Description

Immediate dispatch from Somerset. Nice book in great condition. Pages in excellent condition. Hardcover. English. See images for condition.

About the book >.>.> This is the first serious attempt to examine the erotica of the Qing period and to assess the part it plays within Chinese culture as a whole. At considerable personal risk John Byron has built up a remarkable private collection of Chinese erotic artefacts in Peking. It consists of snuff opium and medicine containers made of porcelain glass silver pewter jade and amber; wood-block prints porcelain figurines glass paintings hand-mirrors and amulets. The pieces most of which are from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries range from the coy to the thrillingly explicit; all of them demonstrate that beneath the Confucian mask of propriety there lies a healthy hedonism which is also evident in the traditional Chinese institutions of polygamy foot binding and elegant courtesans. In his text John Byron traces the history of Chinese erotica from its origins 2000 years ago to its suppression by the communist regime of the present day and considers the cultural and sociological significance of each stylistic innovation. In the early 1950s countless erotic works were seized from antique dealers in Peking and ‘destroyed in a frenzy of iconoclastic puritanism’ an outrage which renders John Byron’s collection all the more unusual. Portrait of a Chinese Paradise is an important addition to our understanding of Chinese culture. (MP)