Moscow: Natalis; Ripol Classic. 2006. 479 p. (Oriental collection)

The publication of a translation of the classic work of the Dutch scholar Robert van Gulik "Sexual Life in Ancient China "(St. Petersburg, 2000) aroused great interest in the topic "women in China". The well-known Russian sinologist V. N. Usov continued his research on this topic, publishing a serious work.

The book is divided into two parts: historical essays and an appendix containing research by sinologists and excerpts from Chinese classical literature. The oldest records of folk love songs are preserved in the canonical Book of poetry "Shijing", so that the Chinese literary material allows us to consider the history of customs for 4000 years.

"In ancient China, as in other archaic societies, mass spontaneous copulation was practiced, taking place during spring festivals. The tradition of holding love games (mainly among the rural population) persisted in subsequent historical epochs," writes V. N. Usov (p. 12).

Later, the conceptualization of archaic-religious ideas about Heaven and Earth led to a natural philosophical understanding of the sexual as the interaction of male and female cosmic principles and the need for a person to be in harmony with the natural world order. If some literary evidence suggests the existence of matriarchy in hoary antiquity, then in historical China there is no trace of female independence. The Chinese ancestral cult inexorably demanded early marriage and female obedience in the family, but ancient Chinese literature shows that the life of Chinese society was by no means monotonous, insipid and boring.

Describing the work of Liu Xiang (77-6 BC) "Biographies of famous women", V. N. Usov writes that they are grouped by the author into sections, where in addition to exemplary mothers, women are described as merciful and wise, chaste and humble, eloquent and reasonable, virtuous and faithful to duty, as well as sinful and depraved"Almost all the heroines mentioned in the book are the embodiment of Confucian norms of morality, each of them is still alive.-

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It has left its bright mark on Chinese tradition and history. But perhaps the most impressive are still the images of "femme fatales" in the last section of "sinful and depraved" (p. 20).

It is only fair to recall that the lives of Liu Xiang's women in Chinese literature predate Plutarch's comparative biographies in ancient Greek literature by 100 years. Liu Xiang wrote completely independently of the ancient author, following his own historical and biographical tradition, created a century earlier by Sima Qian in the famous "Historical Notes". "Femme fatale" for him forever, for thousands of years to come, were the beauties who destroyed the rulers of the three great dynasties of Chinese antiquity - Yin, Zhou and Han. The image of femme fatale beauty has forever become an irresistible force in Chinese history, capable of destroying the state and overthrowing the throne. After Liu Xiang, for two thousand years, the same tragic plot appeared again and again in the life of the Chinese state, with only the names of the characters changing.

If the beauties were recognized as a mysterious power that could destroy the kingdom, then in the daily life of Ancient China, all archaic remnants of former freedom and gender equality disappeared, and the woman turned into a powerless being, completely dependent first on the father, then on the husband and then on the son. The position of women in the Confucian household was exceptionally low. She was required to raise children and run a household, but these activities were considered respectable pastimes. Girls were forbidden from early childhood to play with boys; all communication between the sexes was forbidden, and women were not allowed to sit at the same table with men. It was indecent to give girls an education, and only in isolated cases did they decide to break this custom. Singing, dancing, making music, and composing poetry were left to indecent women outside of social status.

Conventional early marriage and strict marital fidelity made it necessary to somehow solve the problem of childlessness in the family, since offspring, especially sons, were absolutely necessary for religious rites in the ancestral temple. Therefore, in Ancient China, it was customary to perform a prayer service for the gift of offspring in temples among monks who were bound by a vow of celibacy, but not abstinence. After such a prayer, the woman often brought her husband the desired child in the family.

The complete dependence of women led to the emergence of the custom of leg bandaging in medieval China. The miniature (up to 10 cm) size of the legs ("Golden Lotuses") was achieved at the cost of many years of suffering of girls at an early age. Without such legs, it was impossible for a woman to marry a nobleman, because "golden lotuses" were recognized as mandatory for female beauty. The painful procedure of bandaging and deforming the legs persisted in China until the 1920s and was a real scourge for Chinese women. Despite all attempts to justify this custom on aesthetic or erotic grounds, it was based on a man's desire for absolute domination over a woman, whose freedom was limited even by the inability to move freely around her own home, let alone on the street or in the city. The most important force in preserving this cruel custom was public opinion, which ridiculed anyone who dared to marry a "big-legged" girl. This custom prevailed in China for at least 800 years, and it is not surprising that the author of the book V. N. Usov devoted a separate detailed section to it.

A very informative part of the book "Hetaera in the Middle Kingdom" opens with a polemic about the primacy in the organization of brothels. While historians of the ancient world call the first organizer of prostitution of the Athenian archon Solon (VI century BC), Chinese historians consider the initiator of the creation of brothels of the reformer minister Guan Zhong from the ancient kingdom of Qi (VII century BC). Unlike other countries, prostitution in Ancient China was never religious.of a temple nature, but initially pursued fiscal goals. The fact that the organization of prostitution in ancient times was a new business is indirectly confirmed by the fact that both Solon in ancient Greece and Guan Zhong in Ancient China enjoyed the fame of the greatest reformers.

V. N. Usov refers to Chinese brothels as "blue houses" because they had blue shutters on the windows (p. 128), but in Sinological literature the epithet "green" is more widespread, adopted in Chinese literature, novels and novels, starting from the Song Dynasty, when a collection of short stories was already created "New Stories of the Green Window "("Lu Chu-

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an xin hua"). "Green" is more often used in the names of literary works of later times. Unfortunately, the author himself is inconsistent in the designation of color: the title of the Yuan Dynasty treatise "Qing Lou ji" is translated as " Notes on Green Towers "(p. 158), and the title of Yu Da's novel "Qing Lou Meng" on the next page is translated as "Dream in the Blue Chamber". It seems to me that the designation of color by the qing character suffered from some ambiguity, but the frequent use of the absolutely clear meaning of the liu (green) character makes us prefer it in translation.

A significant place in the book is occupied by the section on the imperial harem, which in China at different periods reached an unprecedented number for other countries. The author provides information about the harem of the Han emperor Wu-di in 10 thousand concubines, and the maximum number of women in the harem of the Tang emperors reached 40 thousand people during the heyday of the empire. There were good political reasons for this. First, all the peoples and tribes subordinate to the imperial power considered it their duty to supply beauties to the harem, thereby symbolizing their submission. Secondly, the Chinese nobility sent their daughters to the harem, so that after five years the emperor would marry them off to his soldiers as recognized beauties. Such a marriage was considered an honorary award in China, replacing orders and insignia. It was a recognition of merit, especially in military affairs, and encouragement for success in the civil service, including in the exams for the position.

The girls were kept in the emperor's harem for five to seven years under strict supervision, and most of them did not even have the opportunity to see the sovereign. But staying in the imperial harem provided the girl with public recognition of her beauty, nobility and wealth, i.e. made her an enviable bride for any young man, and marrying her could help her husband in court and official career. It would be wrong to understand the presence of a huge number of women in Chinese harems as exclusively a manifestation of the voluptuousness and unrestrainedness of the emperors themselves, although both took place in Chinese history. V. N. Usov gives an abundance of historical examples, and very diverse. We can only point out that the Tang Emperor Xuanzong, owner of the largest harem in Chinese history, loved his concubine Yang Guifei for many years, and the tragic story of their love became a constant theme of literature and art in China for centuries.

The book concludes with an appendix containing articles by the author's predecessors on the topic and a small selected anthology of Chinese love poetry, starting with the ancient song book "Shijing". This collection is not only a fascinating read, but also an effective refutation of the old superstition that the subject of love was foreign to Chinese classical literature.

The publication of this book, written and compiled by a highly qualified Sinologist, is encouraging, especially now that China and Russia are making mutual efforts to get acquainted with the cultural heritage of the peoples of their countries. We can expect that the book will become popular and our readers will receive reliable information about the customs and customs of the neighboring Celestial Empire.

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