The Carmine Hue of Shanghai

Linglong. Volume 6, issue 242 (1936). Front Cover.

What person has not fallen in love or experienced love in their lifetime? Yet, love is a mystery to most people, both in the past and in the present. Emotions are core elements in the history of the human being, when we experience change so do our emotions. By tracing emotions, we are able to distinguish worlds of feelings. We all feel, but we do so differently, and these feelings give colour to our history.

The atmosphere of Shanghai in the 1930s was a sort of fever dream, or at least that is how the golden age of Shanghai is usually perceived. Shanghai was as complex as the emotion of love, creating a bustling port full of fervour. Where there was love, passion and sensibility, there was also lust, prostitution and seduction. At the same time, the emergence of the global phenomenon of the modern girl in the 1920s and 1930s could also be found in China. Called modeng xiaojie 摩登小姐 in Chinese, she was a result of the changes that swept across the world. In Republican-era Shanghai, these changes challenged existing social and gender norms in society. For the modern girl, this meant new ways for women and men, but also women and women, to interact, form relationships and express and experience love.

In the midst of the shenanigans, love became ardent, and the Chinese modern girl acted out her fantasy of love in nocturnal spaces. Pursuing romantic love, dressed in coquettish fashion and with an audacious behaviour, the Chinese modern girl had little regard for the traditions of old society. From chambers to cabarets, she had entered the public sphere, frequenting the many cinemas and dance halls of Shanghai and exhibiting an aura of romance.

In magazines of the time period, the modern girl was depicted as a mystery, her daring pursuit of romance and provocative and alluring demeanour blurred the lines between reality and fantasy. Linglong 玲瓏 was a weekly women’s magazine published in Shanghai from 1931 until 1937. The magazine portrayed Chinese women struggling with love, their understanding of the emotion, thoughts of what it should be, and their encounters with it. In Linglong, the Chinese modern girl could enter a world that blurred reality and fantasy to nuance her understanding and experience of the emotion.

Illustrated historical map of Shanghai by
Carl Crow and V.V. Kovalsky, 1932.

In the cosmopolitan city of Shanghai, love had become an all-sensory experience, not only in fantasy but in reality. “The wind blew through Miss Lin’s hair, and the smell of her hair, like the scent of rose, penetrated my chest. We curled up closely together, and our faces were as hot as the electrical currents passing through our nerve fibres.” This description of the experience of love was made by Ying Si 影絲 in an article from 1935. As seen in the example above, the Chinese modern girl thought of love as more than an unadorned feeling, instead, it was an all-encompassing and potent escapade. Love could be felt in the words spoken, electrified in the shared intimacy, enamoured in the vision of beauty, as well as intensified from the sweet fragrances filling the air.

The Chinese modern girl knew how to gaze at and admire beauty. In another story published in 1934, the woman Mi Li 蜜麗was appreciating the charming eyes of her lover, as well as his exquisite body, which smiled and called to her. Yet, this was not to be misconceived as superficial love. A poem from the same time period spoke about the vision of love, of a true soul that was coloured with passion. Love was also visualised in the beauty of the lover’s soul, where love took on a more spiritual form. The power of sight had become the window to the soul. With amorous love, one could absorb the beauty of a person, from the inside out. This expanded the idea of love from what it had been before the 1930s, now making it a synthesis of the spiritual and the physical, creating romantic love.

Stories, letters and articles in Linglong illustrated that with spiritual sentiment and sensual desire, love became a union of soul and body, two becoming one. “The great unifier of heart and mind, and that it begins its mysterious work as a separator of heart and mind. To merge “you” and “I” into one. To make one - this is what love always strives for.” Those were the words written by the author Bing Ruo 炳若 in 1937. The oneness of love was essential for the Chinese to reach modern true love. One can also distinguish how such true love rendered love more potent and long-lasting, expanding it to the point of transcendence. The intertwined lovers were supposed to rise above the non-spiritual and the prosaic.

Music, dancing and kissing took the sensory experience to even greater heights. “Bring your lips close to mine while we’re swaying. Oh, my dear! Can’t you hear what they’re playing? This waltz is the Kiss Waltz. Telling us both what to do.” The Kiss Waltz by Ruth Etting from 1930, was one of many popular love songs in Shanghai, which encouraged readers to truly get lost in themselves. Music allowed the Chinese modern girl to immerse herself in all senses and forget reality, even if just for a moment. Jazz could be heard from the broadcast stations of the city, the orchestras playing in the ballrooms, or sung by one’s lover.

Dancing was a way for the Chinese woman to modernise herself, to keep up with the rest of the modern world. However, it was also her way of pushing the limitations of love. The intimacy of dancing created a special bond between the dancers, where the aroma of bodies stimulated the nerves. This bond saw the sharing of the body and soul, encapsulated and commemorated in the footsteps to the music. As they moved across the dance floor, exploring each other to the tunes, the body and soul intertwined and further became one.

Buck Clayton and his Harlem Gentlemen performing at the Canidrome Ballroom in Shanghai, 1934-1937.

In 1930s Shanghai, love was thought to be feverishly intoxicating. And in her intoxicated state, the Chinese modern girl had become brazen in conveying her desires. She was particularly captivated by kissing. In another an article from 1931, kissing was referred to as the “vanguard of war”. War being love in its entirety, and kissing the ignition to such flames. The Chinese modern girl thought of kissing as the prelude to the sensory immersion which composed the heart of the fantasy of amorous love, love had been set abalaze. She longed for sensual pleasure, for it allowed her to dream herself away, in the craze she could forget the worries of real life. As such, she was not shy in expressing and receiving desire, and often used the colour red to amplify the frenzy and excitement of an amorous love.

According to the authors of Linglong, intoxication could also mean fighting one’s desires. “I will not die for you” was the title of a translated text written by British novelist and poet Thomas Hardy. The man in the story cited numerous reasons to which he would not give in to her, to be completely enamoured and imprisoned by love’s pulling force. She might be able to kill the fool, but he was different from other men. However, love makes fools of us all. Certainly this was true, for he would not die for her, praying to god that he would not, yet, in doing so, one could tell that he already had. In her sensual endeavours, the Chinese modern girl took inspiration from literature and stories all over the world.

The men and women of Shanghai had every right to fear love, for as is clear from stories in, and submissions to Linglong, love’s intoxication was so potent that both women and men could feel like its prisoner. In a fictional story from 1935, the characters Mr. Li 李先生 and Ms. Ye 葉小姐 went to work as dancers for a movie. As her body leaned into his arms, he looked into her eyes which tauntingly seemed to say “Ah, are you begging for mercy?” He appeared to have become her captive. Yet, the story has a twist. The term xiaojie 小姐 could be a play on words. The character translates as “young lady” or “miss”, however, it can also mean “prostitute”. At the end of the story, Mr. Li expressed that “Girls surrender themselves to men and close their eyes in his arms... like a dream, like a floating gauze, and like a corpse.” The way of surrendering and becoming a corpse, alludes to the woman selling her body, and therefore, also selling her soul, becoming a living corpse. It would appear that the woman in the story too had become love’s prisoner, in more ways than one.

The modern girl’s appearance and persona was embraced by Chinese women of different social status. From university students, to wives, to prostitutes, it became a means of escaping one’s limited reality. Professional dancers became symbols of the Shanghai nightscape. Due to their low wages, the majority of them had to resort to sex work to make ends meet. The Chinese modern girl could also a performer, vying for love to change the trajectory of her life. By imitation and play-pretend, she was able to forsake old fantasies of love to create new ones.

It was not only the Chinese modern girl’s feelings which had taken on the burning passionate colour red, the whole of Shanghai was painted in a carmine hue. The relationship between environment and our feelings, has only recently been given attention in the history of emotions. To fully understand such experience, one has to take into consideration the urban and global city of Shanghai, its nocturnal spaces and how the Chinese modern girl used these spaces to shape her fantasy of love.

Linglong. Volume 2, issue 70 (1932), 29.

The streets of Shanghai, parks, theatres, cinemas, cabarets and dancehalls, were all nocturnal spaces which enabled an amorous love to be played out in the forgiving darkness of night. A writer of Linglong described their experience of movie theatres, a place which saw greater performances in the audience than the story displayed on the screen. The Chinese modern girl acted out her fantasies of love on and off the silver screen. Early Chinese cinema induced licentiousness and depravity, with the blurring of reality and fantasy, life became a sensory chimerical experience. Thus, the Chinese modern girl created more than a nightscape, Shanghai had become a fool’s paradise, a certified dreamscape for the illicit amorous love to flourish.

An article from 1936 told of an exclusive women’s club in Berlin where only women were allowed. The women could be seen dancing, falling in love, smoking cigarettes and drinking wine together. Dance halls and clubs were intimate “contact zones”, were Chinese and foreign men and women, or in this case, women and women, formed forbidden and sensual bonds. In modern times, cosmopolitan nightlife had spread across the world, with a cultural exchange of music, dance and sociability. Therefore, nightscapes were a way of “going global.” These exchanges and spaces made possible sensual meetings veiled in a dimly lit world of fantasy, which otherwise were deemed immoral and indecent. Shanghai had transformed into a city of dreams, shielding love from the confines of reality. In the nocturnal scene, the Chinese modern girl was able to turn her fantasies into an actual lived experience, realising one’s deepest yearnings.

Through writing and print media, Chinese women were able to venture on a voyage of love, desire and self-discovery. In magazines such as Linglong, the Chinese modern girl was able to create a space for the cultural conversation of love, creating and shaping her fantasies with other modern girls. Here, she was the author of her love story, to shape and redefine love as she pleased. Thus, it was not only the physical spaces of Shanghai which enabled and enriched the fantasy of amorous love, it was also modern print media.

The fantasy of amorous love was not a fantasy for the daytime, it was to be feverishly felt during the evening and night. It was the sensory experience of euphoric and impassioned romance which made the dreamscape of Shanghai possible. Yet, the sources also show that amorous love could be as simple as hearing those three special words, which usually has the most intoxicating power of all: “I love you.”

Yours Truly,

The Lady of the Moon

Further Reading

Boddice, Rob. The History of Emotions. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018.

Dong, Stella. Shanghai: The Rise and Fall of a Decadent City. New York: William Morrow,2000.

Farrer, James and Andrew David Field. Shanghai Nightscapes: A Nocturnal Biography of a Global City. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015.

Field, Andrew David. Shanghai’s Dancing World: Cabaret Culture and Urban Politics, 1919–1954. The Chinese University of Hong Kong Press, 2010.

French, Paul. City of Devils: A Shanghai Noir. London: Riverrun, 2019.

Henriot, Christian. Prostitution and Sexuality in Shanghai: A Social History, 1849-1949.Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.

Hershatter, Gail. Dangerous Pleasures: Prostitution and Modernity in Twentieth-century Shanghai. Berkeley California: University of California Press, 1997.

Hockx, Michel, Joan Judge and Barbara Mittler (eds.). Women and the Periodical Press in China’s Long Twentieth Century: A Space of their Own? Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018.

Lee, Haiyan. Revolution of the Heart: A Genealogy of Love in China, 1900-1950. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2007.

Lee, Leo Ou-fan. Shanghai Modern: The Flowering of a New Urban Culture in China, 1930-1945. Cambridge (Massachusetts): Harvard University Press, 1999.

Ma, Yuxin. Women Journalists and Feminism in China 1898-1937. Amherst NY: Cambria Press, 2010.

Pan, Lynn. When True Love Came to China. Hong Kong University Press, 2016.

Rosenwein, Barbara H. Love: A History in Five Fantasies. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2021.

Weinbaum, Alys Eve and Modern Girl Around the World Research Group. The Modern Girl Around the World: Consumption, Modernity, and Globalization. Durham N.C. Chesham:Duke University Press, 2009.

Yeh, Catherine Vance. Shanghai Love: Courtesans Intellectuals and Entertainment Culture 1850-1910. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2006.

Zhang, Ailing. Half a Lifelong Romance: A Novel. Translated by Karen S. Kingsbury. New York: Anchor Books, 2014.

Zhang, Henshui. Shanghai Express. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1997.

Zhang, Zhen. An Amorous History of the Silver Screen: Shanghai Cinema 1896-1937. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005.