LOVE YOU LONG TIME AGO
Gabrielle Jaffe tours Beijing in the bound footsteps of Sai Jinhua, the courtesan reputed to have saved her nation
‘W ELCOME to my humble brothel,” jokes Simon Gjeroe, our 1.8m guide. Kowtowing to fit through the doorway, he ushers us into a two-storey building that was once one of Beijing’s bordellos.
Today we are touring Bada Hutong, an 800m² area that is just south of Tiananmen Square and was the Chinese capital’s redlight district from the time of the Ming dynasty (1368-1644) until the communists took over in 1949. In its heyday, this warren of lanes housed more than 300 brothels and 700 opium dens.
There were whorehouses to cater for every taste and budget. In the fanciest, fresh-faced girls sang songs, poured tea and entertained men in much the way geishas do in Japan. These women’s bodies were not bought outright; instead, would-be suitors wooed them with gifts over time. For those leaving such places unsated, however, there were also spots where heavily perfumed and thickly made-up streetwalkers openly sold sex.
After the Second Opium War (1856-60), a new breed of customer began frequenting Bada: foreigners from the nearby Legation Quarter. Business boomed: by the turn of the century, Bada brimmed nightly with rows of red lanterns, screeching rickshaws and the heady scent of opium.
At first it’s hard to picture this scene as we stand in this dilapidated house, with half-exposed brick walls and broken banisters. Then Simon asks us to look up from the interior courtyard and imagine the girls in their white silks coyly staring down at us from the second-floor gallery.
Simon and his fellow Dane, Lars Thom, are the perfect guides for this new tour, which started in May. These enthusiastic historians and founders of the popular Beijing Postcards shop have lived in China for more than a decade, spending much of their time chasing down stories and pictures of old Beijing in local archives and flea markets. At our second stop, they point out a stone carving above a doorway, which in Mandarin reads “collected treasure” — a euphemism, apparently, for the high-class prostitutes who once lived inside.
Today this duo aren’t just showing us around former houses of ill repute; they are helping us follow in the tiny, bound footsteps of one of the area’s most famous