Intimate Confessions of a Chinese Courtesan: The Shaw Brothers' Yan-Qing Imaginations of a Transforming Chinese Dream

Once second in production only to Hollywood in the 60s and 70s, the Shaw Brothers’ success have been argued to be their construction of a “Chinese dream”— an idealized nonplace marketed to feed Sinophone diaspora and also win over global visibility. A good portion of their inventory is what is called yan-qing pian (䆏��) or soft-core pornography, a genre argued as itself an idealized realm to negotiate dreams and desires. These filmic productions also allude to the literary tradition of yan-qing novels, toying with as it fetishizes their literary counterparts’ common traits, most prominent of which is perhaps the trope of the “ancient Chinese courtesan.” I’ll focus specifically on Intimate Confessions of A Chinese Courtesan (1972), a marketing success which led to the making of its sequel Lust for Love of a Chinese Courtesan (1984), two films respectively marking the high and low points of the Shaw empire. In doing so, I map the economical and emotional, territorializing and deterritorializing desires involved in the Shaw Brothers’ re-imagining of an ever morphing “Chinese dream,” a fantasized medium which like the morphing “Chinese Courtesan” portrayed, performs imaginations of a nation while titillating transnational desires in transformation.