At over 3,000 pages, it’s a colossal portrait of everyday life in its Song-era setting, recording even the most mundane details of its hundreds of characters. Despite its reputation, it’s unfair to dismiss the book as pointless porn. Since the Qing dynasty, Jin Ping Mei has been repeatedly banned and bowdlerized, with even its first English translator taking care to put the dirtiest parts into Latin. Over the course of the story, he takes six wives and numerous concubines and servants, before eventually dying during the passionate raptures of sex from an overdose of aphrodisiacs.įor the novel’s frank treatment of sex, some of its critics have considered the novel nothing more than pornography. As Ximen rises up the social hierarchy, his lust for power and sex becomes increasingly depraved. Chronicling the life of a decadent merchant named Ximen Qing in the Song dynasty, the book’s notoriety comes from its graphic descriptions of sex, covering everything from adultery to sado-masochism. A pornographic Ming Dynasty painting (public domain image from Wikicommons).įor over 400 years, the Ming-era novel Jin Ping Mei – known in English as The Golden Lotus – has been celebrated by some readers as a literary masterpiece, while others condemn it as a salacious influence.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. Archives
December 2022
Categories |