Abstract

This paper explores the collection of Chinese erotic objects and the interpretation of Chinese sexuality in Europe in the nineteenth and twentieth century. We begin by analysing a number of Chinese erotic objects in the Wellcome Collection for the History of Medicine in London, one of the largest museum collections in the world. In tandem, we unpack Henry Wellcome’s collection and exhibition practices, particularly pertaining to sexual objects from other cultures, which is neither indiscriminate nor haphazard. Wellcome’s ideas and assumptions could be squarely situated in late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century debates, taking place in Britain, concerning China and Chinese sexual culture. These debates often centred on the practice of footbinding, and constructed China as a beautiful yet backward, secret yet sinister, refined yet oppressive world. In the mid-twentieth century, Western thinkers re-evaluated Chinese sexual culture, and early China came to be seen as a utopia of eroticism and wholesome sexuality, in contrast to Judeo-Christian prudery and hypocrisy. Here we briefly discuss the work of Robert van Gulik, Joseph Needham, Michel Foucault, and recent Chinese sexologists. By studying the relationship between collections, objects, and the varied constructions of Western scholarly and popular images of Chinese sexuality past and present, we argue that the meanings ascribed to Chinese erotic objects are often couched on problematic dichotomies between the East and the West, on Western fantasies of a radically different organisation of sexuality. The meanings of the Chinese sexual objects now really only exist in the processes of exchange and encounter which provide the most tangible context for understanding their significance. This article was originally co-authored by Kate Fisher (University of Exeter) and Leon Rocha (University of Lincoln) in English. It was then translated into Chinese.