Dame Wang’s Dumplings: Mediating the Obscene in Manchu Translations of Erotic Literature at the Turn of the Eighteenth Century
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract This article examines the surprising attention to taboo works of Chinese erotic literature within the corpus of early Manchu literary translations, focusing on the Manchu interpretations of Jinpingmei (The plum in the golden vase), Xixiang ji (The story of the western wing), and Rouputuan (The carnal prayer mat). The Qing court is well known to have sponsored translations of core works of the Chinese classical and historical tradition, while simultaneously banning texts perceived as heterodox, lascivious, or politically sensitive. A lively engagement among Manchu commercial publishers with the literary tradition, including vernacular novels and plays, highlights the broader reading habits of the early Qing Manchu reader in practice. In mediating erotic material for this new audience, translators employed a variety of interpretive choices, ranging from expurgation to the opposite extreme of hyper-sexualization. This study situates these translation practices within the broader Manchu justifications of reading this material, shifting our attention from the conventional representation of Manchu literary repression.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".