This chapter begins with a discussion of the terminology and conceptual frameworks that are useful for contextualizing pre-modern Chinese sources about sex and sexuality. It then surveys several well-studied institutions and practices, including sex manuals, concubinage, female chastity, illicit sex, and literary representations of homoeroticism. The second half of the chapter reflects on three phenomena in works on the history of sexuality in pre-modern China, namely retrospective sexology, the censorship hypothesis, and the assumption of sex as a given. The author argues that while historians now no longer characterize sex culture in ancient China as either ‘liberated’ or ‘repressed’, as old sexologists did, we still tend to assume that the history of sexuality should primarily be about sexual practice and behaviour, despite the acknowledged lack of sources. The lack of sources, in turn, is often assumed to be the result of political and ideological censorship. More attention is needed to questioning scholars’ definition of the very subject matter, sex. The chapter concludes with a short review of scholarly approaches to comparing China with other cultures and a proposal of the ways in which a comparative history of sexuality can be productive.

Chapter 1 provides the background for a discussion of Chinese economic thought in the Qing period, introducing its most important ideas, terminology, and tropes. In this context, it stresses the unique centrality of economic issues in Qing politics. It also illustrates how dismissing imperial tropes related to the notion of “nurturing” and “pacifying the people” (yangmin and anmin) as mere empty rhetoric prevents historians from fully understanding important political and economic objectives of the Chinese imperial government. This chapter also examines two important debates on the role of the state in the economy of the empire, the Debate on Salt and Iron (81 BCE) and the controversy surrounding Wang Anshi’s New Policies (1069–76). It further analyses the pro-market trends that accompanied the commercial growth of the Song dynasty – the beginning of a process of commercialization that was to come to maturation in the late Ming and early Qing periods.