Ch’ing, a Chinese Book of Love

John Minford is a sinologist and translator, and Emeritus Professor of Chinese Studies at the Australian National University. He has translated many classics of Chinese literature, including The Story of the Stone, the I Ching, the Tao Te Ching and The Art of War.

The underbelly of Chinese culture was never as poetic and as vivid as in this book on the ars amatoria – arts of love. Erotic and soulful, it takes you into the world of pillow and mat, moon and wind, rain and clouds, scented mountains and gyrating snow. These metaphors for intimacy part the curtains of the bedchamber and enrich the lexicon of love beyond the salaciousness of Western pornography. John Minford, a brilliant sinologist and translator, has brought together ancient, traditional and modern texts, with a flair for winged pleasures such as this one line from the oldest “Book of Songs”: I bring my lithe lass joy. - Vera Schwarcz, Emerita Professor of History and East Asian Studies, Wesleyan UniversityWhat’s love got to do with it? A lot, as John Minford shows us, on a romp across the millennia of Chinese writings on ch’ing (qing). From the Confucian classics and Tang poetry to pornographic novels and bedchamber manuals, this anthology offers us all the pleasure and guidance we have come to expect from a master translator of Chinese literature. - Judith Zeitlin, William R. Kenan Jr Distinguished Service Professor and Chair of the CEAS Committee on Chinese Studies, The University of ChicagoThis book gives a highly learned, comprehensive view of the subject of love in China from the fifth and sixth centuries BCE to the modern era. Impressive and stimulating. - Keith McMahon, Professor of Chinese Language and Literature, The University of KansasLove, desire, longing, enchantment, and more peony buds than you can shake a jade stem at – this magnificent collection of translations has it all. John Minford is one of the world’s greatest translators of Chinese literature and he has assembled here works of poetry, fiction, drama – and even one film script – that represent thousands of years of Chinese writing about love. Profoundly beautiful, often playful, spiritual and sensual, the selections offer an excellent introduction to a most intimate aspect of a grand civilisation. - Linda Jaivin, author of The Shortest History of China and Bombard the Headquarters! The Cultural Revolution in ChinaRepresenting one of the widest-ranging active engagements with the literature of China and its literary translation, only John Minford could have brought together this wonderful and mysterious anthology (I am thinking here of the Chinese adjective miao 妙). Perhaps most intimately intertwined in the work of P’u Sung-ling – certain of his writings are central to this collection – Ch’ing, a Chinese Book of Love is a manifestation of the way – the Tao (道) – through which the most deeply felt of interhuman activities has always, in the Chinese culture sphere, been interpenetrated (with appropriate eroticism if perhaps a little asymmetrically) by a cosmology that is fundamental and has no heed for the highs or lows of culture and society. More or less every genre of Chinese literature is on fine display in this book, along with most of China’s philosophical-religious, historical, and, indeed, socioeconomic perspectives, all conjoined in a Tao that only an adept like Minford could follow through to this end, in the Great Ultimate (T’ai-chi 太極) of Yin and Yang. - John Cayley, Professor of Literary Arts, Brown University