Sing-Song Girls of Shanghai

The Sing-Song Girls of Shanghai is a landmark Chinese novel originally written by Han Bangqing (under the pen name Hua Yin Youren) and serialized in 1892, one of the first great novels of Shanghai's courtesan world and among the last major works of fiction written in the Wu dialect. The novel follows a wide cast of courtesans, their clients, and the men who move through Shanghai's flower houses in the late nineteenth century, depicting the economics, etiquette, and emotional negotiations of that world in unsentimental, closely observed detail.

Eileen Chang, one of twentieth-century Chinese literature's major novelists, translated the book into Mandarin and then into English late in her life, considering the project essential to preserving a text she believed had been unfairly neglected because of its dialect and difficult, understated style. This edition, translated into English by Eva Hung and published posthumously after Chang's own translation was completed and edited, restores Chang's introduction and afterword alongside the text.

The novel is prized for its refusal of melodrama: relationships between courtesans and patrons are rendered as business and social maneuvering as much as romance, and its ensemble structure, following dozens of characters across interlocking storylines, was influential on later Chinese fiction, including Chang's own work.