Description
Considering, as the Chinese did, that sex is the most elevated as well as the most pleasurable of man's actions, it could hardly evoke in them the feelings of guilt and shame known to other societies and other peoples. As this book shows in its detailed study of the sex practices and customs of the Chinese, they pursued the 'bed arts' with an unrestrained vigour and constant joy and good humour.
The 'forbidden books' which the authors present for the first time in modern translations, while rivalling the Kama Sutra in the details of their approach to the practice of love, do so with the poetry and and beauty of an infinitely more sophisticated civilisation. Whether one turns to the sex postures, or to a Rabelaisian extract from a Sung or Ming novel, one is enjoying an authentic glimpse of that part of the rich fabric of Chinese life considered too intimate and too private for the curiosity of coarse barbarians and foreign devils.
Nobody who is interested in the amorous relationships between men and women can possibly ignore this book with its richness of anecdote and its wealth of revelation, not to mention the occasional flash of humour in the descriptions of the bedchamber arts of the old Emperors with their consorts and their concubines, in their pavilions behind high walls.
