The strict boundaries around young women that were supposed to keep them chaste and pure were the same boundaries that upheld the honor of the family in nineteenth-century China. These boundaries were as salient in the laws of the eighteenth century as they were in the upbringing of respectable women at the turn of the twentieth century, as Ning Lao T’ai-t’ai could testify. Tensions surrounding this ideal of female purity were thoroughly explored in early Chinese texts, one of the most widely read being the classic “Tale of Yingying.” Here is a synopsis of that story, written by a Tang scholar named Yuan Zhen (779–831): Yingying is a fair seventeen-year-old when her mother introduces her to the comely scholar Zhang, to whom the mother owes a favor. He falls in love at first sight and attempts to approach Yingying through her maid, Hongniang. Hongniang persuades Zhang to write love poems to Yingying to seduce her. This works so well that Yingying, after an initial display of outrage, climbs over the wall of her compound to Zhang's bed and sleeps with him. For the next month, he joins her secretly every night in the western wing of her home, where they make love. In the end, though, Zhang abandons Yingying for the capital, where he sits for the exams and rebuffs her tender letters. Stories of the affair spread throughout the capital, many of them richly sensual and romantic, some cruel and hurtful. Yingying ultimately marries another man, and Zhang another woman.