continuum of work, we must be mindful that the women themselves were treated primarily as commodities rather than producers of commodities.

Prostitution must be placed on another continuum as well: one of claims on women's sexual services. This continuum included concubinage and marriage as well as prostitution because all of these were means by which others acquired claims on a woman's person.^[1] All women in late imperial and Republican China, Sue Gronewold writes in her study of prostitution, were "regarded fundamentally as disposable merchandise, as commodities. The prostitute's singularity lay in being a strictly sexual commodity" (1982:50). Prostitution and marriage thus become merely different forms of transaction in the same market. Although this formulation calls attention to an important similarity between married women and prostitutes, it diverts attention from the struggle that prostitutes in particular waged, sometimes successfully, to gain a modicum of control over the disposition of their sexual services.

In China, decisions about entry into marriage or prostitution were usually made for the woman by others, most frequently family members. Among the poor, prostitution and marriage drew from the same pool of women; families who could afford to do so were at great pains to keep their daughters eligible for marriage and off the prostitution market. Sometimes poor married women found it necessary to work as prostitutes; sometimes prostitutes left the brothels to become concubines or wives. Both prostitution and marriage exhibited an elaborate hierarchy of different statuses and degrees of permanence; arrangements in both varied by class. Both were vehicles for mobility up and down. Prostitution even mimicked certain of the rituals of marriage and family life.

Yet prostitution and marriage exhibited important differences as well. A prostitute was dependent upon her madam, who controlled her contact with both her natal family and her customers. (Pimps played a less important role, helping some brothels to solicit customers but apparently having little direct control over the prostitutes.) The madam had long-term claims on the body of the prostitute, while the claims of the client were short term. After a pawned prostitute served out her allotted time, her natal or marital family

might reassert their claims on her. In short, demands on a prostitute's person were divided among a number of parties, whereas in marriage short- and long-term claims were not separated in this way. Prostitution, unlike marriage, was not for the purpose of reproduction, although both married women and prostitutes attempted to use pregnancy as a strategy to enhance their own positions. Prostitution was regarded as a temporary stage in a society in which all women were expected to marry. This chapter examines similarities between prostitution and marriage in Shanghai, as well as movements of individual women from one institution to the other.

The changing Shanghai market in women must be understood in the context of the city's rapid growth in the first half of the twentieth century.^[2] The population of Shanghai, including the International Settlement and the French Concession, almost tripled between 1910 and 1930 from about a million to more than three million. At the conclusion of World War II its population was roughly the same as in 1930, but by 1947 it had grown again by one-third.^[3] Immigrants from other parts of China made up more than 82 percent of this population in 1910, more than 90 percent in 1930 (Lo Chih-ju 1932:27, table 43). Women migrants to Shanghai found work in manufacturing, particularly cotton textiles; as household servants or wet nurses; as itinerant peddlers; and as entertainers or prostitutes.^[4]

But far more men than women immigrated to Shanghai. In the Chinese-governed sector of the city in the early 1930s, there were typically 135 men to every 100 women, dropping to an average of 124 to 100 in the three years after World War II (SCA 1933, Population, 2, table 3; SSWH 1948: 14, 16, 18). The ratio was even more skewed among Chinese adults in the International Settlement (156:100 in 1930) and the French Concession (164:100 in 1930) (Lo Chih-ju 1932:30). Republican period social reformers were fond of pointing out that the predominance of unattached men in the urban population increased the demand for commercial sexual services.

To reconstruct the living and working conditions of prostitutes in early twentieth-century Shanghai, this paper begins with a description of the complex class structure of prostitution and a rough estimate of the numbers of women involved. Then it explores common elements in the family background and personal history of prostitutes in addition to the financial arrangements by which a woman entered a brothel. It examines the brothel as a social world with its own rules, codes, and risks and also asks how a prostitute's working life mimicked the rituals of courtship and marriage (with respect to customers) and family life (with respect to madams). Finally, the essay considers the "career path" of prostitutes, particularly the exit into marriage or concubinage. How permeable was the boundary around prostitution, by whom could it be crossed, and under what circumstances? The paper concludes with some observations about the Shanghai market in women.

Hierarchies of Prostitution

One way to untangle the complex structure of prostitution in Shanghai is to look at the types of prostitutes that provided sexual services to different classes of men, from the well-educated scion of the elite to the transient foreign sailor. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the prostitutes most often written about were those who entertained the local literati. Famed as singers and storytellers, they were commonly addressed with the respectful term hsien-sheng , most frequently translated into English as "sing-song girl." The public spaces where they performed were known as storytelling houses, their private dwellings as storytellers' residences (shu-yu ). The term shu-yu was also used to refer to them as a group ("Demi-monde" 1923:783; T'u 1948:hsia , 76; Lemière 1923:127-28; Wang Ting-chiu 1932:"P'iao," 1-2).

Storytelling-house prostitutes traced their entertainer pedigree back a thousand years. Famed for their beauty, their extravagant dress, and their elaborate opium and tobacco pipes, they were equally renowned for their ability to sing and accompany themselves on stringed instruments, skill at composing poetry, refined artistic sensibilities, and conversational skill. Their professional names (chosen upon their entry into the house) were meant to invoke both sensual pleasure and literary associations. Some took studio names (chai ) such as "Fragrant Nest" or "Drunken Flowers Retreat." Others chose names like those used by the male literati, such as "the master of the lodge wherein verses are hummed." One famous nineteenth-century sing-song girl took the name Lin Tai-yü, after the heroine of Dream of the Red Chamber (Lemière 1923:127-28, 130; Arlington 1923:317; "Demi-monde" 1923:783).

Members of the storytelling-house class regarded themselves as skilled entertainers rather than providers of sexual services; they prided themselves on "selling their voices rather than their bodies." One Republican-era description of them, colored perhaps by nostalgia, reported that these women had such high moral principles that if one was discovered having secret relations with a sweetheart, then her bedding was burned and she was driven out. Other accounts say they did "sell their beauty" in their residences, but kept this practice secret and made their reputations as singers (Lemière 1923:127-28; Wang Ting-chiu 1932:"P'iao," 1-2; Liu 1936:136; "Demi-monde" 1923:783; T'u 1948:hsia , 76). In the early decades of the twentieth century the popularity of this geisha-style service declined; at least one source hints that the cause of its downfall was the unwillingness of the women to have sexual relations with their customers. By the 1920s the storytelling-house class had been absorbed into the next lower class of prostitutes, though the term shu-yu was used intermittently as late as 1948 ("Demi-monde" 1923:783; Lemière 1923:127-28; T'u 1948:hsia , 76; Wang Ting-chiu 1932:"P'iao," 1-2; Yü 1948:11).

The next lower class, called "long three" (ch'ang-san ), was named after a domino with two groups of three dots each. Traditionally, "long-three" prostitutes charged three yuan for drinking with guests and three more for spending the night with them; the name remained long after the fee structure changed. Like the storytelling-house women, the "long-three" prostitutes performed classical songs and scenes from opera, dressed in elaborate costumes, and specialized in hosting banquets and gambling parties for merchants and well-placed officials. In the era before taxis became common, women rode to these parties in horse-drawn carriages or were carried on the shoulders of male brothel servants "like a Buddhist pagoda," providing live advertisement for the services of their house (T'u 1948:hsia , 76). The "long-three" brothels in Hui-le Li, a lane off Fu-chou Road, were the most famous. Sometimes wealthy customers would request that a woman accompany them to a dramatic performance or other place of entertainment (Henderson 1871:14; T'u 1948:hsia , 76). The woman's brothel charged a set fee for all such services. Though they were less sexually available than lower-class prostitutes, a patron who went through a long "courtship" process and paid elaborate fees to the woman and her madam could hope for sexual favors ("Demi-monde" 1923:783-85; T'u 1948:hsia , 76; Wang Ting-chiu 1932:"P'iao," 1-2; Yü 1948:11; Liu 1936:136; Yi 1933:39).

Next in the hierarchy were the "one-two" prostitutes, also named for dominos. In the 1940s their fees were quoted as one yuan for providing melon seeds and fruit (called a "dry and wet basin") and two yuan for drinking companionship, though an evening in their company could cost considerably more. Sources agree that the singing of "one-two" prostitutes was not as good, nor their sexual services as expensive, as the "long three." "One-two" houses were most numerous along Peking Road and in the French Concession (Yü 1948:11; T'u 1948:hsia , 76-77; "Demi-monde" 1923:785; Wiley 1929:65; Yi 1933:39).

The largest group of brothels in the next grade down were called "salt-pork shops" (hsien-rou chuang ). Unlike all the grades above them, they were devoted exclusively to the on-demand satisfaction of male copulative desires, with little attention to singing, banqueting, or other ancillary forms of entertainment. Women were the "salt pork"; as a 1932 guidebook put it, "the price in the shop depends on the taste of the meat. Everyone knows that a slice costs three yuan, and an entire night five to eight yuan." In these houses customers were said to divide up the women as though cutting salt pork (Wang Ting-chiu 1932:"P'iao," 27-28). Another 1930s guide reminded its readers that salt pork was no longer fresh meat and that it might in fact be rotten (Wang Chung-hsien 1935:23-24). In the late 1940s laborers were the main clientele of the salt-pork shops. Many of these brothels were located near the French Concession's Bridge of the Eight Immortals (Pa-hsien ch'iao ) (T'u 1948:hsia , 77; Wang 1932:"P'iao," 25; Yü 1948:11).

By far the largest group of prostitutes in Republican Shanghai were the "pheasants" (yeh-chi or chih-chi ), streetwalkers whose name suggests both their gaudy dress and their habit of "go[ing] about from place to place like wild birds" ("Demi-monde" 1923:785-86). Every evening groups of them could be seen on both sides of the main streets aggressively seeking customers. Guidebooks of the period repeatedly warned Shanghai visitors to beware of the pheasants, whose eager assaults on passersby could shade over into pickpocketing. Mixing his ornithological metaphors, one author warned that pheasants fastened onto their prey "like an eagle seizing a chick" (T'ang 1931:152-53). Their prices as reported in 1932 ranged from one yuan for what was euphemistically called "one cannon blast-ism" (yi-p'ao chu-yi ) to seven yuan for a night (Wang Ting-chiu 1932:"P'iao," 49).

Although pheasants worked the streets, they were by no means independent of the brothel system. Most operated under the control of madams, often under more restrictive conditions than their higher-status sisters. Brothel attendants supervised them as they went about finding customers, who were then brought back to the brothel (T'u 1948:hsia , 77). "No matter the weather, hot or cold, rain, frost, or snow, when evening came they must stand in groups and call out to men and on the least response they must take hold of them and cajole them to respond," commented a 1923 article. "If not successful, the girls were beaten" ("Demi-monde" 1923:786). In at least one respect they were certainly worse off than other prostitutes: because they did not remain in brothels, they frequently came into conflict with the local police, who enforced the municipal ordinance against street soliciting (see, for example, SP July 22, 1929:7). One guide advised Shanghai visitors that the only way to shake off a determined pheasant was to drag her into the street, because then she would become fearful of police intervention and desist in her efforts (T'ang 1931:152-53).

Lowest of all in the hierarchy of prostitution were the employees of brothels called "flower-smoke rooms" (hua-yen chien ) and "nailsheds" (ting-p'eng ). Flower-smoke rooms were places where a customer could smoke opium and visit prostitutes ("flowers") simultaneously. After 1933, when opium was banned, they reportedly disappeared. Nailsheds, scattered throughout the city, were rudimentary brothels that catered to rickshaw pullers and other laborers; the prices ranged from two chiao for quick sex to one yuan for the night (1932 figures) (T'ang 1931:154; Yi 1933:39; T'u 1948:hsia , 77; Wang Ting-chiu 1932:"P'iao," 50-51).

Like workers in other sectors of the Shanghai economy, most prostitutes were not of local origin. Outsiders were in the majority in part because Republican-period Shanghai was an expanding city that attracted peasants with the hope of work while rural crisis and war were pushing them out of the countryside. They also reflected the presence in Shanghai of powerful merchant and official cliques who hailed from Canton, Ningpo, and the cities of

the lower Yangtze; men from all these regions apparently preferred prostitutes from their own native places. Finally, those who trafficked in sexual services preferred to resell women far enough from home that their families would not clamor for the return of the goods or a share of the profits (Wiley 1929:52-53). Brothel owners who bought women from other regions increased their ability to control them because "if the prostitute [was] removed from her home community she [was] absolutely at the mercy of her keepers" (ibid., 66-67). For the same reason, "Shanghai girls, as a rule, when sold or mortgaged, are shipped off to some far away place," as one contemporary account noted (Lemière 1923:133).

As with most occupations in Shanghai, regionalism played an important role in the hierarchy of prostitution. Women in the top two classes came mainly from cities in the Kiangnan, notably Suchou (famed for its beauties), Wuhsi, Nanking, Hangchou, and Ch'angchou (Lemière 1923:133; Yi 1933: 39-40; Wiley 1929:53, citing Morris 1916). Even those in the top classes who came from Shanghai proper did their best to affect a Suchou accent and claim Suchou as their native place (T'u 1948:hsia , 76-77; Yü 1948:11). Prostitutes of the grade of "one-two" and below came largely from Yangchou and other parts of Supei, like the laborers who patronized their brothels. Supei prostitutes also carved out special niches for themselves in the sexual service market; for example, some specialized in rowing out to the junks moored on the Huang-p'u River to sell themselves to the Chinese sailors (Yi 1933:39-40; SP , April 6, 1929:7). This intersection of class and regional divisions, with Supei people at the bottom, mirrored the larger occupational structure of Shanghai (Honig 1987).

Regional divisions shaped prostitution in other ways as well. Distinct groups of prostitutes from Canton and Ningpo serviced the merchant and official groups from those cities who were resident in Shanghai. In the 1920s warlord conflicts drove many wealthy Cantonese to migrate to Shanghai, where they opened large businesses like Sincere and Wing On; the ranks of Cantonese long-three prostitutes increased accordingly. Ningpo prostitutes, supervised by madams, lived in and worked out of hotels in the Wu Ma Lu and Da Hsin Chieh area, receiving guests with Ningpo-style snacks of salted fish and crabs. The high-status Cantonese and Ningpo prostitutes kept to their own communities and generally did not welcome guests who were not from their native places (Wiley 1929:52; Yi 1933:39-40; Lemière 1923:133; Wang Ting-chiu 1932:"P'iao," 34-35).

Another group of Cantonese women, who traced their presence in Shanghai to the early nineteenth century, specialized in entertaining foreign sailors. They were known as "saltwater sisters" (hsien-shui mei ), which may have been a reference to their maritime patrons; but one source explains that their name was a transliteration of "handsome maid" into Cantonese (hansui mui ) (T'u 1948:hsia , 77). They were reputed to be "more hygienic than some

others, partly because of the Cantonese love of cleanliness, and partly because they wish to attract foreigners" ("Demi-monde" 1923:787-88). (This emphasis on cleanliness was far more pronounced in guides to Shanghai written by foreigners than in the Chinese literature, though the latter also featured occasional warnings about venereal disease.) Nevertheless, their solicitation of foreign sailors, and the resultant spread of venereal disease, attracted the attention of the British admiral who in 1877 requested that Shanghai open a lock hospital (a hospital devoted to the treatment of venereal disease) to examine and register Cantonese prostitutes. Undaunted, the women proceeded to use their hospital registration cards, each with a photo identification, as advertisements for their services. Examinations continued until 1920, when prostitution was officially (though ineffectively) phased out in the International Settlement (SVC 1920:83-84).

Foreign prostitutes came to Shanghai from all over the world, recruited by the shadowy traffickers that reformers called "white slavers." Among them were many Russians, whose numbers grew larger after the Russian Revolution; in the 1930s one observer noted that eight thousand Russian prostitutes resided in Shanghai. Many were brought in from the northern city of Harbin and either worked openly as prostitutes in "Russian houses" (Lo-sung t'ang-tzu ) in the French Concession and the Hung-k'ou area or became taxi dancers who sold sexual services for an extra fee. Japanese prostitutes also worked in the Hung-k'ou area, sometimes doubling as maidservants or waitresses. Foreign prostitutes apparently drew most of their clientele from among the foreign community and transient sailors, but some of them entertained Chinese customers as well (O'Callaghan 1968:11-12; Champly 1934:188; Hauser 1940:267; T'ang 1931:153-54; T'u 1948:hsia , 77; Yi 1933:41).^[5]

In addition to native place, beauty also determined a woman's place in the hierarchy of prostitution. A Suchou woman, no matter how well her relatives or fellow villagers were known to the owner of a long-three brothel, could not hope to become a prostitute there unless she was beautiful. Less attractive women could work only as servants in these houses. At the same time, particularly beautiful women from other regions sometimes entered high-class houses without the benefit of connections. One small but prosperous brothel, a former resident of the neighborhood recounted, had two prostitutes, one from Suchou and one from Shantung, but "the second one was so beautiful you couldn't tell she was from Shantung." As one moved down the hierarchy, the prostitutes reportedly became less beautiful (Sun et al. 1986).

A third factor determining a woman's place in the hierarchy was age. Many prostitutes in ch'ang-san houses first entered the brothels as children, purchased by the madams as "foster daughters" (yang-nü ). If a woman had already passed adolescence, then no upper-class house would want her;

madams reasoned that she was already untrainable or that she would not be able to work enough years to pay back the investment. Pheasants and other low-class prostitutes were frequently in their twenties or even older (Yü 1948:11; Wiley 1929:66-67). Of five hundred prostitutes surveyed in 1948, almost half had begun work between the ages of fifteen and nineteen; the largest group was between the ages of twenty and twenty-four at the time of the interviews (Yü 1948:11). Women who began work at the top of the hierarchy might descend to less prestigious establishments as they aged if they were unable to devise a successful exit strategy.

Numbers

It is impossible to say how many women worked as prostitutes in Shanghai. The inconsistent attitude of multiple municipal governments meant that no systematic statistics were collected. Even more unlucky for the researcher, brothel owners often had an interest in concealing their business from the authorities, if only to avoid paying bribes. Virtually every observer of the Shanghai scene commented that licensed brothels were outnumbered by unlicensed ones and by disguised forms of prostitution. Taxi dancers in the dance halls, masseuses in the massage parlors, waitresses in the vaudeville houses, guides in the tourist agencies, female vendors of newspapers, cigarettes, and fruit, and itinerant menders of sailors' clothing all engaged in prostitution, either because their jobs required it or because their precarious incomes needed augmenting (T'ang 1931:154; Yü 1948:11). Though they were seldom counted among the ranks of prostitutes in contemporary surveys, these part-time, or "disguised," prostitutes must be considered in estimating the size of the sexual-service sector and understanding the employment alternatives for women.

The fragmentary statistics available indicate the steady growth of prostitution. A 1920 report of the Special Vice Commission (SVC) counted 4,522 Chinese prostitutes in the International Settlement alone, or 1 out of every 147 Chinese residents, male and female, of the settlement. If the greater population of Shanghai was taken as 1.5 million, the report added, and if prostitutes in the French Concession were figured in, then 1 in 300 Chinese residents of Shanghai sold sexual services for a living (SVC 1920:84). These figures did not include what the report referred to as "sly" prostitutes, and in fact another set of statistics collected at around the same time found more than 60,000 prostitutes at work in the two foreign areas, most of them of pheasant rank or below (Wiley 1929:45; Yi 1933:39). By 1935 combined estimates of licensed and unlicensed prostitutes ran to 100,000, with much of the increase attributed to rural disaster and Depression-related factory closings (Lo Ch'iung 1935:37). A postwar study put the number of full-time prostitutes at 50,000 but suggested that the figure should be doubled to take

account of women "whose activities approach those of prostitutes" (Yü 1948:10). If the Shanghai population at that time is taken as 4.2 million, then 1 in every 42 city residents was directly involved in prostitution. There may even have been more prostitutes than cotton spinners. Shanghai, China's largest industrial city, had about 84,000 cotton spinners out of a total of 173,432 women working in industry (Honig 1986:24-25).^[6] But prostitution played a part in the Shanghai economy far beyond its direct significance as an employer of women. Many a small shop survived on the sale of goods and services to the upper-class brothels. "In the vicinity of her residence," a writer observed in 1929, "are numerous tailoring shops, hair dressers, makers of silk and satin shoes, embroidery shops, whose trade is enriched by her patronage" (Wiley 1929:74). Brothels also provided a venue for the meeting of the Shanghai powerful; merchants concluded deals and officials made alliances in upper-class brothels (T'u 1948:hsia , 76). For all of these reasons, prostitution touched virtually every sphere of Shanghai life.

Entry

Poverty led most women into prostitution, poverty that either drove their families to sell them, caused them to choose prostitution themselves, or made them vulnerable to the wiles of traffickers. Of twenty news stories about prostitutes reported in the Shanghai newspaper Shih-pao between March and November 1929, half explicitly mentioned family poverty as the cause of entry into prostitution. Five of the stories mentioned that the women were fatherless (three were orphans). Eight women had been sold or pawned by relatives (including parents, spouses, and others) and ten by traffickers; one had agreed to enter prostitution herself to pay off family debts. In the remaining case, two women were approached by traffickers but escaped (SP March 2; April 6, 8, 12, 19; May 23, 29; June 10, 17; July 6, 10, 15, 18, 19; August 21; September 20; October 14, 20; November 16, 25, 1929:7).^[7]

Little is known about how poor families decided whether to sell their daughters as brides, maidservants, or prostitutes, though it is generally assumed that they attempted to emulate richer families in keeping their daughters on the marriage market and out of the brothels. But for a poor woman marriage was not a lifetime guarantee of respectability.^[8] In the twenty cases just mentioned, eight of the prostitutes were married; most of them had been kidnapped, but one had been pawned by her husband, and another was tricked into prostitution when she left her husband to look for work because he refused to support her. Of the five hundred prostitutes surveyed in 1948, two-thirds were unmarried, a fifth were widows, and more than 9 percent had living spouses (Yü 1948:11; Yü and Wong 1949:236, table V). The percentage of married women and widows was higher among lower-class prostitutes (SP August 26, 1929:7; Yü and Wong 1949:236, table V). Though the data are not conclusive, they suggest that disintegration of fami-

ly networks through death or poverty, or detachment from family networks in order to find work in Shanghai, greatly increased a woman's chances of ending up in a brothel.

Women entered brothels of all classes in Shanghai under one of three arrangements. A small number (estimated by one investigator at less than 5 percent) entered as employees, or "free persons" (tzu-chi shen-t'i or tzu-chia shen-t'i ), paid all expenses themselves, and controlled their own work. A free prostitute in theory controlled her own earnings, but in practice she had to give half or more of her income to the madam in return for use of the brothel facilities. Often the madam kept complete control of the finances and paid each prostitute a fixed salary per season ("Demi-monde" 1923:784-85; Lemière 1923:131; Yi 1933:40-41; Lo Ch'iung 1935:35).

The majority of prostitutes were mortgaged (ya-chang or pao-chang ) by relatives, traffickers, or themselves for a fixed term, much like pawned goods ("Demi-monde" 1923:784-85; Lemière 1923:131; Yi 1933:40-41). In six cases of pawning reported in the Shanghai press in 1929, the price ranged from seventy to four hundred yuan.^[9] Women in the upper price range were virgins who could be expected to command a high defloration fee (SP April 8, 19; May 29; July 10; August 21; October 20, 1929:7).

The remaining women, known as "completely uprooted" (tu-chueh , or t'ao-jen ), were sold outright to the brothel by relatives or traffickers ("Demi-monde" 1923:784-85; Lemière 1923:131; Yi 1933:40-41; Zhang and Sang 1987:32-33). Prostitutes who had been sold, rather than pawned, were regarded by the madams as their private property. They could be released from service only if someone paid what the brothel owner regarded as "a fair market price" (O'Callaghan 1968:13-14). In seven cases reported in the press where women were sold outright, the price ranged from 140 to 600 yuan (SP April 6; June 10; July 15; October 14; November 16, 25, 1929:7).

Trafficking in women was big business in Shanghai. Traffickers, both men and women, would go to rural districts that suffered from flood or famine and purchase girls and young women "for a couple of dollars apiece," reported a foreign observer in 1940, "and if they were lucky, they could resell the choice ones for a thousand dollars in Shanghai" (Hauser 1940:268). Equally common, and featured more prominently in the cautionary tales of the Shanghai press, were urban traffickers who preyed upon recent migrants to the city and sold them into brothels by trickery or force. "The methods of the procurers and procuresses are so subtle and ingenious that no one—unless associated with the traffic—knows exactly how they do their work," warned one foreign writer in 1927:

Their favorite recruiting grounds are the theaters, tea houses, amusement parks, and other public places. . . . Many of the hotel boys, the theater ushers, the waiters in the restaurants, the flower girls, newspaper sellers, Mafoos (carriage men), maid servants, and even ricksha coolies are aiding and abetting in this tragic. The most dangerous of all perhaps are the women hair dressers, and

the sellers of jewelry, because they have easy access to the household and can exercise their influence freely. (McCartney 1927, cited in Wiley 1929:56)

Some professional traffickers pretended to be labor recruiters, promising to introduce women into legitimate jobs as servants or factory workers in Shanghai (SP March 2, 1929:7; Zhang and Sang 1987:31). They played on native-place ties to win the confidence of the women and their families. A woman from Suchou named Yang A-p'o, for instance, became acquainted with a man named Feng San-chuan who also resided in Shanghai. When Feng had to go to Hangchou on business, Yang offered to find his wife a maidservant's job so that she could remain in Shanghai. Several months later Feng returned from Hangchou looking for his wife, only to find that Yang had sold her into a brothel. Yang offered him two hundred yuan to acquire another wife, but he declined and sued her in court (SP April 12, 1929:7).

Other traffickers made no attempt to entice women, but instead kidnapped them by force. One such case involved a married woman named Hsiao (née Wang) who was grabbed by three men as she washed clothes on a riverbank in Supei. Gagged and restrained, she was taken to Shanghai. Her case came to public attention when, after several months of streetwalking, she spotted her kidnapper on the street and alerted the police (SP April 6, 1929:7). Another woman, new to the city, was forcibly pawned by the owner of the rickshaw her husband pulled (SP August 21, 1929:7). A third sought lodging in a local monastery while looking for work in the city, only to be mortgaged into prostitution by the monks (SP October 20, 1929:7). It was not uncommon for male traffickers to rape or seduce young women before selling them into prostitution, thus making their return to a spouse or the marriage market more difficult (T'ang 1931:481; SP October 14; November 25, 1929:7). A woman's entry into prostitution thus was sometimes accomplished by outright violence that removed her from whatever protection her family could offer.

Brothel Life

In Ta-ch'ing li, a lane off of Chiu-chiang Road, residents of every class crowded together in the 1940s. Doctors, fortune-tellers, owners of opium and gambling dens, businessmen and shop employees lived in close proximity. The monied classes resided in large apartments, while their poorer neighbors lived ten to a room. Of the four hundred residences in the lane, twenty-four were brothels. Though not of the highest grade, they nevertheless boasted many of the accoutrements of fancy establishments. In the late 1940s Ta-ch'ing li was home to 101 prostitutes, many recruited by the madams from their own native places.

To open a brothel in this lane or anywhere else in Shanghai, a madam

(known as the lao-pao ) needed not only. money but also "background": marriage or a liaison with a local hoodlum, connections to the neighborhood police or to gang bosses. Local madam Ting Ts'ai-ch'un, for instance, was the lover of a police officer. Sometimes the madam's money and "background" had been acquired in a previous career as a prostitute. In other cases madams had begun their careers as brothel servants; this was the case with Big Pockmark and Small Pockmark, two madams in Ta-ch'ing li (Sun et al. 1986). Madams frequently owned as well as operated these establishments (Henderson 1871:12), though sometimes they shared ownership with a male boss. If a madam owned the establishment, she took charge of renting the house, meeting police regulations, and recruiting women (Wiley 1929: 59). After they opened their brothels, madams had to cultivate connections with the local police, usually through the payment of quasi-legal taxes like the "street-standing tax" (chan-chieh chuan ) and the "friendliness tax" (ho-ch'i chuan ). Prompt payment of these fees ensured that when the police came to inspect an establishment there would be no trouble, and if a madam became embroiled in a court case the local police would intercede. These police connections could be invoked by the madam in conflicts with the neighbors or used to bring an unruly prostitute into line (Lu 1938:14-15).

Once a woman was sold or pawned to a brothel, the madam had claims on her person that resembled those shopowners had on their apprentices or labor bosses on their contracted laborers. In the upper-class brothels, at least, the harshness of the madam/prostitute relationship was obscured by the language of kinship. Most prostitutes in Ta-ch'ing li, for instance, were addressed by terms used for adopted daughters and were taught to address the madams as "mama." The "family" consisted of a "father" (the owner or the madam's paramour), a "mother" (the madam), five or six adopted "daughters," and servants to do the housework. Larger brothels had a complete complement of cooks, bookkeepers, runners, and rickshaw pullers, but the Ta-ch'ing li establishments were more modest. The madams played cards or gambled with the neighbors, who were careful to avoid epithets like "madam" or "prostitute" when a conflict broke out because such an insult could not be easily repaired. In general, the madams treated these young women well, gave them enough to eat and wear, and made sure that they were strictly supervised by female servants. The more beautiful prostitutes-in-training were educated in chess, poetry, and music. During the day the "daughters" of the madams dressed like any other girl on the lane. Only their habit of sleeping until noon and their resplendent dress after five in the evening distinguished them from the neighbors (Sun et al. 1986; "Demi-monde" 1923:785).

Relationships in the brothels mimicked familial relationships in less. benign ways as well. Daughters in most Chinese families had little to say about the choice of their marriage partner or the timing of the match. At marriage,

they passed from the control of their natal families to that of their husbands, who had claims on their labor and their sexual and reproductive services. Similarly, prostitutes exercised no autonomy over when and to whom they would begin to sell their sexual services. A "daughter" in one of these houses was carefully groomed for her first night with a customer, which usually happened sometime after she turned fourteen. The privilege of defloration (k'ai-pao ) was expensive, and the madam would do her best to locate a wealthy businessman or industrialist whose first-night fee would repay the cost of raising the girl. The man who could afford such a fee was permitted to take the young woman to a rented room for the night; the entire defloration fee went to the madam. In top-class houses, first-night rituals were especially elaborate. The occasion was marked by a solemn ceremony that included lighting candles and bowing to images, much like a marriage rite. The patron then hosted a banquet for his friends at the brothel, a procedure known as "celebrating the flower" (tso hua-t'ou ) (Sun et al. 1986).

Little is known about how young women were prepared for their first sexual encounter. In some respects they appear to have been as sequestered, and as ignorant, as their counterparts who were married to upper-class men. Madams in the higher-grade brothels took care that their virgin "daughters" did not go out unchaperoned; they worried about the girls, recalled a resident of one brothel district, "just like parents worried about their children." They did not want to risk a casual sexual encounter with a local hoodlum, or a love affair, and the consequent loss of the lucrative first-night fee.

Even after a prostitute had spent her first night with a man, the madam continued to exercise a great deal of control over the sale of her services (what kind, when, how often, to whom, and for how much money). As mentioned earlier, providing sexual services was a minor part of an upper-class prostitute's duties. She spent much of her time attending parties given by powerful men, where she engaged in light conversation, drinking, and music making (Wei 1930:13). In the 1920s she was paid one yuan for each call, even if it was only several minutes in duration, and might make dozens of such stops in the course of a working evening, either alone or accompanied by a servant (Lemière 1923:131; Wiley 1929:72). Sometimes wealthy customers would request that a prostitute accompany them to a dramatic performance or other place of entertainment (Henderson 1871:14; T'u 1948:hsia , 76). The woman's brothel charged a set fee for all such services.

An upper-class prostitute thus moved around more than the sheltered daughters of respectable urban families. As one contemporary observer put it, "She can visit the races, the theatre, make journeys unaccompanied by a male member of the family, and engage in many other activities denied to her sisters within the home" (Wiley 1929:74). It is not clear, however, that an upper-class prostitute was able to control where she went, when, or with

whom; much of her social schedule was probably arranged by the madam. The ability to move around did not necessarily mean freedom of movement.

But there were exceptions to the ironclad control of the madams. Very famous or very beautiful prostitutes had some control over their own sexual services. And money was not the only variable; as one guidebook lamented, "Many are those who spend ten thousand pieces of gold, and never get to touch her" (T'u 1948:hsia , 76). A 1932 guide to Shanghai, in a section entitled "Key to Whoring" ("P'iao ti men-ching"), elaborated on this theme. It explained that some patrons could not "get into the water" even after hosting several expensive banquets, while others "tasted the flavor" without hosting even one. The key, explained the author, lay in the behavior of the patron. He should be careful to exhibit not only wealth but also good taste in dress and choice of male companions. If he was "foolish when appropriate and serious when appropriate," then even the most popular prostitute would eventually become a "prisoner of war at [his] feet" (Wang Ting-chiu 1932:"P'iao," 6). Accounts of this kind never mentioned the madam as arbiter of such encounters; the woman was portrayed as having a degree of autonomy in her choice of customers.

Although upper-class prostitutes often commanded high fees, they had little or no direct control over the income they earned. Direct fees for a woman's services were usually paid to the brothel staff, not to the prostitute. The more elegant brothels "had their shroffs and they sent their customers chits at the end of the month, like any other business establishment" (Hauser 1940:268). A house made money not only on its women but also on its banquet facilities and domino games; the madams, rather than the prostitutes, received this income (Wiley 1929:60). When a high-class prostitute went out on a social call, accompanied by her attendants, she was expected to divide the money she received with servants, musicians, and the brothel owner (Lemière 1923:131).

Three-quarters of the five hundred prostitutes questioned in 1948 said their income was average or above (chung-teng yi-shang ), though their comparison group was not specified; the investigators commented that since the currency devaluation prostitutes were much better off than salaried urban workers. But the survey added that "after exploitation by the brothel owners and middlemen, and after waste and consumption, their life is by no means well-to-do" (Yü 1948:13). One of the few ways that an upper-class prostitute could amass wealth of her own was if a customer gave her money or presents in addition to paying the madam's fee. This private wealth was known as ssu-fang ch'ien , the same term used for a married woman's private savings (Sun et al. 1986; R. Watson 1984:4-9). But a woman did not always have clear title to these presents. In a 1929 case, for instance, a popular prostitute received some valuable jewelry from an admirer. Later she fell ill and pawned

the jewelry to pay her medical bills. When one of the Shanghai tabloids published this information, her erstwhile patron was furious and demanded that she return the jewelry. Unable to comply, she tried to kill herself by jumping from a ferry sampan into the river (SP May 20, 1929:7).

As one moved down the hierarchy of prostitution, women apparently had even less control over the sale of their sexual services. in the "one-two" houses, customers were accepted readily whether they were regulars or strangers (T'u 1948:hsia , 77). Prostitutes in the salt-pork shops and even lower-grade establishments received customers in cubicles called "pigeon sheds" (ko-tzu p'eng ), each one just big enough for a bed. The women spent a certain amount of time with each customer, depending on the size of the fee, then went on to the next one (Sun et al. 1986; Zhang and Sang 1987:32). The pheasants, too, remained under surveillance by brothel servants, even when soliciting on the streets. Neither their freedom from the physical confines of the brothel nor the fact that as a group they were somewhat older than upper-class prostitutes guaranteed them greater control over their working lives. In addition, women who had been sold outright to a brothel apparently had less freedom to refuse customers than "free prostitutes" (Zhang and Sang 1987:33).

In the 1948 survey of five hundred prostitutes, most women were found to have had ten to thirty sexual encounters per month, with some women reporting as many as sixty (Yü 1948:13). But even the high figure may not accurately reflect the experience of lower-class prostitutes. Madams reportedly forced these women to have sexual relations with anywhere from four to twenty men a night, while saltwater sisters sometimes serviced twenty to thirty customers a night (Lo Ch'iung 1935:36; Zhang and Sang 1987:32; T'ang 1931:153). Such accounts are indirectly supported by the complaint of reformers that lower-class prostitutes were the chief cause of venereal disease because they spread it more widely and quickly than others (Yü 1948:13; "Demi-monde" 1923:786).

In some brothels women were expected to continue work even if they were menstruating or in the second trimester of pregnancy; such practices are said to have led to disorders ranging from menorrhagia to frequent miscarriage. After a miscarriage, a prostitute was put back to work as quickly as possible (Zhang and Sang 1987:32; Lo Ch'iung 1935:36). To prevent pregnancy, madams gave their prostitutes live tadpoles to eat on the theory that the "cold element" in tadpoles would counteract the "heat" of pregnancy. The same remedy was applied as an abortifacient (Sun et al. 1986).^[10] Venereal disease undoubtedly brought on infertility, stillbirth, and miscarriage. A 1948 survey found a very low rate of pregnancy among a sample of five hundred prostitutes (Yü 1948:13).

The actual incidence of venereal disease among prostitutes is impossible to determine. A 1931 guidebook, its author intent on advertising the

pleasures of Shanghai's entertainment quarters, estimated that only 1 or 2 percent of all prostitutes were infected (T'ang 1931:154). But soon after the Japanese occupation, an investigative committee organized by women reformers under the auspices of the city government found that all of the pheasants rounded up in one relief effort (a total of thirty) had syphilis, and many suffered from gonorrhea as well (Ch'en Lu-wei 1938:21-22). A 1948 government report commented that most women contracted venereal disease within a year or two of beginning work as prostitutes. Of 1,420 working prostitutes examined by the municipal health authorities in 1946, 66 percent had venereal disease; the percentage was 62 percent for 3,550 women examined the following year. Most of these were cases of tertiary syphilis; the report noted that the numbers would have been still higher if a more reliable test for gonorrhea were included (Yü 1948:11, 13). Women who were examined and treated in government clinics represented only a tiny percentage of all prostitutes, most of whom had no contact with the medical system. Many who contracted syphilis were treated in the brothels with crude home remedies.

An examination of violence in the brothels makes clear the lack of control that prostitutes had over their working lives. Accounts of violence used by madams and brothel servants against prostitutes filled the Shanghai press during the Republican period. These reports usually concerned practices in lower-class brothels, where the madams beat their prostitutes for failing to bring customers home, for refusing to receive customers, for infractions of brothel rules, for stealing or being careless enough to let customers steal from them ("Demi-monde" 1923:786-87; SP April 8; May 29; June 10; July 6, 18; November 16, 1929:7; January 28, 1928:7). Some madams were sadistic as well as brutal; one put a cat inside the pants leg of a new prostitute who did not want to sleep with customers and whipped the cat until it lacerated the woman's leg (Ch'en Lu-wei 1938:22). When prostitutes fled to escape such abuse, they found scant refuge on the streets of Shanghai. The lucky ones were picked up by the police and remanded by the courts to the Door of Hope or another relief organization, with the ultimate expectation that they would find a spouse (sung-t'ang tse-p'ei ) (SP February 23; July 6, July 15, 1929:7). The others got no help from local patrolmen, who were often receiving regular payoffs from the madam. If a prostitute complained directly to police headquarters, the brothel owner might be fined a few dollars. But with no other way to make a living, a woman usually had to return to work as a prostitute (Ch'en Lu-wei 1938:22).

Very little is known about how the prostitutes regarded their work or themselves. Undoubtedly their outlook varied depending on whether the madam was cruel or kind, whether or not they had to entertain many guests, whether or not they became ill or pregnant. Certainly beautiful prostitutes in prestigious houses led a comfortable life compared with what they might

have expected in their families of origin. They ate well, dressed beautifully, and enjoyed the glamour surrounding their occupation. "Since seduction is her trade," commented a 1929 observer, "her dress sets her off from other women. Her rich apparel of brilliant silk makes her much better dressed than any class of women save the very rich. On the streets she is the object of attention for those who wish to see the new styles in feminine dress" (Wiley 1929:74). A 1920 newspaper article reported that upper-class prostitutes often wore jewels worth five or six thousand dollars (NCH June 26, 1920, cited in Wiley 1929:74). Of the five hundred prostitutes of all grades surveyed in 1948, 56 percent declared themselves satisfied with their occupation, mainly because it provided them with a relatively secure livelihood in a period of economic uncertainty. Less than a quarter were unhappy with their current circumstances (Yü 1948:12).

Nevertheless, social workers reported a variety of less sanguine attitudes on the part of prostitutes. Some, they found, articulated feelings of depression, inferiority, and suspicion (ibid., 12-13). Relief workers who interviewed such women reported that they were "as though anesthetized . . . numbed to the conditions of their existence." Unfortunately for the reformers, such emotional numbness did not translate into docility or willingness to reform. Given literacy training, the women in one program tore up their books and asked, "Why should we 'chew yellow beansprouts' here when in our 'own homes' servants will address us as 'Miss'?" In despair the social workers responsible for this program commented that "prostitutes are not ordinary women; they have deeply rooted vulgar practices, know no shame in their behavior, assume airs of importance, are lazy and full of ailments, like to sleep and cry, and are especially good at trickery" (Ch'en Lu-wei 1938:21-22). A former prostitute interviewed in the 1980s recalled the strategies women used to justify their existence to themselves:

You've got to have some idea in your head to keep you going. Otherwise you just couldn't take it, going with all those men. At first I just felt it was my fate and nothing could be done about it. Later I believed some of the things the other girls said. The craziest idea was it wasn't men having fun with us, but us having fun with them and they still had to pay good money. (Zhang and Sang 1987:33)

For these women, as for the prostitutes rounded up by the municipal government in the 1950s campaign to eradicate prostitution, it was no longer possible to imagine life outside the brothel system. Women dragged from the brothels in police raids during the 1950s often clung to their madams, weeping piteously and shouting, "Don't take me away from my 'mama'" (Ts'ao 1986). Though the madams might be oppressive and the effects of venereal disease debilitating, the fictive kinship networks of the brothels represented the only stable family many of these women knew, and they were loathe to leave it for an uncertain future.

Exit

When prostitutes imagined life outside the brothel system at all, they thought of becoming the wives or concubines of rich men. A quarter of the prostitutes surveyed in 1948 wanted to leave the life and marry a rich husband (Yu 1948:12) who was willing to pay off her "mortgage" or, if she had been sold outright, reimburse the madam for her purchase price plus interest and expenses. Some women, especially ones who were still young and attractive, left "the life" by this route (e.g., SP April 8, 1929:7), though such reports may have been exaggerated for their value in selling papers.^[11]

For many women, an interim arrangement that might lead to a more permanent union was to be "rented" by a single patron. The man would pay a monthly fee to the madam and would either visit the woman regularly or take up residence in the brothel. Alternatively, he might install the woman in quarters of her own. Men who could not yet afford to redeem a prostitute's pawn pledge or buy her outright made use of this arrangement. In the late 1920s monthly rental fees could run as much as fifty yuan (Wei 1930:14; SP July 31, 1929:7).

In their search for a secure future, prostitutes used sexual strategies, particularly their capacity to bear children. Just as married women consolidated their positions in their husbands' families this way, so some prostitutes used pregnancy as a way out of prostitution and a ticket to marriage or at least concubinage. Ch'iao-nan, a young prostitute in Ta-ch'ing li, had a patron who was the scion of a wealthy family. Because she was beautiful, her madam treated her well and guarded her carefully and was reluctant to allow the young man to buy her out of the brothel. When Ch'iao-nan became pregnant, she and her lover agreed that she would not have an abortion. She refused the required doses of tadpoles, and when her pregnancy became so far advanced that there was no hope of her continuing to attract customers, the madam finally permitted her lover to purchase her (Sun et al. 1986). In cases like this, pregnancy was the occasion for struggles between prostitutes and owners over who controlled the disposition of sexual services and fertility decisions.

Women who were bought out of the brothels as concubines sometimes kept up contact with the madams who had raised them (Sun et al. 1986). Some reports indicate that women who had led active social lives as upper-class prostitutes found family life too sequestered and left their new husbands to seek a situation in which they enjoyed more autonomy (Lemière 1923:133). Others found that life as a concubine was in some respects less secure than life as a prostitute, depending as it did on the continuing favor of only one man. Women from lower-class brothels could seldom hope for a match with a rich man; some became wives of widowers and older men who could not afford a conventional match (Wiley 1929:76).

Many prostitutes did not cross over into marriage, but remained in the

sexual service business. If their looks declined before they had accumulated private money or connections, they became servants in the brothels. The more fortunate ones opened their own establishments and became madams. In Hui-le li, the only madams who actually resided in the lane were those who had just crossed over from prostitution into sexual service management. After making some money as madams, they moved elsewhere, returning to the lane only during working hours (Sun et al. 1986). Life as a madam afforded a woman a rare degree of autonomy. Although a madam, as noted earlier, needed to cultivate protection from men who might also threaten her, she was able to operate as a petty entrepreneur with the opportunity to amass considerable personal wealth.

The type of crossover strategy most frequently reported in the press, however, involved neither marriage nor becoming a madam, but flight. Women who could no longer tolerate the conditions of their employment, particularly in lower-class brothels, simply slipped out of the houses and sought refuge on the streets. One story reported in detail in the press involved a seventeen-year-old woman whose professional name was Red Cloud. Her madam was exceptionally cruel; Red Cloud was compelled to solicit customers on the street until four in the morning. If she failed to bring in business she was forced to kneel on broken tiles with a pan of water on her head, and was forbidden to sleep. Driven beyond endurance, Red Cloud fled the brothel early one morning and leaped into a rickshaw parked at the end of the lane. Upset to the point of incoherence, she could not tell the puller where to go, so she directed him by means of hand motions. After nine hours of running through almost every district in Shanghai, the hapless puller lost patience and asked her where she wanted to go. At this point she realized that she had no money to pay him, so she offered to marry him instead. Delighted, the puller told her that he might be too old for her (he was thirty-six), but that he had three younger brothers at home, all unmarried. He took her to his house in the Cha-pei district, whereupon his brothers immediately began to argue over who should have her as a wife. The tumult alerted some inquisitive neighbors, who suspected that the woman had been kidnapped and turned her and all the brothers in to the police (SP May 29, 1929:7).

It was not easy for prostitutes to free themselves from the control of the brothel system. Brothel owners employed both legal and illegal forms of coercion to keep women in their employ, particularly if the women had been mortgaged to them and the term had not yet expired. The power of such coercion can be seen in the case of Ma Jui-chen, a prostitute who briefly passed through a reform organization in the late 1930s. Ma was released from the reform school on court order and remanded to the custody of her mother. But as they left the courtroom, her mother told her that the madam had threatened the mother's life if she did not get the daughter released immediately. On the street they found the madam and several of her

"friends" (hsiang-hao ) waiting to escort them back to the brothel. The madam wanted to beat Ma and demanded immediate compensation for the two months' income she had lost while Ma was incarcerated. If Ma did not pay her immediately, she threatened to turn her over to the "boss" (lao-pan ), whom Ma referred to as "the highest penal official in the brothel," a man who might well kill her or sell her into another city. Then some of the madam's "friends" mediated. They convinced Ma and her mother to kneel in front of the madam and beg that Ma be allowed to continue to work in order to pay off the debt. Ma was sent back onto the street to solicit customers under the watchful eyes of the brothel servants.

For two days Ma deliberately failed to bring in customers. The madam cut off her food and threatened to have her hung up and beaten if she did not bring in some business before midnight. Ma fled to the local police station, which took her into protective custody. But when the police went to arrest the madam, they found that she had disappeared, warned by local detectives with whom she had a well-developed financial relationship. The police could only hold Ma in protective custody for twenty-four hours, and When they let her out one of the madam's "friends" took her to the madam, who had already seized her mother. Both mother and daughter were severely beaten. Only then did a bystander intervene and help Ma drag the madam and her accomplices to the police. But when the case went to court, the judge agreed that Ma and her mother were contractually bound to work for the madam; he ordered the mother to work as a maidservant in the brothel, while Ma was permitted to work outside as a maid. In this way she could pay off her debt while avoiding work as a prostitute. Only after the debt was cleared could she and her mother hope to return to the countryside district where Ma had grown up. State power thus intervened to legitimize and perpetuate the conditions of servitude in the brothels (Lu 1938:14-15).

Even when her pawn period was up, a prostitute often found it difficult to leave the brothel. Often she had nowhere to go. Moreover, madams, reluctant to lose a lucrative property, often tricked ignorant and illiterate women into agreeing to extensions on their contracts (SP April 8, 1929:7). When a woman did leave the brothel, it was invariably with financial help from a patron or someone else; in this arena women had little autonomy.

Only a woman who could prove that she had been forced into prostitution could hope to get legal help in fleeing the brothel system. Many cases that came before the courts in the Republican period thus centered around the contention, made by a prostitute or her relatives, that she had not voluntarily entered the brothel and they had not voluntarily sold her there. Madams routinely contested these assertions, saying that women had been sold to them as foster daughters or pawned as prostitutes. Because pawning or sale was a contractual transaction, madams frequently produced the signed contracts in court as proof that all parties had agreed to the arrangement.

Brothel owners who had acquired women by irregular means were not above forging such contracts or tricking women into signing them after the fact. The prostitutes, in turn, often contended that such documents had been signed under duress (SP April 8, 12; July 15; November 16, 1929:7).

The many efforts made by parents and other relatives of prostitutes to find and free them testify to the continuing ties between prostitutes and their kin, particularly in cases where the women had been kidnapped or tricked rather than sold. One peasant man brought a complaint against a madam after he came to Shanghai on business and saw his daughter soliciting customers at an amusement hall (SP June 10, 1929:7). Another peasant told the court that his younger brother's wife had been kidnapped and sold by her own relatives; the wife corroborated his testimony and asked to be released to his custody. Interestingly, the madam argued that the woman had been sold by her own father and that she could produce a contract to that effect, implying that this would make the sale legal and irrevocable (SP June 17, 1929:7). In a third case, a man from the rural hinterland of Shanghai discovered his fiancée working in a brothel four years after she had disappeared from their home county. He bought her from the madam (negotiating the asking price of a thousand yuan down to eight hundred) and married her (SP November 25, 1929:7).

But if a woman testified that she had become a prostitute of her own free will, then not even the protests of her relatives could free her. In a 1929 case, for instance, the mother of Sun Feng-ying petitioned the municipal court, saying her married daughter had been kidnapped and pawned into a French Concession brothel. But Sun herself testified that she had volunteered to become a prostitute to help pay the debts incurred by her husband's family when her sister-in-law became ill. The court dismissed the mother's corn-plaint (SP April 19, 1929:7). Conversely, a woman who did not wish to become a prostitute but was forced into it by relatives did have legal recourse. One woman retained a lawyer to petition the court to enjoin her mother from harassing her; the mother had forced her to engage in prostitution from age fourteen to twenty-nine (SP May 23, 1929:7). Both types of cases were exceedingly rare; usually the interests of the woman and her family were arrayed together against those of the brothel owners. In fact, it would appear that it was virtually impossible for a woman to leave the brothel system for a secure future unless she had either a rich patron or a loyal family (natal or marital) that was willing to testify for her in court.

Some prostitutes who grew old in the system without finding a rich patron or accumulating enough money to open their own establishment would adopt a daughter who could care for them in their old age or at least could yield a hefty brideprice when married off. However, for those prostitutes who had neither the means nor the foresight to invest in this arrangement, age brought a descent into less prestigious brothels, then into the ranks of

Shanghai beggars and itinerant entertainers (SP September 4, 1929:7; Wiley 1929:51-52).

Conclusion

How should we classify the market in prostitutes? In many ways, Shanghai prostitutes fit James Watson's definitions of slaves—they were acquired by purchase, their labor was secured by coercion (though the degree of actual physical force employed varied enormously), and they did not have, and could not attain, kinship status with their owners (1980a:8). They had a price on their heads, one that apparently correlated to market considerations of supply and demand as well as individual attributes of beauty, age, and virginity. Furthermore, they could be and often were resold. In short, it is tempting to regard these women as market commodities.

But portraying Shanghai prostitutes as slaves—that is, as fully detachable commodities that could be owned, bought, and sold—presents several problems. First, they were not fully detachable. Many prostitutes remained legally, emotionally, or financially attached to their natal or marital families. Using the language of slavery obscures the temporary nature of servitude for the majority of women who were pawned into prostitution. It also ignores the degree to which a fictive kinship structure was necessary in legitimating and maintaining the coercive relationship between madam and prostitute. Finally, the scattered evidence we have on struggles between prostitutes and their employers over claims on the woman's person indicates that both parties thought of the relationship as contractual rather than rooted in slave status and that the contracts were contestable in court. At a minimum, if these women were commodities, at least some of them put up an extraordinary struggle against such a status. To emphasize unduly the market transaction surrounding their entry into prostitution. directs attention precisely away from the complex and variegated. struggle of these women to assert some control over their working lives. It is more accurate, if less analytically tidy, to emphasize the ambiguity in their status, to say that they were treated as both persons and things by their families and by the madams who purchased long-term claims on them.

Conversely, if Shanghai prostitutes were not simply commodities themselves, neither had they "progressed" to the stage of selling their labor as a commodity for wages. Many of them received no regular wages, and even those who were in theory paid for their labor seldom saw or controlled the income. They were less than fully "free" to sell their labor to the highest bidder, or even to move from one workplace to another. Of course, in this lack of freedom they had much in common with other laborers; contract workers in the cotton mills and apprentices in small workshops had limited control over their own wages or mobility. Although less is known about

domestic servants, it seems probable that their employers regulated their living arrangements and leisure time in addition to their work. But the degree of control asserted over prostitutes by their employer/owners was extreme even by these standards. Prostitution in China involved more than wages for sex work; it included control by madams over a woman's fertility, sexual access, mobility, and life-style, as well as her labor. Rather than regarding the labor of prostitutes as fully commodified, it seems more accurate to say that what was being purchased were claims on a woman's attributes and services, rather than her actual labor, and that these claims were contestable in the courts and through flight from the brothel system.

The language of commodification causes another problem when applied to women up and down the hierarchy of Shanghai prostitution: it obscures status differences among the women themselves and imposes a false uniformity on their experience. The status of all prostitutes derived from the class background of their customers rather than their own family backgrounds. However derivative, a woman's status translated into real differences in daily working conditions, personal control over income, and possibilities for negotiating an advantageous exit from prostitution into concubinage or madamhood. The experience of a storytelling-house courtesan was radically different from that of a saltwater sister, and the two might well have had difficulty viewing themselves as members of a single profession. Noting the structural similarities of commodification should not blind us to the inequality among prostitutes, an inequality that mirrored the complex class structure of Shanghai society.

The language of commodification, then, cannot be applied neatly either to the women themselves or to their labor. Nevertheless, it must be said that in early twentieth-century Shanghai there was a growing market in which claims on women's bodies were exchanged: that is, that the commodification of women's bodies outside the marriage market was becoming more common. Perhaps the most important thing we can say about the Shanghai market in prostitutes is that it appears to have grown and changed during the first half of the twentieth century. During that period what had essentially been a luxury market in top-class courtesans became a market primarily geared to supplying sexual services for the growing numbers of unattached (though not necessarily unmarried) commercial and working-class men of the city. The increase in demand was apparently accompanied by a boom in supply, fed by a burgeoning population of refugees and peasants in distress with daughters they could not support. We cannot yet trace the fluctuating value of women on this larger market as brides, maidservants, concubines, or prostitutes. But it certainly looks as though the "popularization" of prostitution was accompanied by degenerating conditions of work for the individual prostitutes, or at least that more and more women participated in the less privileged and more vulnerable sectors of the trade. This trend, combined with the growth of various distinct reform cur-

rents among foreigners and Chinese in Shanghai, led to a series of loud, though largely ineffective, calls for the regulation or abolition of prostitution. Not until the early 1950s did the municipal government succeed in abolishing this particular market in women.

Glossary

chan-chieh chuan

ch'ang-san

chih-chi

ch'u-chi

chung-teng yi-shang

erh-san

Han-chu chia

ho-ch'i chuan

hsiang-hao

hsiao hsien-sheng

hsien-jou chuang

hsien-shui mei

hsien-sheng

hua-yen chien

k'ai-pao

ko-tzu p'eng

lao-pan

lao-pao

Lo-sung t'ang-tzu

pao-chang

P'iao-ti men-ching

shu-lou

shu-yu

ssu-fang ch'ien

sung-t'ang tse-p'ei

t'ao-jen

ting-p'eng

tu-chueh

tzu-chi shen-t'i

tzu-chia shen-t'i

tso hua-t'ou

ya-chang

yang-nü

yao-erh

yeh-chi

yi-p'ao chu-yi

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