Erotic Colour Prints of the Ming Period: With an Essay on Chinese Sex Life from the Han to the Ching Dynasty, B.C. 206-A.D. 164

The publication in 1951 of Robert Hans van Gulik’s Erotic Colour Prints of the Ming Period created a stir in the Chinese art community. It was privately published in only fifty copies, which were sent as gifts to selected libraries and museums worldwide. (A list of those outside the Far East is Appendix II to the same author’s Sexual Life in Ancient China.) The copies were accompanied by a letter advising that in order to keep away “sensation-seekers and peeping Toms,” the books were to be made accessible only to “a limited number of serious scholars in the field, for purposes of research.” This highly limited distribution and difficulty of access, along with the “forbidden” nature of both text and pictures (this was a time when people were still being prosecuted for publishing or even owning erotica), excited everyone’s curiosity and eagerness to get at the work, which was typically kept in special locked rooms or cases, by persuading mistrustful librarians of one’s purely scholarly interest in it. Stories circulated about copies that were robbed of their illustrations before even leaving cataloguing rooms. That was a particularly serious loss because all of the color pictures and some of the black-and-whites were original woodblock prints, some of them newly engraved by a Japanese specialist under van Gulik’s direction, some printed from surviving old blocks that later would no longer be available for use in reprinting.