Classical Chinese Erotica

Abstract

China possesses one of the world’s great literary traditions, with an uninterrupted history of more than 3,000 years. More than a thousand years ago, Chinese prose literature diverged into two streams. The first, more literary stream, known as classical prose, includes works emulating the standards and styles set by the authors of the Confucian Classics and the early philosophers. The language in such works is always far removed from contemporary dialects. By contrast, the second stream consists of vernacular prose, written in the same language their authors used on a daily basis. The same distinction exists in the realm of Chinese fiction.