The Courtesan’s “Role Portrait”: Brothel Performances and the Qiu Ying Models in Late Ming Suzhou

This article seeks to contribute to the historical scholarship on the relationship between pictorial and dramatic arts in China, more specifically, between the use of the “beautiful woman painting” (meiren tu) as a prop in brothel theater and the mental habits of late Ming viewers of such paintings. Examples are analyzed within two larger historical contexts: the commercial marketplace and the literary field of drama. The generic quality of the “beautiful woman painting” in the Qiu Ying style, its copied or forged versions, and its inclusion in wood-block drama prints all reveal the diurnal aspect of such images associated with everyday life. I suggest that this graphic genre’s erotic energy is rooted in its dramatic context, in which the static image of a beautiful woman could come to life as a courtesan-actress endowed with virtuosity in singing and dancing. Qiu Ying’s “portraits” prompted a popularly received response among dramatists such as Tang Xianzu to adopt a new focus on depicting “beautiful woman portraits” in plays (and onstage), known as “beautiful woman plays” (yanpin). Scenes of “realizations” and reanimations later fell into disuse in Chinese drama, along with the waning influence of the Qiu Ying models, Suzhou pian (Suzhou studio replicas) shops, and the courtesan-actress herself.