As we have seen, romantic love was far from a new theme in twentieth-century China's popular culture. For centuries, the tension between romantic love and arranged marriage supplied endless drama for opera scripts, novels, and short stories. During the Qing period, the Manchus campaigned against eroticism and sensuality in fiction and the theater, in part to enhance their claims to legitimacy. By attacking the “decadent customs” of the former Ming dynasty, the new Qing government presented itself as a regime dedicated to restoring the proper boundaries between men and women and to promoting the Confucian family system and its rituals. To some degree, Qing rectification movements, much like the sweeping anti-rightist campaigns of the Maoist period in the People's Republic, reshaped the content of literary and visual arts. Woodblocks for printing proscribed works were burned along with manuscript copies and published editions, so that many of these books are now known only from titles in bibliographies, or because they made their way into libraries outside of China (Ruan 1991:96–98). Much of the erotic painting and drawing that fills sinologist Robert van Gulik's famous book on Chinese erotica, for example, was copied in Japan, where it survived the Qing purges unscathed (Gulik 1951). Even so, and despite the Manchu court's efforts, fiction and drama from the Qing dynasty open huge windows on romantic love, sexuality, and gender performance under Manchu rule.