Prostitutes' rain-dance
" If the drought persists , the Chinese government officials will report the disaster to the emperor , and the emperor will ask prostitutes to perform a rain dance."
" Those Chinese prostitutes were divided into groups. All of them together sat down to sing and play music. One by one, each group of prostitutes would stand up and dance at the twelve points, offering a peculiar performance; after each group finished, they would leave the stage for the next group, which would writhe and perform for the spirits." Anyone could predict what would happen if the rain still did not nourish the cracked ground after these rituals , everyone knew that if they were undiligent in their sacred task, the emperor would not release and send them back to their brothels with a rosy smile on his face. Everybody knew that, it was impossible, that was China in 1516. It was not hard to foresee that those prostitutes who disappointed their king would all be executed, but at least they would have the luxury of going to the scaffold instead of the other creatively ruthless devices for torturing. You know, there were thousands of prostitutes involved in the ceremony, so would take several years to execute all those innocent females if the emperor wanted to kill them by a wide range of torture varieties. That 's why the square was choked by the waves of women's cries of pain. Through those starving and sleepless days and nights , they could only wait, with their eyes like dried-up wells, opened to the air, for the rain to come.
This ceremony has never been recorded in a Chinese history book, at least not the official ones. Ibn Battuta 's observation provides additional evidence on China' s folk-religious history, and it is this missing part that attracts my attention. During ancient times, just like in any other agricultural Asian society, there were remains of primitive religion in Chinese society, no matter now influential Confucianism and other more advanced religions were. So what is the meaning of these relics of primitive religion? Research tell us that primal agriculture and witchcraft are siamese twins, so it is not surprising that we have found information indicating that there were such shamanistic ceremonies in a dynasty where technology existed that could allow a Chinese eunuch to sail from China to Africa. The link between primitive agriculture and shamanism is based on the unstablity imposed on early peasants by nature: hailstorms, hurricane, flooding ------any one of these disasters could devour millions of peasant s' lives and properties in one gulp. Dealing with the nature that was a provider as well as a foe , early Chinese peasants could only take a passive stance--------let supernatural powers control the uncontrollable nature. This idea was the fundamental concept of primeval Chinese religion, and was closely related to agricultural productivity.
Facing supernatural powers higher than nature , the primordial Chinese could not do anything other than beseech. So who was going to communicate with invisible spiritual beings？Through intuitive observations, early people decided to put emphasis on women. Through visceral observation, early people associated the reproduction of crops with that of human beings directly (in aboriginal matriarchal communities , males' role in breeding was considered not as important as females'). This is the reason why most primitive religious rites were performed by females.
Thus the role of women in rain-dance ceremony could explained by looking at shamanism, but not the choice of using prostitutes. One controversial explanation would be that prostitutes were not considered to be humans. In ancient China, sex-workers were commodified by the patriarchy as toys on men's palms. Transaction contracts for prostitutes and systematic operation of brothels widely legitimated this commodification from an ideological perspective to economic and legal aspects . Being defined as commodities and not humans, sex workers lost their right of blending into the social structure through ethical relations. Ancient Chinese prostitutes were nobody's wives, daughters, or mothers, and so they did not have any corresponding ethical identity in society. Instead, they were attached to brothels and men through repressive relations. Rulers and moralists were happy to assign unpleasant tasks to prostitutes, for instance, the rain-dance, since using women in the societal structure for such dangerous tasks would topple the entire Confucian society, which was formed by individual households.
As French philosopher Gilles Deleuze stated ,empirical history is strata of visible and narrative surfaces. Histories do not exist before they are expressed by narration , nor they are stuffed with visible elements. Narration and selection of discourses are crucial components of history. Chinese history is always utilized as an implement of moral-education ,hence , historians were advised to be cautious when they were going to put something involving prostitutes , who were considered to be immoral and also detrimental to the Confucian stability ,on a history book.
Prostitutes would only appear in Chinese history in two forms : as femme fatale , or an individual whose 'immorality" was watered-down by patriotism . Nobody that the prostitutes who sacrificed their bodies and minds or even lives ,were kind of patriots , but historians and media told us that stories of individuals are more striking than those of a group of people ( The news reports on the Middle-East rivals demonstrate how this theory works), in other words , one prostitute's stories are more eye-catching than the ones of a group of prostitutes , so , they are more effective in moral education and propaganda. That's why we could only see the evidence of those pitiful women's existence on a foreigner's travel note instead of our own history books.
Since ancient days, even on the ancient plain silks or inscribed-bamboo stripes that ancient history was inscribed upon, we cannot find many written records discussing the subject of prostitutes. There were many who were infatuated by prostitutes with snowy-white skin and willing to spend millions in gold on them. However, being treated as commodities, prostitutes were doomed to be muted, to be forgotten on purpose. There might be heavenly nourishment coming down after incantations floated by on chapped purple lips with fading rouge，there might be pomegranate-red wounds with air-pipes exposed blooming in the scorched square, but in any case the prostitutes' voices were forever buried. Only the marble lions on the squares would see them, with sleepless stone eyes.
