Text by Zhongmu

Translated by Allen Young

Pu Songling, Liaozhai Quantu, Chinese manuscript, n.d.

Courtesy ÖNB Digital, Austrian National Library

Legend has it that in the Ming dynasty, during the reign of the Chenghua Emperor, there lived in Dongchang a lecherous scholar named Ma Wanbao. One day, he and his wife Tian devised a plan: she would feign illness and call for a young woman living nearby, who could reputedly cure “women’s blood sickness,” to visit their house at night. The young woman duly came, and Tian found an excuse to step out, leaving her husband Ma in her place. The young woman approached her patient, thinking it was Ma, and spoke teasing, playful words as she began the treatment. “Ma said nothing as the woman stroked his belly and slowly moved her hand past his navel.” Yet when she felt his manhood, she took fright and tried to flee. Ma seized the chance to grope her in turn—only to find that the young woman, too, was a man! Ma tied up this “woman” and questioned her, learning that his name was Wang Erxi, and he was the disciple of a disciple of the notorious ravisher of women Sang Chong. He cross-dressed to seduce women. At first Ma wanted to turn him over to the law, but beguiled by his beauty, he instead had him unmanned (castrated). “At night Ma took him to his bedchamber, and in the morning he had him draw water, mend clothes, sweep the floor, and cook the meals”—just as though he were his concubine.

This lurid story appears in Pu Songling’s Strange Tales from the Liaozhai Studio, a collection of supernatural tales from the early Qing dynasty. Titled “Renyao”—literally, “human demon”—it’s a work of fiction, though Sang Chong, from whom Wang Erxi learned the art of cross-dressing as a ruse for seduction, was a real person, an infamous seducer and rapist in the Chenghua reign of the Ming Dynasty. For ten years he dressed as a woman and, under the guise of teaching needlework, had his way with over 180 women from respectable families. In the end he was sentenced to lingchi, the death of a thousand cuts. Sang Chong had seven disciples, one of whom, named Wang Daxi, was perhaps the inspiration for the renyao of Pu Songling’s tale. 

In traditional Chinese thought, the renyao was someone who deviated from the norm. The term initially referred to something abnormal or ominous in the human world, yet starting in the 13th century, it gradually became a designation for gender deviance. By the Ming and Qing dynasties, it had begun to refer specifically to male cross-dressers who engaged in sexual predation.¹ They cross-dressed, it was thought, in order to dishonor women from upstanding families, and hence they became the most frightening image of deviance and evil in late imperial China.

“A distinction between men and women” and “the way of beasts”

Fear of deviant individuals like the renyao has a long history in ancient China. The Book of Rites, one of the five classics of Chinese thought, says: “When there is a distinction between men and women, fathers and sons are close; when fathers and sons are close, righteousness takes root; when righteousness takes root, ritual propriety established; when propriety is established, all things are at peace. When there is no distinction and no righteousness, that is the way of beasts.” The “sages” who established ritual propriety (li) explained and set forth, in a tone of oracular certainty, the origin and structure of human order, which was founded on the natural difference implied by a “distinction between men and women” (nan nü you bie). Yet the meaning of this difference is not natural but cultural. As a differentiating distinction (bie), it establishes a set of complex, orderly relations that extend from blood ties to the structures of the family and the state, and even to the whole universe. “Distinction” is the very essence of propriety (li). Hence ritual propriety, as a form of creating order, can introduce distinctions in a chaotic or silent “nature.” Male and female become masculine and feminine, biological difference becomes cultural distinction.

The principle of a “distinction between men and women” persisted throughout the entire imperial age. The unification of the empire in the Qin and Han dynasties, in particular, gave rise to a new (gender) cosmology that integrated scattered ideas about gender into the theory of the Great Unity. The hallmark was the transformation of the traditional male-female binary into a unitary structure: in the Han dynasty, philosophers such as Dong Zhongshu abstracted “male / female” into two basic elements, and the nü or “feminine” principle (i.e., elements such as the earth, the moon, the yin and the kun) no longer had an independent existence outside the nan or “masculine” (i.e. the heavens, the sun, the yang and the qian). Instead, they became a sign of absence, i.e., non-masculine. As Bret Hinsch has pointed out, the formation of this new cosmology had a specific political background—namely, the fact that officials in the Han had to contend with queen consorts such as Empress Lü and Empress Dou, who used their roles as mothers and their blood ties to seize supreme control. Unlike the traditional system of patrilineality, which defined women’s roles in the family and society, the new cosmology that the Han officials formulated (albeit using traditional sources) demarcated the essences of “masculine” and “feminine” at a more abstract level.^2,3 Even if this cosmology had limited influence when it first emerged as a response to a given historical moment, it eventually evolved into a universal, canonical “way of heaven” (tian dao). In this process, it thoroughly transformed the ancients’ understanding of the sexes: the bie between man and woman was no longer merely a difference but also a hierarchical relationship. 

“A Table Set for Two,” illustration from Dianshizhai Huabao, 1889

Reproduced from The Fox Spirit, the Stone Maiden, and Other Transgender Histories from Late Imperial China

Courtesy Columbia University Press

Only against the backdrop of this commonplace (if seemingly abstract) gender cosmology can we make sense of the anxiety and alarm over gender deviance in mainstream society during the Ming and Qing dynasties. What should be noted is that attention to “anomalies” was intimately linked to the cosmology of early imperial China. Theories of the yin-yang, the five elements, and the correspondence between heaven and the human world, in particular, led to the rise of divination (chenwei): “oddities” in the natural and human world were linked in various ways, and anatomical and gender anomalies in particular, such as intersex individuals or men and women who displayed the gender traits or physical appearance of the opposite sex, were often seen as a sign of a failing in the monarch’s rule and morality. The ancients took this extremely seriously, and most such abnormalities were recorded in the official histories as an example to posterity.

Fear and Regulation of “Transgender” Individuals

Attention to anomalies runs throughout imperial China, and its roots lie in the unitary structure and the distinction-making mechanism of ritual propriety (li). As Georges Canguilhem pointed out in Le normal et le pathologique (1943), the abnormal appears as a supplement to the structure of the normal. We could even say that the obsession with distinctions and boundaries, so fundamental to li, is precisely what led to the exclusion of so many things that didn’t fit the norm. Boundary crossings were inevitable and occurred constantly. Paradoxically, the constant attention paid to such behavior persistently reinforced the initially weak boundary, continually reaffirming its efficacy. So when a “distinction between men and women” became the norm, it resulted in the questioning or even undermining of the “normal” definition of man and woman. Not only because of the existence of natural anomalies like erxing (“dual form” or intersex individuals) or shinü (“stone maidens” who lack a vaginal opening), but also because in everyday life and practice, metaphysical cosmology is always inadequate, even if it presents itself in a universal form.

Cover of Matthew H. Sommer, The Fox Spirit, the Stone Maiden, and Other Transgender Histories from Late Imperial China, Columbia University Press

This is why the “transgender” behaviors studied by Matthew H. Sommer became a headache for the imperial court in the Ming and Qing dynasties.^4,5 And there seems to have been a noticeable rise in such occurrences, linked to the boom population and the accelerating urbanization: the traditional lifestyle of being rooted in a particular place began to crumble, and internal changes in the four-tier social structure (scholars, farmers, artisans, and merchants) meant that traditional norms could no longer provide clear divisions. Rather, the increased mobility in the population brought governance problems and socio-psychological alarm. In Philip Alden Kuhn’s classic study Soulstealers (1990), groups of migrants of uncertain origin caused panic in traditionally closed villages, and since they moved frequently, this panic expanded and led to mass hysteria.⁶ Population mobility was the greatest problem the imperial court had to grapple with, because it shook to the roots a traditional social system founded on the distinctions and hierarchy of li. Norms that had once been unquestionable now began to falter. In this constantly shifting time, when it seemed there was no firm ground left to stand on, both administrators and the masses fell into confusion, and one classic reaction was to punish and correct what was deviant or abnormal. Though the “soulstealer” panic seems absurd, in fact it was a faithful reflection of the psychic stress felt by people in late imperial China in the face of change and uncertainty, and the limitations of an entire system built on distinctions and hierarchies.

The anomalous bodies and transgender practices that Sommer finds in late imperial criminal archives and literary works should also be understood against this backdrop, especially when they primarily involved the lives of commoners. Given the scarcity of materials and documents, our understanding of late imperial gender-crossing is restricted to limited historical records. The gender-crossing cases that appear in criminal files from around the country often show similar patterns and outcomes, yet elite officials and the lower-class poor often had contradictory understanding of these behaviors. Since the surviving criminal records come largely from officials, they reveal less about the actual predicament of “transgender” individuals or their own understanding of this behavior than they do about the rulers’ anxieties over gender deviation, and the measures they took to correct it.

Six actors

Courtesy Ruxton Family Collection, Historical Photographs of China project, University of Bristol

Hedda Morrison, Chinese Theatre, 1933–1946

Courtesy Hedda Morrison Collection, Harvard-Yenching Library

Officials typically assumed “transgender” individuals had sinister motives, dressing up as women either to enter traditionally female spaces to commit sexual crimes or to swindle or traffick women and children. In a system of prescribed gender roles or behavior, where men and women are different, any attempt to flout “the way of heaven” implied a sinister intent. Hence, officials punished and rectified any transgressive behavior, rather than relying solely on individual cases. Yet this ignored the practical motives for cross-dressing. According to the case descriptions, most of these people were poor and had a hard life, and they turned to cross-dressing as a means of survival. Some believed it would be easier to beg if dressed as a woman, others dressed as women to form unconventional families with men. Even in the cases of men who, as the officials supposed, really did cross-dress for criminal purposes, poverty was also involved.

Challenging Norms or Seeking Survival?

There was a clear disparity between officials and these “transgender” commoners. As Sommer and Michael A. Szonyi have found, in late imperial China’s lower-class communities there existed several unconventional social structures, such as families formed by guanggun or unmarried men regarded as potential sexual predators, or the “sham marriages” that formed in certain groups, or the same-sex love between “sworn brothers” (qixiong qidi) that the Ming dynasty writer Shen Defu found so titillating. Such relationships often arose as a practical solution to specific circumstances—what was known as “getting together to get by” (dahuo guorizi)—and they often imitated the traditional structures of marriage and family.⁷ Late imperial gender-crossing practices reveal that many men played the role of wives and lived with other men. Fictional accounts like Pu Songling’s story “Renyao” and Li Yu’s “A Male Mencius’s Mother” involve “transgender” men in the role of wives. Both ultimately have their male genitals removed and physically transform themselves into women, conforming to the image of “woman” in the gender norms—not only in their roles, but also in their bodies.  

Pu Songling, Liaozhai Quantu, Chinese manuscript, n.d.

Courtesy ÖNB Digital, Austrian National Library

Like the officials who tried Sang Chong and other male cross-dressing criminals, Pu Songling and Li Yu used the cultural privilege of the scholar to write their “crimes”: they redirected this transgression and deviancy into mainstream interpretative frameworks, thereby normalizing or even eliminating it. And this led them to fail to truly understand the behavior: they opted to denigrate and punish practices that were taken as a last resort. Such practices constantly appear in the surviving case records, which Sommer calls “a coercive dialogue” (133) and “creativity inspired by torment.”⁸ Officials were captive to their own interests and norms, and paranoically viewed these “transgender” individuals as potential criminals—just as the migrants and unmarried men who so alarmed them and were symbols of danger and disruption, and hence in urgent need of corrective action.

What we need to note is that these “transgender” individuals were typically men. Or rather, those who alarmed the late imperial court were mostly men who crossed the boundaries of normal men’s behavior. In mainstream gender norms, these men were designated as husbands and fathers and occupied the active role in marriage and the family—in other words, in their conduct they were supposed to be the penetrative partners, not the other way around. Sommer notes that the gender principle in late imperial China had an important function, namely to redefine “male” and “female” through marriage and family structures, and in so doing form a series of male and female behaviors and traits with clear boundaries. Migrants, bachelors, and cross-dressers were therefore enemies of the gender system, and only by removing this threat could the system’s normative status be consolidated.⁹ 

Actor at a market fair during the Dragon Boat Festival in a village on the Shandong coast

Courtesy Hedda Morrison Collection, Harvard-Yenching Library 

© President and Fellows of Harvard College

Were these “dangerous” lower-class men aware of all this? How did the cross-dressers in particular understand their behavior? In fact, we know very little about this, which is why Sommer’s interpretation of these behaviors as “queer” practices is questionable: perhaps they had no intention of challenging or disrupting mainstream gender norms. And even if their behavior was provocative, they were often forced to it by circumstances—as in the story of Xinxiang, another cross-dressing renyao from the Qing dynasty who was just as famous as Sang Chong.

A man of humble origins, Xinxiang constantly changed identities, chameleon-like, to make ends meet. He seems not to have sought to challenge the mainstream gender system by cross-dressing, but rather hoped to gain class mobility. As Sommer writes, “[i]n a society with extremely limited scope for upward mobility, the only way . . . to enjoy the perquisites of such status was to fake it. One can interpret [such] scams as an abortive attempt at upward mobility . . . a bold shortcut to higher status.”¹⁰ Precisely because they lived in an era with such a limited scope for social advancement, the lower-class men officially derided as “neither man nor woman,” “monsters,” or “beasts” chose to seek potential means of survival by disguising themselves and crossing gender boundaries. 

Note:

1. Hsiao-wen Cheng, “Before Sexual and Normal: Shifting Categories of Sexual Anomaly from Ancient to Yuan China,” Asia Major, Third Series, 31, no. 2 (2018): 1-39.

2. Bret Hinsch notes that in pre-Qin China the more significant factor influencing gender roles was a kinship system founded on paternal blood ties, i.e., patrilineality, as distinct from traditional patriarchy. In matters of gender, patrilineality emphasizes the role of the family in kinship relationships, while patriarchy emphasizes social power relationships. Patrilineality and patriarchy do not necessarily go hand in hand. Hinsch’s distinction is crucial for understanding the construction of the gender system of ancient China.

3. Bret Hinsch, Women in Early Imperial China (Rowman & Littlefield, 2010).

4. While Sommer uses the Western term “transgender” to refer to male cross-dressing behavior and practices in Qing society, he stresses a distinction: unlike the notion of identity that’s central to contemporary gender politics, he’s more inclined to understand what he sees here as a practice, rather than an essential nature. Here I’ve found it more suitable to use the verb-like “gender-crossing” to describe a specific gender practice. 

5. Matthew H. Sommer, The Fox Spirit, the Stone Maiden, and Other Transgender Histories from Late Imperial China (Columbia University Press, 2024).

6. Philip Alden Kuhn, Soulstealers: the Chinese Sorcery Scare of 1768 (Harvard University Press, 1990).

7. Michael Szonyi, “The Cult of Hu Tianbao and the Eighteenth-Century Discourse of Homosexuality,” Late Imperial China, 19.1 (1998): 1-25. On this question, compare Sophie Volpp, “The Discourse on Male Marriage: Li Yu’s ‘A Male Mencius’s Mother,’” Positions, no. 1 (1994): 113-132.

8. Sommer, The Fox Spirit, 133, 108.

9. Sommer, Sex, Law, and Society in Late Imperial China (Stanford University Press, 2000).

10. Sommer, The Fox Spirit, 243.

Zhongmu is a literary critic and postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Chinese Language and Literature at East China Normal University. His essays and criticism have appeared in The Beijing News, The Paper, and other publications.