Historic Shanghai: How prostitution transformed the Old City

The idea of prostitution in historic Shanghai conjures all the cliches of a mysterious and scandalous city: the sheathed silhouettes of sing song girls and the intricate etiquette of their high-class houses, or the miasma and squalor of waterfront opium dens. The spread of Western customs added variety to the mythology of Shanghai vice: Russian ingenues, taxi dances and clandestine meetings in criminal hotels.

Red-faced interior courtyard of a house near Hongzhuang Nong.

But, in reality, as characterized in "Prostitution and Sexuality in Shanghai," the oldest trade was fairly new to Shanghai's Old City, and its marks can still be seen today.

Flower girls

A forest of masts -- a thousand junk barges anchored in the Huangpu -- testified to the prosperity and dynamism of Qing Dynasty Shanghai. But after sunset, things settled down and the boats (residential and merchant) were dark, with a conspicuous exception: brightly lit pleasure junks cruised the Huangpu all night, catering to Fujianese and Cantonese merchants that manned the wharves in Dongjiadu. The feudal character of the agrarian gentry within the city walls left no space for established houses of prostitution; for centuries, all the action was on the boats. 

But in the 1820s Shanghai experienced a powerful economic shift: a new generation of entrepreneurs invested in the walled city, building new residences and businesses. The ‘flower girls’ came ashore and settled in the center of town. 

Back inside the Old City

To this day, street names in the heart of Shanghai's Old City -- Honglangan Jie (‘street of the red banisters’) and Hongzhuang Nong (‘red hamlet lane’) -- invoke not Marxism-Leninism but brightly painted facades of the brothels. ‘Tit-pinch lane,’ Monai Nong, was so narrow it provided the wicked-minded pedestrian with groping opportunities. Houses of prostitution were as legal and ubiquitous as shrines.

Most cul-de-sacs in lilongs were utilized by brothels.

Brothels transformed their neighborhoods into the first mixed-use consumer zones in Shanghai. Tailors, restaurants, jewelers, shoemakers and hairdressers all catered to the prostitution industry. ‘Working girls’ became enthusiastic customers of the first photo studios, bestowing portraits onto favored customers. 

Elite courtesans enjoyed a measure of local celebrity. Brothels competed to recruit famous ladies, showing more solicitous respect than a Bund restaurant to a Michelin chef today. A newly contracted girl was greeted with a salute of firecrackers, a hopeful invocation of future income for her and her retinue.

When paying a call, courtesans arrived in carriages flanked by butlers and maids. Girls were necessary for any respectable feast or business meeting; at these events their services were usually limited to singing, playing pipa, pouring tea and offering superficial banter. The quality of the setting and the breadth of expenses boosted the status of the gentlemen. Another round of expensive gifts and phony courtship gave the customer a chance of becoming a courtesan’s intimate friend. 

The high cost of banqueting disqualified all patrons but the rich or cunning. The insider guides of the early 20th century warned readers of the drawbacks of spendthrift ‘brothel addiction’ and offered handy tips. One way to avoid wallet-breaking tea ceremonies was to ‘accidentally’ meet a courtesan promenading inside Yu Garden. 

By the 1920s, according to Christian Henriot, author of "Prostitution and sexuality in Shanghai: a social history, 1849-1949", the dizzying variety of paid entertainment in the concessions made the elaborate romancing of courtesans parochial and inefficient. Utilitarian decadence put an end to the pleasure houses in the Chinese City, although their legacy still remains on the streets of the Old City for those willing to look. 

Katya Knyazeva is a journalist and fine artist born in Siberia.

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