In 1979, the Chinese publication Popular Cinema landed in hot water after releasing a still from a British movie revealing a couple kissing. The “reform and opening-up” duration had actually started the previous year, public display screens of intimacy were still taboo in China– a bourgeois affectation alien to the nation. The reaction to the image was extremely favorable: Of the over 11,000 letters the publication got, two-thirds were encouraging, with readers arguing that an on-screen kiss would neither “toxin the youth,” as one early critic declared, nor damage Chinese society in basic.
The back cover was conserved, however the preliminary debate enhanced stereotypes about Chinese prudishness that continue to this day. In “The History of the Kiss!” the Canada-based scholar Marcel Danesi composes that kissing “is not part of the courtship customs of China or Japan.” This belief in the foreignness of kissing is implanted even in China itself: A Chinese dictionary from the 1980s declared that the term “kiss” in Chinese– jiewen — stemmed from the Japanese word seppun, which, in turn, was originated from the English word “kiss.”
It is this misconception that Hu Wenhui, an independent scholar, tries to unmask in his 2023 book, “A History of Kissing in China.” Hu argues that, far from being an import, words like jiewen were extensively utilized by ancient Chinese, and are practically as old as Chinese literature itself.
According to Hu, the earliest reliable Chinese records concerning kissing can be discovered in Mawangdui, a historical site in main China understood for its Han dynasty burial places (202 BC– ADVERTISEMENT 220). Amongst the manuscripts uncovered there is a guide to sexual practices that includes a recommendation to a strategy called xu. Initially implying “to breathe out” or “spit saliva,” it can likewise be analyzed as “kissing” in the context of the manuscript.
Another Han-dynasty manuscript went back to China in 2009 deals hints about how couples kissed almost 2,000 years back. In one imaginary passage, the author jokes about a lady’s undesirable look and unrestrained habits while noting her fondness for kissing: “Her body resembles a hedgehog with spinal columns, yet she is a passionate hugger; her breath is nasty like a rotting rat, yet she likes securing her spouse’s moustache.”
The Han dynasty is the source of numerous long-lasting pictures of kissing in Chinees culture. The majority of these originated from ornamental murals discovered in burial places and spiritual halls. Han artists had a hard time to use the concepts of viewpoint, however that didn’t stop them from imagining kissing in innovative methods. One mural represents 2 kissing individuals by having their mouths near each other, linked by a tongue.
In spite of these early records, points out of kissing would stay a relative rarity in Chinese literature till the last millennium. That may be due to an absence of sources, however Hu thinks that a genuine modification happened: the secularization of both sex and literature. Prior to the Song dynasty (960-1279), sex and kissing were typically mystified as an “art of the bed room” and carefully connected to Taoist practices. This propensity to perplex sexuality slowly lost its attraction, nevertheless, releasing representations of kissing from the pages of medical books.
More considerable was the secularization of literature. The growth of metropolitan life throughout the Song enabled brand-new literary types, consisting of lyric poetry and books, to grow. By the Ming (1368-1644) and Qing (1644-1911) dynasties, authors understood how to amuse their readers with juicy, sometimes lurid information. In Pu Songling’s popular Qing-era collection of supernatural narratives, “Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio,” a small authorities surnamed Xu establishes an accessory to a girl. He by force kisses her, just to be notified that their relationship will go no even more. When Xu approaches the lady once again, this time with the objective of more than a kiss, a turmoil emerges around them. It ends up that the lady is a fox spirit, and the set are now surrounded by hunters of the supernatural. She gets away, and Xu never ever sees her once again.
To explain the act of kissing, Pu combined the characters for jie, suggesting “contact,” and wen, or lips. Jiewen, far from being an imported term, would turn into one of the most frequently utilized words for kissing in contemporary Chinese. Jiewen is simply one of lots of terms for kissing in Chinese literature: Lovers may qinzui– “touch mouths”– or zashe– “lick each other’s tongues.” Another imaginative expression, special to Chinese, compares the act of kissing to “drawing lü”– a character made by copying the character for “mouth” two times. It’s a really actual analysis of the expression “mouth-to-mouth.”
If kissing was so widespread in conventional Chinese literature and art, why do so lots of contemporary Chinese still see it as a mainly Western import?
The response, according to Hu, lies not in the act, however its context. In pre-modern China, kissing was seen specifically as a sexual act, one that must just be practiced in personal. This stands in contrast to Western Europe, where kissing has a more comprehensive series of cultural significances. It wasn’t till China’s fast modernization in the early 20th century that young Chinese ended up being comfy with kissing in public, and even valued it as a sign of the flexibility to pick their own partners.
Obviously, this procedure was not constantly smooth, specifically for females. The renowned 20th century author Eileen Chang– a female, unlike all the other authors pointed out in this piece– made a bleakly amusing contribution to China’s kissing canon in her unique “Little Reunions.” Of an undesirable kiss experienced by the story’s heroine, Chang composes: “A square pointer of tongue, dried to a cork-like texture from excessive talking, unexpectedly extended into her lips. He noticed her disgust simultaneously and smiled as he released.”
(Header image: Details of a painting by Qing painter Yin Qi. From the collection of the Boston Museum)