Both the character Apricot and her proprietress, Madam Lin, have ties to the courtesan Wen Wan (温琬; fl. 11th century). While readers only casually acquainted with Chinese history tend to equate courtesans with prostitution, this is an incomplete and misleading portrayal. First and foremost, a courtesan was an entertainer. Musician, singer, dancer, painter, calligrapher, and poet: the courtesan’s principal task was to accompany powerful men during the interminable string of banquets that were part and parcel of state life. Banquets were so important that during the Song, many courtesans were actually owned by the state and kept on official registers. This is not to say that romance and sex did not enter the mix, but in an effort to keep officials from becoming emotionally compromised or blackmailed, any sort of relationship with a courtesan outside of formal banquets was—in theory, at least—illegal.
Like all entertainers, courtesans were considered to be jian (debased)—the class beneath commoners. Despite their education, talent, and connections with luxury and power, a courtesan’s life was still one of servitude, and their vulnerability, lower social status, and aura of ill-fated tragedy was a favorite subject of the poets and elite patrons with whom they associated.
The path to courtesanship was varied: girls might be sold by their relatives, kidnapped, tricked, of foreign birth, have parents who were imprisoned or exiled, or they might have simply grown up in a family of entertainers. Whether or not Wen Wan was a real person is debated by contemporary scholars, but at the very least, her biographical sketch provides some insight into the arc of a courtesan’s life in the Northern Song.
As the story goes, Wen Wan’s mother, who was born to a good family, became a courtesan in order to support herself following the death of her husband. Motherhood, of course, was anathema to the profession, and so at a young age, Wen Wan was sent to live with her maternal aunt’s family. Wen Wan began to read the classics at the age of six, and when the family recognized her precociousness, they sent her to school dressed as a boy. At the age of fourteen, just after she was engaged to be married, her mother reappeared and regained custody of Wen Wan following a legal battle in court. Her mother, who by this point was an alcoholic and too old to support herself as an entertainer, proceeded to break off her daughter’s marriage and forced her to become a courtesan in her place.
A dutiful daughter, Wen Wan acquiesced and, thanks to her literary talent and education, went on to become one of the most famous entertainers of her day, publishing over five hundred poems (of which thirty survive) and crossing paths with several high-ranking officials, most famously Sima Guang (1019–1086). She eventually ran away from the “fiery pit” of courtesan life by disguising herself as a man, but was captured soon after. Her time as a courtesan ended when a prefect took pity on her and bought out both her contract and her mother’s. She was engaged to be married a second time after obtaining her freedom, but her suitor inexplicably disappeared, never to return.
For more on Wen Wan, see Bossler, Courtesans, Concubines, and the Cult of Female Fidelity; Idema and Grant, The Red Brush; and Lee and Wiles, Biographical Dictionary of Chinese Women.