This chapter begins with a discussion of the terminology and conceptual frameworks that are useful for contextualizing pre-modern Chinese sources about sex and sexuality. It then surveys several well-studied institutions and practices, including sex manuals, concubinage, female chastity, illicit sex, and literary representations of homoeroticism. The second half of the chapter reflects on three phenomena in works on the history of sexuality in pre-modern China, namely retrospective sexology, the censorship hypothesis, and the assumption of sex as a given. The author argues that while historians now no longer characterize sex culture in ancient China as either ‘liberated’ or ‘repressed’, as old sexologists did, we still tend to assume that the history of sexuality should primarily be about sexual practice and behaviour, despite the acknowledged lack of sources. The lack of sources, in turn, is often assumed to be the result of political and ideological censorship. More attention is needed to questioning scholars’ definition of the very subject matter, sex. The chapter concludes with a short review of scholarly approaches to comparing China with other cultures and a proposal of the ways in which a comparative history of sexuality can be productive.