The most immediately striking feature of Michael Nylan's The Chinese Pleasure Book, apart from the beauty of the cover design, is its title: it playfully evokes an Orientalizing fantasy world of sensual delights and exotic pastimes—a world that could not seem further away from an academic study of classical Chinese texts. But it does the job of drawing attention to the topic at hand, and to the fact that pleasure—and not just of the sublimated variety—was indeed an issue of central concern for premodern Chinese thinkers. It is also an honest one, as titles go, insofar as it leaves somewhat unspecified the sort of engagement this book offers with respect to pleasure. For, although Nylan begins her narrative by stating that it “traces the evolution of pleasure theories in early China over the course of a millennium and a half, from the fourth century BCE to the eleventh century,”...
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