Ed Ranks the Eight Beauties of Qinhuai

This courtesan's home is now a museum! Hooray!

Hey, I've talked about European royal courtesans before. In fact, I talked about them so much that I needed to break them into two rankings. So I'd be remiss if I didn't also mention the "Eight Beauties of Qinhuai," a group of eight famous courtesans during the Ming-Qing transition period of China (all of who resided along the Qinhuai River in Nankin), on and around 1664.

8. Bian Yujing

A courtesan and painter, she had a number of famous clients (it feels weird to call these transactional relationships "romances"), including with Qian Qianyi (poet, scholar, social historian), Wu Sangui (military general instrumental in the fall of the Ming Dynasty), and Wu Weiye (a poet who was so obsessed with her that he wrote a bunch of poems about her).  In the end, she did a 180 with her life and became a Daoist Priestess.

7. Ma Xianglan

Beginning her time as a courtesan at age 15 (yikes), she would go on to become the matriarch at a courtesan society which encouraged all of its hos to be educated in the arts. She was a high-class Elliot Spitzer type of madame who only catered to elite customers. She carried on a famous romance and exchanged love letters with Wang Zhideng, a famous calligrapher known for graceful strokes. Ma also was a somewhat notable painter, generating landscapes, orchids, and bamboo imagery combined with calligraphy. I guess that's cool.

6. Dong Xiaowan

The Christian Dior of 17th Century China.

Nicknamed "Qinglian," she was famed for not only her beauty, but also for her writing, needlework, and tea ceremonies. She lived in the brothel district of Nankin and entered the world of ho'ing because her mother died and she had no other way of making money. Nobleman Mao Bijiang eventually focused his attention on her (but only after first perusing the fellow Eight Beauty Chen Yuanyuan) after she essentially stalked him for a month, continuously asking to be his concubine. Eventually Qian Qianyi (he appears a lot in the stories of the Eight Beauties, because he loved to spend time with hos, I suppose) payed her debts off which allowed her to marry Mao Bijiang as his concubine. Mao was in big with the rulers, so when the Ming Dynasty ended in 1644, she was forced to flee. She'd go on to write a book about women's fashion and parties.

5. Kou Baimen

A "registered" teenage prostitute (hey, it's good to have your certificates in order), she had a good run at the ho thing until she was late in her teenage years and caught the attention of a high official named Zhu Guobi. He married her in a lavish ceremony but the honeymoon didn't last and they became estranged. When the Qing revolution came around in 1644, Zhu was arrested and jailed. Kou Baimen scrounged up enough money to buy her husband's freedom, but the payment was sort of a two-for-one deal, as she also bought her own freedom from him. What did she do after that? Well, she turned back into a courtesan again, and would go on to have numerous relationships with nobles and writers, including poet Fang Wen who wrote a bunch of poems about her because he's super clingy and was reading a way lot more into the courtesan thing than he should have.

4. Li Xiangjun

Oh, you flirt you.

Her origins are murky, but she seems to be the daughter of a once high-ranking Chinese official who was demoted and had his family sold or killed. Where is a young girl to go after the liquidation of her father and family? Why she was adopted, of course! By a brothel owner! Yeeeeeeah. She was taught to dance, sing, play music, paint, and write poetry. And do other things, of course. This is a brothel. Also, she was 13 but then again life was rough and came by you fast back in those days. She had a famous romance with a young scholar named Hou Fangyu, and their romance is one of the most famous and epic romances in Chinese literature. Like Romeo and Juliet but with less suicide at the end. The most famous version of their love story is probably told in the play The Peach Blossom Fan.

3. Gu Hengbo

Famous as a painter of orchids, she was the hostess of a "literary saloon" called Meilou (apparently meaning "House of Bewitchment"). She'd have a number of famous and notable clients, but also considered jumping out of the courtesan game and finding herself a steady man. She initially wanted to go with one of her patrons, Liu Fang. But then she changed her mind and decided she didn't want to marry him and that she'd go back to being a ho and sleeping with clients. This didn't sit well with Liu Fang, who reacted in a very moderate way by killing himself. Eventually Gu would settle down with Gong Dingzi, a renowned author and poet. After that, she basically ran his life and controlled him - which is a hell of a good outcome, all things considered.

2. Liu Rushi

Her family sold her as a concubine at a young age, which is a pretty horrible thing to say. However, they did sell her to the,/ Prime Minister of the Ming Dynasty at the time, Zhou Daodeng. So at least they sold her to someone super famous, huh? It's not like they sold her to Larry on the street corner. Still horrible. At age 13 when she had already been a concubine for some time (yikes, these stories don't get any easier from here, folks) she caused a "scandal" and was sold again, this time to a brothel. She'd go on to have a number of relations with famous Chinese nobles and artists, but she bagged the big one when she got Qian Qianyi (as previously mentioned with Bian Yujing). She apparently pulled a full Mulan on him by pretending to be a man when meeting him, getting into an argument, and then only later have the gender reveal. Qian Qianyi married her, in fact, and treated her as his principle wife (technically she wasn't, and was only a concubine wife). When the Ming Dynasty came to an end in 1644, Liu tried to get her husband to kill himself because she was obviously tired of his shit. He didn't though, and he tried to lead a resistance movement against the new Qing regime. He never regained his social status though, and later died heavily in debt. Liu was harassed by debt collectors (some things never change) and just decided to hang herself. The end!

1. Chen Yuanyuan

She looks like a grandma here, but okay.

The most famous of the Eight Beauties of Qinhuai, she would have many stories told about her. Alas, it's pretty hard to separate fact from fiction with her biography, as many of the stories only came later and probably aren't true. We do know that she became a courtesan after the death of her father, she was famous in the opera scene, became the lover of the scholar/poet Mao Xiang, then was then purchased (yep, of course you can purchase people) by Tian Hongyu, the father of one of the Chongzhen Emperor's (Zhu Youjian) concubines. From there, somehow she wound up with the famous general Wu Sangui, briefly mentioned above with Bian Yujing. Wu Sangui is famous because he played a key role in the birth of the Qing Dynasty (she might have been a gift to him, or sold again). Wu Sangui was firmly on the side of the Ming Dynasty's Chongzhen Emperor as he was being challenged by a rebel leader named Li Zicheng. In fact, he was the Emperor's greatest general with the most forces. But Wu Sangui couldn't rescue the emperor in time, and the Emperor committed suicide, which basically made Li Zicheng the emperor, beginning the "Shun Dynasty." Haven't heard of that dynasty, have you? Well, that's because Wu Sangui said "fuck Li Zicheng," despite the fact that Li was holding Wu's family as hostages. Wu Sangui's forces sided with a rival claimant, Dorgon, and helped defeat Li and establish the Qing Dynasty, installing the Shunzhi Emperor in Peking. What does any of this have to do with Chen Yuanyuan? In reality, probably nothing. In fiction though, the story was embellished and included tales such as Li Zicheng kidnapping and raping Chen Yuanyuan, and Wu Sangui heroically fighting against Li to gain Chen back. What actually happened to her is unknown as there are different stories such as her eventually becoming a nun or committing suicide, but those are probably made up too.