The Scholar and the Courtesan: Songs on the Pearl River's Flower Boats

Abstract

In 1828, a volume of about one-hundred song lyrics, titled Yue'ou 粵謳(Cantonese Songs), was published in Canton. The songs are mainly composed in the voice of courtesans on Pearl River's pleasure boats, who sang to their lovers with tenderness, yearning, and often despair; some are in the voice of the author, Zhao Ziyong 招子庸 (1795?–1847), who warns the women and men not to fall in love since that always ends in heartbreak. These songs became celebrated because of their pathbreaking use of Cantonese language, such natural colloquialisms enhancing the song's expressivity. The fates of most of these women add to the songs' poignancy: sold to their "mother" as little girls, they were trained in the fine arts of pleasing men, including singing and playing the pipa, until at around thirteen years of age they assumed the role of courtesan. Living in opulent furnishings on the flower boats, which disappeared by the 1930s, their best hope was to become someone's concubine, their worst fate to be banished to the streets when their beauty faded. The article includes a rare recording, made in 1980, of a Yue'ou song as performed by an elderly woman who had been a blind professional singer during the flower boats' heyday, and its transcription.