China, the world’s longest continuous civilization, can also boast of the oldest surviving studies of lovemaking. Sexual theorizing reaches back to the founding texts of Chinese thought and permeates its multiple fields of inquiry: from the divinatory cosmology and metaphysics of the Yijing, or Book of Changes (the oldest of Chinese classical texts), to the medical theories of The Yellow Emperor’s Classic of Internal Medicine, and further into the ethics of Confucius and the Daoist doctrines of Laozi and Zhuangzi. Because sex pervades so many aspects of life, it finds expression in many fields of thought. Much classical Chinese sexual theory has therefore been formulated in works largely focused on broader topics. However, there does exist a distinct genre of texts in Chinese erotic theory, variously known as the “handbooks of sex” or manuals of “the Art of the bedchamber.”1