Real courtesans were portrayed in the same fashion as the fictional women featured in beautiful woman paintings. One rare example of a painting named after a real courtesan is Wu Wei’s 吳偉 (1459–1508) portrait commemorating a courtesan named Wuling Chun 武陵春 (fig. 3).²⁴ The formula in Qiu Ying models was also transmitted across the media of painting and wood-block illustrations as we find it applied widely to catalogues of courtesans.²⁵ The best examples are illustrations of well-known courtesans labeled with their names and rankings in catalogues published in the early seventeenth century as publicity pamphlets for local courtesans.²⁶ The illustrations mostly depict various cultural activities and leisure moments that a client could enjoy with these women, who excelled at cultural skills such as drinking, horse riding, mountain hiking, chess games, chasing butterflies, and so on (figs. 4, 5).²⁷ What enabled the transmission of female icons from the genre of beautiful woman paintings to the medium of wood-block printing was the practice of standardization in iconography. By comparing the above four examples, we can tell that the painters’ execution was often translated faithfully by skilled engravers. Standardization provided ease of trans-media replication and manufacture.

The best prototype for legitimate copies of beautiful woman paintings, however, is the long handscroll of sixty female figures, ink and heavy color on silk, that is catalogued in the collection of the National Museum of China as “a Qing-Dynasty copy after Qiu Ying, Scroll of A Hundred Beauties” 清人仿仇英百美圖 (fig. 6). Since these figures all look similar to visual representations of real courtesans such as Wuling chun (fig. 3) and Chen Yuan (fig. 5), there must have been a contemporary erotic reality behind the paintings’ decorous classic references (for instance, to the Moon Goddess, Mount Wu Goddess, Wang Zhaojun 王昭君, Lü Zhu 綠珠, Imperial Concubine Lady Ban 班婕妤, Zhuo Wenjun 卓文君, Imperial Concubine Lady Plum Blossoms 梅妃, or Xue Tao 薛濤)—an erotic reality that the late Ming mentality may well have easily decoded. The same handscroll may have been in the Shenyang Palace collection, identified as “Qiu Ying, Scroll of A Hundred Beauties” (Qiu Ying Baimei tujuan 仇英百美圖卷), before it was sent to Beijing. There is another handscroll, entitled “Illustrations of Beautiful Women” (Jia furen tuli 佳婦人圖例), in the collection of Waseda University (hereafter Waseda copy), in which the sixty figures are rendered in monochrome and painted on seventeen sheets of various-sized paper (with three or four figures per sheet).

Both the color Beijing copy (see figs. 6, 8b) and the monochrome Waseda copy bear Qiu Ying’s seals and signatures, which we also find on other paintings attributed to him, fake or genuine. The signatures, in which the proper name (Qiu Ying) appears beneath an alternate name, Shifu 實父, resemble the signature on a painting entitled Saying Farewell at Xunyang (Xunyang songbie 潯陽送別), which is likely a fake, now preserved in the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City.²⁸ The seals that read Shizhou 十洲, Qiu Ying’s sobriquet, look similar to his ownership seals whose authenticity is considered undisputed (figs. 7a,b).²⁹

However, evidence abounds of outright faking, and of mistakes generated by mass duplication, suggesting that the copiers took the replication of seals and signatures to be a legitimate and indispensable part of their job of copying the original work, rather than replicating the seals and signatures in order to deliberately trick the viewer for extra profit. That is to say, the contemporary customer may have understood that a studio replica was not the original in the same way that we buy reproductions of Ming paintings from museum gift shops. The signature and seal in the monochrome Waseda copy, for example, do not display any effort to look as restrained and dignified as those we see elsewhere (fig. 7b). Similarly, both handscrolls’ fifty-seven poems dedicated to the sixty women, inscribed in the upper right corner of each image unit (six of which appear in three pairs and thus share poems), whose calligraphy was assigned to the famous artist Wen Zhengming 文徵明 (1470–1559), are written in a conspicuously clumsy style, openly revealing a hand other than Wen’s. In addition, the color scroll is missing some poems and the Waseda copy contains multiple cases of mislabeling that can be supplied from or corrected by reference to the color copy.³⁰ The discrepancies between the two renditions again indicate that the copiers, like many studio laborers of various times, played fast and loose with the subtle expressions of the Qiu Ying models.

Most of the figures in the Waseda copy appear in an order that is distinctly different from that seen in the color scroll. But its thirteenth sheet happens to depict four figures that appear in the same order, from left to right: a Tang singing girl, Beauty Du; a Tang courtesan, Miss Willow; an abandoned wife, Beauty Xue, also from the Tang dynasty; and a Tang concubine, Beauty Bu (figs. 8a,b). The iconography of the beauties—their settings, costumes, poses, and gestures—is roughly parallel between the two copies. One can imagine that there was a coherent system that provided an important template for many other copies. Making copies of the handscroll, or of a selection of figures from it, was a tool for professional painters working in the commercial environment.

All the figures in the two handscrolls feature the accessorized imagery of ancient beauty icons, including fairly standard and formulaic facial and gestural contours, with various visual cues coded to their respective background stories. Inner evidence from the two scrolls suggests that coherence in artistic expression would have come in handy for copiers. The traditional method of copying is called lin 臨 (copying by eye alone, as opposed to making an exact copy). One might note that the poem dedicated to the abandoned wife Beauty Xue in both handscrolls, as seen in figure 8, is a variation on the one recorded in Feng Menglong’s 馮夢龍 (1574–1646) anecdotal account of her story. In Feng’s version, the disappointed wife, Xue Yuan 薛媛, paints her self-portrait and inscribes on it a poem asking her husband to “frequently unroll and look at the portrait” 時展畫圖看,³¹ whereas in the two handscrolls, the verb look at has been replaced by the verb copy (lin) 請君時把畫圖臨.

The idea of copying a beautiful woman painting as a public pastime in the method of lin is closely associated with the use of fenben 粉本, line-drawing drafts for the reference of aspiring painters. As Tu Long 屠隆 (1543–1605; jinshi 1577) wrote in the 1590s, “Draft paintings by artists from antiquity are called fenben,” and since such a sketch would be of immediate value to contemporary painters, “those who happen to possess one had better treasure it” 古人畫稿謂之粉本. . .有則宜寶藏之.³² The popularity of model images “preserved for private use” became a sixteenth-century cultural phenomenon associated with what J. P. Park calls “the democratization of art” along with “the improved economic standing of the late Ming urban classes.”³³ However, in the only extant Ming painting manual exclusively devoted to the genre of figure painting, Zhou Lüjing’s 周履靖 (1549–1640) Heavenly Forms and Exemplary Manners (Tianxing daomao 天形道貌), there is clearly a lack of the Qiu Ying models—only four out of thirty-six pictures were women, placed at the end of the volume, among which just one was rendered in the Qiu Ying style.³⁴ In the context of Japanese painting, Brenda Jordan has pointed out the function of fenben as an important means to transmit “the style of a particular workshop from generation to generation.”³⁵ There was surely the market demand for fenben of the Qiu Ying models, and the two handscrolls under discussion may have been a response to it.

The term fenben may refer to specialized manuals for painting female images in Ruan Dacheng’s 阮大鋮 (1587–1646; jinshi 1616) The Swallow Letter (Yanzi jian 燕子箋), completed in the Chongzhen reign (1628–1644). When the hero of The Swallow Letter is adding his own image to his portrait of his courtesan-lover, he decides not to use a fenben—a draft painting of male figures as a model for a portrait of himself—but to “resort to this small mirror” 脫粉本央小鏡菱花, and then to look back and forth at his reflection while drafting his own image.³⁶ This is a manifestation of the gendered divide between a male portrait and a courtesan’s “portrait.” The male tradition pursued a certain degree of verisimilitude, the female one a stereotypical beauty with a generic face. The scholar’s own face must come from a contemporary moment and not be rendered through a veil of past visualizations; or, perhaps, most fenben copies for female portraits available at his time were exclusively in the Qiu Ying style. For the image of his courtesan-lover, therefore, he uses as his model a portrait of the imperial concubine Wang Zhaojun 王昭君 (also Wang Qiang 王嬙; ca. 51–15 BCE, frequently the subject of beautiful woman paintings), which the courtesan has borrowed from her neighbor (presumably another courtesan). The resulting painting portrays the courtesan chasing butterflies while orioles flit about overhead near a willow tree, possibly reminding us of the historical courtesan Chen Yuan’s portrait in the Nanjing catalogue (fig. 5). The hero comments approvingly on the resemblance of his courtesan-lover to the fenben, to which she replies: “Nothing about me resembles Zhaojun except that my harsh life in the brothel, like fallen petals of peach blossoms, is comparable to her sufferings from the trip crossing the borders” 諸般不像, 只是桃花薄命, 流落平康, 也與他出塞的苦沒什麼差別.³⁷ But the hero fetches the Wang Zhaojun handscroll and speaks emphatically to it about the resemblance: “She [my lover] duplicates you, Imperial Concubine, in painting” 果然明妃重畫. It is the hero’s transforming imagination alone that superimposes the generic face of the ancient beauty Zhaojun onto that of his courtesan-lover.

Likewise, a bolder hero in another play also spends some leisure time painting in the same genre: holding a brush, he first thinks of reproducing a Zhaojun painting 便要實圖出塞王嬙貌;³⁸ his second thought, unsurprisingly, is to make an exact copy of previously existing models “in the same way I would to create auspicious deity images in the Spring Festival” 似歲底神荼按本勾描. His ideal model is the beauty icon of a famous Han-dynasty queen, A Jiao 阿嬌 (ca. 150–ca. 200), from wood-block imprints that are not yet at his disposal 又沒有個版刊成葫蘆阿嬌.³⁹

To return to the sixty role portraits in the Hundred Beauties scroll, in Ming times there was in all likelihood a dramatic dimension to their predecessors. When viewers’ attention was drawn to the accessories of the beauty icons depicted in the handscrolls, they often deduced the women’s various identities and types by associating these accessories with love stories enacted in the theater. In these instances, it better served the emotional intensity of the portrait to be less unique. The image’s affinity with its background stories would create an uncanny effect of lifelikeness, inviting the viewer to reanimate the figure in his imagination. If one finds that a Barbie doll expresses some degree of sexual ideal and gendered expectations, touched up with a sense of playfulness, then one should not feel surprised at a Ming consumer’s fascination with these much earlier female images.

One example should suffice. Jade Flute’s image in the handscrolls does not illustrate any specific scene in the drama (fig. 9). Instead, the four-line verse inscribed beside her image highlights “her hands caressing the pair of jade pendants near a pavilion” 手弄雙環亭下玩—the signature gesture that epitomizes Jade Flute’s longing for her lover in the final days before she perishes for want of him.

The image in the handscroll is certainly intended to revive the viewer’s memory of Jade Flute’s prop portrait in its sentimental, theatrical setting. The Jade Pendants (Yuhuan ji 玉環記), an anonymous Ming play, may have been based on the northern zaju play Jade Flute’s Marriage Destiny Over Two Lifetimes (Yuxiaonü liangshi yinyuan 玉簫女兩世因緣), attributed to Qiao Ji 喬吉 (ca. 1280–ca. 1345).⁴⁰ The story tells of a courtesan known as Jade Flute who, at the time of her forced separation from her scholar-lover, offers to send a self-portrait to his lodgings in the capital to quench the fire of his love-longing. But after his departure, she pines away and eventually expires while holding tight to their love token, a pair of antique jade pendants. A reincarnation of Jade Flute, a well-born young lady named Flute Jade, daughter of a general, is to marry the hero. The self-portrait somehow resurfaces and is presented to the hero. Miraculously, the general confirms that his daughter has a birthmark on her palm in the shape of the jade pendants, which look exactly like their pictorial counterpart—the jade pendants in the hand of the painted beauty 那圖中美人掌持玉環，小女亦於此掌中白圈如在.⁴¹

The Jade Pendants has a prominent place in the visual culture and popular repertoire of the late Ming. It is among the twenty or so plays mentioned in Pan Yunduan’s 潘允端 (1526–1601; jinshi 1566) extensive records of watching theatrical performances in his luxurious Yu Garden (still a famous tourist attraction in present-day Shanghai) in the last sixteen years of his life (1586–1601).⁴² Furthermore, the attractions of the courtesan’s self-portrait scene remained constant for half a century (1570s–1620s): it appears in four drama miscellanies and three popular kunqu songbooks published in that period, in addition to the play’s three full-text wood-block editions from approximately the same time.⁴³ The sixteenth-century anonymous pornographic novel The Plum in the Golden Vase (Jin Ping Mei cihua 金瓶梅詞話) describes in chapter 63 the staging of this scene in a rich merchant-class family’s private theater. Perhaps to highlight the emotional crescendo of the drama, the novelist atypically records verbatim Jade Flute’s lines sung to the messenger boy before she hands over the scroll painting: “In this life [he and I] are unlikely to meet again. For this reason, I bequeath this painting to him” 今生難會, 因此上寄丹青.⁴⁴ Two more arias follow, reinforcing the image of the heartbroken and dying courtesan. A moment later, the heroine asks for the jade pendants, caresses them while crying “Oh, Mister Wei Fengxiang, my love!,” and dies. The contemporary viewer of the Qiu Ying figure of Jade Flute must have been well aware of the tradition of her sentimental deathbed scene.

Qiu Ying figures such as Jade Flute refer to the theater externally through a range of static, conventional gestures, props, and pieces of clothing that evoke central dramatic situations. They were designed to bring pleasure through the recognition and sentiment of theatrical presentations.

Displaying beauty icons of the Qiu Ying models in a set was a new trend in social customs of interior decoration, which may have stimulated reproduction of group images, in sharp contrast to the earlier convention of hanging just one scroll per room. Yu Yonglin 余永麟 (fl. Jiajing reign, 1522–1566) records a contemporary idiom in the 1530s: “People today have the lowest taste; they need four paintings to hang [on their walls]” 今人最俗，挂畫四幅.⁴⁵ According to him, the new trend of displaying a set of four vertical scrolls of beautiful women was called “one hall” (yitang 一堂). The visual fullness of four figure paintings in one hall finds a fictional representation in The Plum in the Golden Vase, in which the protagonist’s favorite courtesan has her two opposite walls decorated with a set of hanging scrolls depicting four beautiful women in the four seasons, and a portrait of Guanyin of the Ocean Tides placed on the wall in the middle.⁴⁶ Soon, when the courtesan finally shows up, she is the living image of a beautiful woman painting in front of the protagonist: “If she is not the image of a portrait of Kuan-in by Wu Tao-tzu, she must be the subject of a painting of a beauty by Mao Yanshou” 若非道子觀音畫, 定然延壽美人圖.⁴⁷ Here the novelist not only makes a silent comment on the vulgar taste of the courtesan—a comment that would have remained hidden to readers unaware of elite taste, but also speaks wittily of the theatricality of brothel culture: the courtesan and the beautiful woman painting are but one.⁴⁸ That one beauty image multiplied into a set of many images recalls medieval folding screens discussed by Wu Hung in his recent study. Wu argues that although screens in various forms had functioned as a medium for beauty icons since the Han dynasty, large standing folding screens, or lianping 聯屏, with multiple beauty images nevertheless have a special illusionistic or even “animation” effect.⁴⁹ In fact, Qiu Ying’s beautiful-woman folding screen, consisting of nine paintings (each 65.24 by 37.88 cm), authentic but now lost, was treasured by the famous late Ming painter and collector Xiang Yuanbian 項元汴 (1525–1590).⁵⁰ In 1554, Xiang solicited inscriptions from eighty- four-year-old Wen Zhengming. Thus, when Song Zhengbi 宋徵璧 (1602–1672; jinshi 1643) began his 1633 poem with a line depicting an elite man’s folding screen with twelve beauty images 十二雲屏坐玉人, he was both referring to a real standing screen, likely rendered in the Qiu Ying style, and alluding to the size of the man’s harem.⁵¹

By mechanical multiplication, the Qiu Ying models created an audience for these images that any theater would have been happy to share. To dramatists, these popular paintings had intrinsically high value to the theater as the viewers of the paintings automatically saw in them scenes from dramas. They provided a ready-made audience for new dramas that centered on the beautiful woman paintings. Given the Qiu Ying models’ place in popular consciousness and their close association with a prior consensus of erotic imagination, there is no reason to suppose that beautiful woman paintings, as the courtesan’s “role portraits,” would not have influenced Tang Xianzu and his followers directly. The beauty image projected an erotic charge in both its visual and theatrical representations, thereby enabling particular repertoires of chuanqi drama. We have encountered in the opening pages of this article one reference to beautiful woman paintings in Tang Xianzu’s play, which, among many other references to beautiful woman painting, may have been one of the attributes of the category of “beautiful woman plays,” or “erotic plays” (yanpin) as defined by the drama critic Qi Biaojia 祁彪佳 (1603–1645; jinshi 1622).⁵² There are twenty southern comedies (or chuanqi plays) and nine northern dramas (or zaju) in his annotated bibliographies. Not all of them involve beautiful woman paintings, but they are all preoccupied with explicit portrayals of erotic love for beautiful women.

The list of twenty chuanqi plays opens with Tang Xianzu’s The Purple Flute (Zixiao ji 紫簫記, ca. 1577) and The Purple Hairpin, both of which feature a beautiful woman with a prominent place in Ming visual culture: Little Jade (Huo Xiaoyu) and a courtesan, Mme. Four Strings (Bao Sixian 鮑四絃), respectively (fig. 10).

Tang Xianzu’s 1598 masterpiece, The Peony Pavilion (Mudan ting 牡丹亭)—a long story of love, despair, death, return from the dead, and marriage—is not listed in Qi Biaojia’s annotated catalogues. But it is even bolder in its allusions to the courtesan’s portrait than is The Purple Hairpin. The Peony Pavilion makes multiple references to Cui Hui 崔徽, a Tang courtesan, and deliberately confuses Cui Hui with another lady surnamed Cui, the heroine of The Story of the Western Wing (Xixiang ji 西廂記). Legend has it that the desperate Cui Hui, abandoned by her lover, arranged to have her portrait painted by a master and then sent to him, together with a letter that read, “Someday I will no longer resemble the woman in the scroll, and that is when I shall die for you.” Before long, she went mad, stopped seeing clients, and eventually died. The story must have been quite popular from the ninth to thirteenth centuries, for it appears in poetry, classical tales, song lyrics (ci), and chantefables, the earliest of these being Yuan Zhen’s 元稹 (779–831) lost Song of Cui Hui (Cui Hui ge 崔徽歌).⁵³ But somehow the story seems to have lost its allure in Ming popular culture, so when Tang Xianzu alluded to it three times in The Peony Pavilion, he must have done so with specific intention because it was an esoteric reference by his time.

Cui Hui had been erased in the sixteenth-century public’s memory, replaced by another figure, Oriole Cui 崔鶯鶯, the heroine of a fourteenth-century northern play called The Story of the Western Wing, which thrived onstage in its southern adaptation in the late Ming.⁵⁴ Neither the northern nor the southern version features a prop portrait associated with Oriole Cui. Yet Tang Xianzu playfully portrays the sexual awakening of the heroine Bridal Du in The Peony Pavilion as being inspired by The Story of Cui Hui (Cui Hui zhuan 崔徽傳), which, according to Bridal Du’s explanation, tells the story of Oriole Cui as though she and Cui Hui were the same person (scene 10). Experts on Tang Xianzu see this as either a case of his carelessness or as “an unnecessary complication.”⁵⁵ This is plausible yet lacks strong interpretive support. Why would the play’s various Ming editions retain all three recondite allusions to Cui Hui?

The other two references clearly involve the courtesan’s portrait. In scene 14, Bridal Du’s deathbed scene, she completes her own self-portrait. We find a line directly borrowed from the probable medieval sources put into the mouth of a page boy—“Cui Hui no longer resembles the woman in the scroll” 崔徽不似卷中人—thus alluding to Bridal Du as a contemporary Cui Hui. And, in scene 26, the hero extols Bridal Du’s self-portrait for its resemblance to Cui Hui’s portrait 小娘子畫似崔徽—a resemblance certainly not in terms of painting technique, but of the painted beauty’s sex appeal.⁵⁶ There is no reason to doubt Tang Xianzu’s erudition: how could this renowned poet not have known that Oriole Cui and Cui Hui—two female protagonists surnamed Cui—initially appear, respectively, in the Tang poet Yuan Zhen’s Story of Cui Yingying 鶯鶯傳 and Song of Cui Hui?

Oriole Cui finds herself among the Qiu Ying models in the late Ming. For example, the Oriole Cui portrait on the opening page of a 1616 edition openly acknowledges its use of a painting of Qiu Ying as its model (fig. 11). In the static image, the full implications of a real woman can be savored, and its remarkable, magical “realization” or animation into total dynamism is bound to take place, whether on the stage or on the page.

Another manifestation of Tang Xianzu’s indebtedness to the Qiu Ying models has also gone unnoticed. In scene 5, The Peony Pavilion sets out to frame its heroine Bridal Du within the mental picture of an ordinary beautiful woman painting, thereby echoing its counterpart—her self-portrait created in scene 14. In scene 5, Bridal Du enters and greets her pedantic teacher, describing herself as a stereotypical painted beauty: “Brows limned black with emerald sheen, pendants swaying at the waist, pictured beauty steps as from an embroidered screen” 添眉翠, 搖佩珠, 繡屏中生成仕女圖.⁵⁷ Unlike the protagonist of The Plum in the Golden Vase, Bridal Du’s stale elderly teacher is obviously blind to this living image of a beautiful woman painting in front of him; yet the theater spectator, familiar with the visual pleasure of such a painting in typical brothel decoration, would be pleased. The reading public would find their taste for beauty portraits materialized in illustrated drama imprints such as the 1620 wood-block edition of The Peony Pavilion by the renowned Suzhou professional Wang Wenheng 王文衡, in which an illustration is set to this very line (fig. 12).⁵⁸ Here Bridal Du is seen from a remote standpoint within a visual tableau—standing between two maidservants on a terrace surrounded by trees and taihu rocks. She is easily distinguished by her taller and more richly accessorized figure in a three-quarters profile. The illustration is constructed quite conventionally, with the entire left leaf taken up by an unpopulated landscape and inscribed captions. Yet the right half, or the “portrait,” also displays its architectural and botanical details more proudly and distinctly than it does the facial features of Bridal Du.

In this pictorial fantasy of Bridal Du as the subject of a beautiful woman painting, there are no hints of eroticism, sensuality, or intimacy to modern eyes. It is tempting to downplay Wang Wenheng’s erotic investment in creating this illustration—featuring a slender body with few facial details and an unattractive posture, yet a distracting, luscious garden setting— and to ignore its association with a sexual aesthetic. But scene 26 (“The Portrait Examined” 玩真） unveils the enchantment of such paintings by dramatizing how the hero Liu Mengmei 柳夢梅 fetishizes Bridal Du’s self-portrait, which displays compositional elements similar to Wang’s illustration.

In scene 26, Liu notices that Bridal Du’s slender figure and standing posture resemble those of the Moon Goddess, but this suggestion is quickly discarded as there is no cloud supporting her. This painting must be nothing other than a beautiful woman painting, Liu realizes. But he is uncertain whether it is a studio replica done by a professional portraitist or a self-portrait painted by the anonymous mortal girl 是畫工臨的，還是美人自手描的. Finally, judging by the figure’s “artless charm,” which a professional painter could never have achieved 總天然意態難模, he concludes that “surely this brushwork shows the skill of the lovely maid herself” 多半他自己能描會脫.⁵⁹ Clearly, Tang Xianzu chose to portray Bridal Du’s painting technique in a “realistic” fashion—that is, to situate her execution on silk within the framework of contemporary-style beautiful woman painting, in which little interest resided in the replication of a likeliness.

Zhou Gongwang’s 周公望 (fl. 1628) The Story of the Western Wing on Brocade (Jin xixiang 錦西廂) offers a comical parody of the portraiture scenes in The Peony Pavilion.⁶⁰ In this case, a female painter’s portrait of a man has the same arousal effect on another woman. The gender roles in Bridal Du’s self-portrait and her lover Liu Mengmei’s fascination with it are completely reversed. The parody heroine Oriole Cui paints her lover Scholar Zhang’s portrait—not her self-portrait—on her round fan after their forced separation. Yet she relies not on any preexisting male icons but rather on her memories of the lover 虛空畫出張生面.⁶¹ Fleeing from the Buddhist temple, she leaves behind the painted fan, which then falls into the hands of the villainous general’s wife, who, lately widowed, falls in love with the painted handsome man. His identity is quite clear since Oriole Cui has inscribed on the fan “Portrait of Junrui” (Scholar Zhang’s style name). Deeply enamored by the male image, she decides to seek out Scholar Zhang and marry him, instead of killing him for being responsible for her husband’s death as she had originally planned.

With the great success of The Peony Pavilion came a series of plays whose plots revolve around beautiful woman paintings including the above-mentioned The Swallow Letter. Another play missing from Qi’s catalogue, but surely having a place in the category of “beautiful woman plays,” is Meng Chengshun’s 孟稱舜 (1599–1684) Mistress and Maid (Jiaohong ji 嬌紅記 or Yuanyang zhong 鴛鴦塚, 1638 preface). Like The Peony Pavilion, it sets out in early scenes to identify its heroine, Bella, as a beauty in a commercially produced beautiful woman painting. The first romantic encounter between the young lovers, in scene 3, when the hero glimpses Bella, is a vivid depiction of his memory of many beautiful woman paintings: “Her cheeks flushed with spring, clear jade yet fragrant—those scrolls of painted beauties were no lies” 翠臉生春玉有香, 則那美人圖畫出都非謊.⁶² The thought that she looks just like the beauties in the many scroll paintings he has viewed—easily accessible in the marketplace—sends a shiver down his spine, and he is instantly in love with her.

Referenced as a painted beauty many times in later scenes, Bella belongs to the marketplace of the idealized, generic beautiful woman paintings. In scene 5, Young Master Handsome, ironically played by a clown, orders his hangers-on to “hire a painter who can find a chance to sneak in and sketch” five pretty unmarried young women in town, including Bella. He also wants to know “if there are any more pretty girls worth painting” 你可引了畫工, 把那些女子的真容,乘間偷畫來我看, 還再打聽有好的也畫將來.⁶³ At a time before the invention of cameras and smartphones, the only way to complete the task is for the portraitist to stalk women secretly, and then to rely on his memory to paint each of their images on a scroll. In scene 19, the two hangers-on reappear onstage with nine scrolls of beautiful woman paintings. Like Bridal Du’s self-portrait in the eyes of Liu Mengmei in The Peony Pavilion, the nine painted beauties are first described using literary clichés that insist they all look as beautiful as Guanyin Bodhisattva and the Mount Wu Goddess. Yet a new metaphor is quickly added to cater to the playboy’s libido: the two flunkies hang the scrolls on the four walls like pinups, creating the impression that he is surrounded by nine well-dressed singing girls serving him wine at a banquet 四壁安排,仿佛筵前列錦釵. Provided that Handsome’s ritual supplications succeed in animating them, the hangers-on promise that he will enjoy a romantic rendezvous with each one.⁶⁴

Although each scroll bears an actual woman’s name, Handsome understands that his prodigal expenditure on them does not guarantee their correspondence to real, identifiable women; the scrolls may well be cheap studio knockoffs like the ones with which the destitute hero is familiar. So he claims that he has enough patience to investigate their true identities before sending a matchmaker to arrange a wedding with one of them 待我查了的當, 內人去求婚便了.⁶⁵ Even in scene 30, in which he finally possesses and worships these expensive pictures in a religious manner, with incense burning in front of the hanging scrolls day and night, he remains wracked with doubt: “I can’t tell which are true and which are fake, and so don’t care to go straight ahead and make a marriage proposal” 中間未知虛實,不敢即往求婚.⁶⁶ But it is in this same scene that a courtesan who occasionally visits both Handsome’s and Bella’s homes as a professional entertainer verifies that there is a real Bella who looks even more beautiful than her image on the scroll. The courtesan’s comments do not refer to the verisimilitude of the painting, which the titillated man cares little about—what matters is that Bella is a real woman. Delirious with joy, he sends the matchmaker to ask Bella’s parents for her hand in marriage right away, thus triggering a series of tragedies. Up to this point, identifying the heroine as a beauty in a commercial painting has been the major thrust of the play. The complete absence of such dynamics from an earlier chuanqi play that tells the same story, Gold Boy, Emerald Girl, the Story of Mistress and Maid (Jintong yunü Jiaohong ji 金童玉女嬌紅記), speaks to how Meng Chengshun distinguished himself from playwrights of the old repertoire.⁶⁷

It seems to have been fashionable to commission a famous female-figure painter and a well-known engraver to create the heroine’s portrait(s) that open drama imprints. In the case of Mistress and Maid, Chen Hongshou 陳洪綬 (1598–1652) was commissioned to paint a set of four portraits of Bella for the edition, which then were successfully transmitted into wood-block prints that readers would encounter before they read the script, just like the Oriole Cui portraits that are set into the opening pages of wood-block editions of The Story of the Western Wing (fig. 13). Many wood-block drama editions adopted the structure of half-length portraits of the heroine(s) on their opening pages, followed by illustrations of individual scenes. To take wood-block imprints of The Story of the Western Wing as an example, portraits of Oriole Cui after the painterly styles of Tang Yin 唐寅 (1470–1524), Qiu Ying, and Chen Hongshou open various fashionable drama imprints.⁶⁸

In circumstances where the beautiful woman’s portrait appears on the opening page, there was a strong implication that the female role was to be performed by a woman rather than a female impersonator. Other visual hints further suggest that the heroine’ images belong to a courtesan-actress, whether her social identity in the story is that of a respectable woman or a courtesan. Chen played with his imagination of Bella being dressed in different costumes and holding different props—a flute, a whisk, a fan, and a mirror. Although Bella in the story is a well-born lady, Chen’s logic behind the composition of the set was to represent the four indispensable skills of the courtesan—mastery of a musical instrument, of dance, of solo singing in the southern style, and of maintaining a perfect countenance. The slim type of the vertical flute demands special skills to emit harmonious sound, whisk dance was the courtesan’s signature dance style, and solos accompanied by dancing with a round fan were another staple of the courtesan’s repertoire.⁶⁹ Certainly, Bella, the respectable lady in the drama, does not possess these skills (no written records suggest gentry-women of the time had that set of skills built into their curricula). The illustration portraits on the opening pages, therefore, are typically the courtesan’s role portraits, where magic and wonder take over to reanimate Bella into a real courtesan.

The late Ming Huaiyuantang 懷遠堂 wood-block edition of The Swallow Letter also opens with portraits of Flowing Clouds Hua 華行雲 (the secondary female lead [xiaodan 小旦 ] as a courtesan) and Flying Clouds Li 酈飛雲 (the female lead as a well-born lady) by an anonymous painter and engraver (figs. 14a,b). Similar to the sixty role portraits in the Hundred Beauties scroll, these two portraits feature beauties typical of the Qiu Ying style, with hints of Chen Hongshou in the way they tilt their heads. Their accessories reinforce the illusion that the role icon they adorn may be reanimated at any time in the theater. The well-born lady Flying Clouds Li, for instance, holds a sheet of paper on which she will write the poem that will be carried away from her desk by swallows (very likely performed by costumed actors onstage) and then dropped, to be picked up by the hero—hence, the title of the play, The Swallow Letter. The courtesan Flowing Clouds Hua holds a thin vertical flute, the signature musical instrument of late Ming courtesans. Her posture and gesture suggest her virtuosity in playing the flute: she holds it not in her palm but on one finger, her fingernails long. The viewer of these wood-block engraved portraits thus encounters illustrations that pictorialize the story.

To summarize, beauty images that open illustrated dramas functioned as more than just attachments or adornments. More importantly, to the late Ming reader, they may have signified the dramas as the courtesan-actresses’ specialty repertoire. The string of examples I have analyzed in this section suggest that established public interest in the courtesan’s role portraits and established sexual aesthetics stimulated playwrights to produce new plays, whose stage productions would then cast a courtesan in the lead role to evoke multilayered pleasure. To a lesser degree, this late Ming phenomenon resembles what Joseph Roach describes as the “It-effect” derived from “the feature-by-feature attributes of the actresses playing the heroines” in plays. When a play’s paratext “alluded leeringly to their [the actresses’] sex lives off-stage,” he suggests—and I completely agree—“the practice of intimacy in public had clearly arrived.”⁷⁰

The best example of the dramatization of the circulation of a studio replica between private households and the marketplace is Wu Bing’s 吳炳 (1595–1648; jinshi 1619) The Painted Beauty (Huazhongren 畫中人), published in the Chongzhen reign. The subplot dramatizes how the painting of an anonymous ideal beauty leaves the hands of its initial creator, and how the burning of a random studio replica purchased in the marketplace rescues the original. For the scholar-hero in The Painted Beauty, the beautiful woman paintings in the marketplace are the motivation for his ambition to paint a beauty without any model 自畫一軸美人圖.⁷¹ It is this invented beauty with whom he falls in love and whom he seeks to animate through his passion, like the mythical figure Pygmalion and the statue he adores. The scholar’s search for originality is set against the backdrop of a world of highly reproductive commercial products and thus turns out to be in vain. Just as Bridal Du’s self-portrait was confused with professional workshop paintings by its intended viewer, Liu Mengmei, the scholar’s painting, we are told later, can easily mingle with any beauty portrait in the market, clearly indicating the playwright’s realist approach to portraying market forces of the day.

In scene 12 of The Painted Beauty, the scholar’s strict father learns about the affair between his son and the woman in his painting, and dispels her by burning the painting to ashes. From this point on, the play becomes preoccupied with the destiny of the painting that houses the woman. It disappears for a time but reappears in scene 24, in which the scholar and his page boy rediscover a beautiful woman painting in a Daoist priest’s dwelling. Here begins an interesting dialogue about the painting’s potential on the portrait market (my emphasis):

The page boy’s incomplete account omits that he has sold his master’s brushwork to the villain for a tael of silver; according to the villain, a “contemporary-style” scroll (shi-hua 時畫) is worth three fen of silver on the market, that is, 30 percent of the price he has paid the page boy 三分銀子另買一軸.⁷²

Because the Old Master is waiting for the page boy to fetch the portrait and burn it, the villain’s stratagem would not succeed if purchasing an over-the-counter replica in a late Ming shop had taken longer than grabbing a soft drink at a nearby convenience store today. Meanwhile, the term shi-hua—similar in composition to shi-wen 時文 (contemporary-style essays, or the “eight-legged” essays prescribed for the civil service examination), shi-ben 時本 (drama editions reflecting the most popular renditions in theater), and shi-diao 時調 (popular tunes)—discloses a piece of late Ming reality: “Contemporary-style” pinups were widely available in painting stores. Countless beautiful woman paintings in this style floated in and out of the art market, driven by the commercial culture that surrounded the painted beauty.

Possession of and infatuation with the portrait of a beautiful woman might lead to a Pygmalion realization of the male fantasy. “Since [the painted beauty] bears resemblance to a human,” says a Daoist magician who excels at animating painted beauties to serve as singing girls for banquets, “she must be given affection” 既具人形, 總屬情類.⁷³ The theory was that, if a man persevered in showing affection to her, a painted beauty might come to life and become his real, loving wife or mistress.

Against this backdrop, any replicas could be expected to have some association with brothels. In other words, brothels may have constituted a particularized, anecdotal context for many painted beauties rendered in the idealized, if not standardized, manner of beauty-figure painters. In a world that longed for ideal beauties and perhaps found the reality of brothels disenchanting, beautiful woman paintings offered illusion and satisfaction.

Let us consider the situation in which a courtesan was cast in the role of a character who would unroll a beautiful woman painting onstage as a key prop (whether generic or one believed to be her own portrait). As a result, male viewers would have been justifiably preoccupied with the double dose of erotic energy generated by her sexualized body onstage and the painting’s intense visuality and aesthetic ideal of beauty. The actress’s sexual allure—rather than her facial resemblance to the painted female—would have converged with theatrical representation, thickening the erotic atmosphere of the portraiture scene.

My first example comes, inevitably, from Wu Bing’s The Painted Beauty, specifically, scene 5, aptly entitled “Entertaining with Magic” (Shihuan 示幻). Wu dramatizes with intensity the conceit of an anonymous, ordinary figure painting as a movable brothel in which a painted courtesan resides. At a Daoist magician’s feast, the scroll is reanimated to enable her to deliver an eroticized performance for his guests, including the scholar-hero, who is thereby inspired to emulate the magician by painting and animating his own beautiful young woman. Wu proffers meticulous stage directions. The courtesan, played by a secondary female lead in line with theatrical conventions, “suddenly walks from behind the painting, with a fan [in her hand] covering her face,” while a gong is struck “backstage” 內鳴鑼, 小旦忽從畫邊走出, 扇遮介.⁷⁴ She serves wine to the men at the table, as all courtesans do. Upon the magician-host’s request, she sings a free aria in the northern tune typical in brothel repertory; it begins with the line “Recall our first glimpses of each other in the pleasure quarters” 憶當初瞥向章臺見.⁷⁵ After a sprightly dance circling and spiraling, she abruptly exits 作飛舞盤旋忽下介.⁷⁶

This staging provided, in material form, fantasies in which the male viewers’ lived experiences of brothel banquets reflected the fictional space of the prop painting. The idea was to reanimate the painted beauty and let the courtesan-actress who portrayed her demonstrate the musical and dancing skills that were at the core of a courtesan’s training. In scene 23 of the same play, the villain borrows from his neighbors a vertical flute, a reed pipe, and a rug for a dance, as preparation for having the reawakened painted beauty serve him wine and entertain the group—just as the woman brought to life by the magician had done in scene 5.⁷⁷ To reproduce brothel experiences at full scale, he also hires male performers/hangers-on. The idea behind this fantasy is simple: since the scroll painting houses the beauty, it must be a portable, pictorial counterpart of the brothel.

In terms of acting and the material conditions of staging, there seems to have been no effort to conceal the actress’s body from the audience. In The Painted Beauty, for example, there is no doubt that the painting hangs from a table, one of the few pieces of stage furniture, because the word table appears twice in stage directions when the painting is onstage. When the soul of the heroine, played by the female lead, arrives to see the portrait and claims her resemblance to the painted beauty, she “hides herself behind the painting” 掩入畫後介. The lyrics she sings suggest that she either stands or crouches behind the table: “I impress my real body on the [woman’s] body in the painting” 我把真身合上畫中身 (scene 9).⁷⁸ Because there was no wall to block the viewer’s sight on the late Ming arena stage, a table placed in the open space of the stage could not be expected to be a real hiding place. Hence the audience was expected to trust the heroine’s words and imagine, even though she never left their field of vision, that she and the painted beauty had become one.

Tang Xianzu uses this discrepancy between the mental picture suggested by the lyrics and the real vision of the audience to comic effect when Bridal Du’s ghost tries to hide behind the painting, which she also claims to be her very own image. In scene 30, “Disrupted Joy” 歡撓, the randy yet loyal Daoist nun senses an affair taking place in Liu Mengmei’s room and wants to search the room for evidence. The ghostly Bridal Du insists that Liu unbolt the door to the nun without fear, assuring him that “I shall conceal myself here in the shade cast by this beauty’s portrait” 影著這一幅美人圖那邊躲.⁷⁹ As the Daoist nun pushes past the hero and approaches the portrait (which according to the stage directions is to be hung onstage before the scene begins), there is the sound of wind from offstage, the lamp flickers, and the ghost swiftly exits 旦閃下介.⁸⁰ The difficulty of visualizing this sequence of actions has led Tina Lu to believe that the painting is supposed to have the magic power to change in size, since the material form of the prop portrait would have been too small to hide anyone of normal size.⁸¹

But is Bridal Du’s ghost capable of hiding herself from the nun? Is the portrait a magical one? The staging convention meant that the audience would certainly see the ghostly heroine, regardless of what the Daoist nun might see or not see. The answer is not disclosed until the nun, after her reunion with the resurrected Bridal Du in a deserted village in scene 48, responds to the reanimated young lady’s inquiry: “That night, aunt, when you came calling at Master Liu’s door, did you know that it was I hiding there?” The nun’s answer suggests that the ghost was completely exposed to her naked eye, just as she was to all the audience members: “You tell me: How it is possible for a single scroll of painting to furnish such concealment?” 則道畫幀兒怎放的個人迴避?⁸² This is a comical comment referring back to the performance in scene 30. Not only was the ghost’s self-confidence in her magical power misguided, but the audience’s mental picture, based on theatrical conventions, is shown to have been unreliable as well—in what may be seen as the theater’s own self-referential moment to reflect upon its conventions. We might also wonder whether, in challenging earlier literary and theatrical conventions, Tang Xianzu is once again emphasizing the ghost’s lack of a recognizable likeness to the painting, thus differentiating this beautiful woman painting from all the other painted beauties in medieval miracle stories. In those earlier stories, which Tang Xianzu references elsewhere in the play, beauties never fail to merge into their home paintings.

My last example—the casting of courtesans in The Swallow Letter in late Ming theater—comes from Kong Shangren’s 孔尚任 (1648–1718) historical drama The Peach Blossom Fan (Taohuashan 桃花扇), completed half a century after the collapse of the Ming dynasty. In this play, the villain Ruan Dacheng is put in charge of organizing a troupe consisting of Nanjing courtesans and male brothel guest-performers (qingke 清客) in the Nanjing palace, in order to mount The Swallow Letter for the emperor. In scene 4, which is marked as happening in the early spring of 1643—the central dramatic action in the historical drama is premised on a temporal sequence—Ruan’s private troupe versed in The Swallow Letter is “loaned” to a few literati for their enjoyment of the refined theatrical performance.⁸³ At the same time, Ruan is proofreading a combined edition of his four chuanqi plays, including The Swallow Letter. By the first month of 1645, a final wood-block imprint is apparently presented to the emperor, who “is greatly pleased and immediately orders the Ministry of Rites to select good palace women and eunuchs to perform The Swallow Letter.”⁸⁴ But Ruan pleads that he be permitted to cast brothel performers instead, because by 1645 The Swallow Letter has become a staple in the brothel repertoire, often juxtaposed with The Peony Pavilion and Yuan Yuling’s 袁于令 (1592–1674) famous The Western Bower (Xilou ji 西樓記, completed ca. 1624).⁸⁵ In Ruan’s terminology, palace performers are “untrained voices” 生口, whereas courtesans are “trained voices” 熟口. To ensure the quality of the performance and to protect his own “literary fame,” he proposes that several dozen courtesans and male performers be summoned to the Nanjing palace for an audition, which is fully dramatized in scene 25, “Auditioning the Courtesans” (Xuanji 選伎). The playwright Kong Shangren even arranges a play-within-a-play skit after a number of “trained voices” are selected and cast in different roles during the audition. According to the stage directions, various brothel performers “act out an aria from The Swallow Letter as usual; Ruan Dacheng (played by Secondary Painted Face) acts casually, providing instructions” 隨意演《燕子箋》一曲, 副淨作態指點介.⁸⁶

What happens next in Kong’s The Peach Blossom Fan indicates that the courtesan’s presence onstage is measured in relation to contemporary standards of beauty and desire to a much greater extent than was the case for any other performer: within Kong’s play, the villain Ruan casts a courtesan-actress—that is, the courtesan-heroine in The Peach Blossom Fan—as a clown in The Swallow Letter. This must have violated a principle of brothel performances, for the major criterion in auditioning courtesan-actresses was an erotic one—finding the most beautiful courtesan to play the female lead. More specifically, Ruan’s task is actually to find a courtesan- actress who will unroll the scroll of the beautiful woman painting onstage and marvel at her own resemblance to the painted beauty. This courtesan-actress, originally cast by the villainous Ruan as the clown in his Swallow Letter, soon catches the eye of the emperor in the audience because by convention a courtesan-clown did not have to put on a powdered face. To the emperor, a beauty should act the female lead, and she is then cast back into the lead female role. A fledging courtesan, she makes it clear that she has only The Peony Pavilion in her personal repertoire and is therefore an “untrained voice,” unsuitable for The Swallow Letter. But the emperor asserts that her “extraordinary beauty” 美麗非常 outweighs her inexperience, and that she should memorize the lyrics assigned to the female lead in three days before joining the rehearsal.⁸⁷

A beautiful woman painting used as a prop in the late Ming plays I have analyzed carries with it all the dynamic energies that crossed the boundaries between the art market and the theater, reality and illusion. Such a generic, static beauty icon that mediates between reality and fiction is what I have called a “role portrait” of the courtesan. Once animated into a living and breathing actress with virtuosity in singing and dancing, the beautiful woman image would be superimposed onto the courtesan herself. To late Ming consumers, such a painted beauty remained suspended, waiting to be reanimated by the copier or the admirer. The phenomenon of connecting vertical images of beautiful women to form a folding screen can be traced back to medieval times, but in the late Ming context of new beautiful woman plays, similar objects must have been more erotic to contemporary viewers because the painted beauty’s reanimation was not just in the “mind’s eye” but in what we might call the “body’s eye.”

It was the late Ming theatergoer’s mental habits, cultivated by the conjunction of story and image in the Qiu Ying models, on which Tang Xianzu’s new dramas depended. However, scenes of “realizations” and reanimations fell into disuse in the later history of Chinese drama, alongside the waning influence of the Qiu Ying models, Suzhou pian shops, and the courtesan- actress. These were the cultural roots from which the theatrical effects of some beautiful woman plays had stemmed. That is perhaps why “beautiful woman plays” did not find descendants in the Qing dynasty. The ties between the dramas and the genre of beautiful woman paintings were forgotten. The brothel theater that had once embraced both the pictorial and the theatrical disappeared. The lineage of dramatic works with obligations to the Qiu Ying models ceased.

The hybrid sources I have compiled have been previously unnoticed as materials for investigating the historical phenomenon of beautiful woman paintings. Nevertheless, they provide important data in the art history of this subgenre, in its relation not only to the marketplace but also to the conceit of the courtesan’s role portrait both inside and outside the brothel theater. I am aware of these sources’ distance from what we traditionally consider to be “historical documents.” I want to insist, however, that such unconventional documents allow us to trace the seemingly traceless presence of the courtesan-actress, providing alternative methodologies for imagining her involvement in shaping Tang Xianzu’s legacy in the new pictorial dramaturgy.