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Anal sex was also regarded favourably and held in esteem as early as 500 BC, when it began to be referred to ellipti-cally to as ‘sharing the peach'. The tradition of gay male love in China continued to be strong until the early part of the
twentieth century, when it began to be discouraged as part of the Westernisation of the culture. The new disavowal of the old ways survived both in Communist China and Taiwan, where it is, a little perversely, considered a heinous Western import and against traditional Chinese morals.

One of the Chinese culture's greatest claims to sexual fame is producing the world's earliest sex manuals – graphically detailed books which would be deemed pornographic by some today. The second-century pillow books, introduced for newlyweds, were just one example of this genre. They offered details of forty-eight different sexual positions, plus instructions for foreplay, oral and anal sex. Chinese erotica, which was really instructional material in the form of scrolls, novels and pictures, was also notable for its lack of insulting, misog-ynistic language or objectifying of women: the erect penis was the impressive-sounding ‘Positive or Vigorous Peak', ‘The Hammer,' the ‘Heavenly Dragon Stem,' the ‘Red Phoenix' and the ‘Coral or Jade Stalk'.

The female pudenda were poetically named too. The clitoris was ‘The Jewel Terrace', ‘The Jade Pearl', ‘The Golden Jewel of the Jade Palace'. The labia were ‘The Examination Hall'; the vulva, ‘The Golden Cleft and Jade Veins', ‘The Open Peony Blossom', ‘The Golden Lotus', ‘The Jade Pavilion', ‘The Palace', ‘The Open Lotus Flower', ‘The Receptive Vase' and ‘The Cinnabar (or Vermilion) Gate'. Sex is ‘Mist on the Mountains of Wu', ‘The Meeting of the Dragon and the Unicorn', or ‘The Clouds and the Rain'. An orgasm is ‘The Bursting of the Clouds'.

Chinese sex manuals were expressly designed for both men and women. A poem by Chang, written around 100 AD, describes a young woman awakening her sexual desire on her wedding night by use of an erotic manual called
The Plain Girl:

Let us now lock the double door with its golden lock

And light the lamp to fill our room with its brilliance
.

I shed my robes and remove my paint and powder
,

And roll out the picture scroll by the side of the pillow
,

The Plain Girl, I shall take as my instructress
,

So that we can practise all the variegated postures
,

Those that an ordinary husband has but rarely seen
,

No joy shall equal the delights of this first night
,

These shall never be forgotten, however old we
may grow
.

An erotic novel of the same period,
Jou P'u T'uan
(The Carnal Prayer Mat) by Li Yu, recounts the marriage of a scholar, Vesperus, to Jade Perfume, a beautiful and aristocratic but prudish young girl. She refuses to experiment sexually, or to make love other than in pitch darkness. The young husband persuades her to look at a sex manual, which she is soon perusing with enthusiasm. Her passion becomes ‘greatly aroused' by the book, and her sexuality is awakened.
Jou P'u T'uan
has the distinction today of being banned by the Beijing authorities on grounds of indecency.

Naomi Wolf has written approvingly of both the language and female-friendliness of Chinese ‘educational' pornography: ‘When I read, as an adult, the Ancient Chinese erotic texts in translation, I felt oddly embarrassed,' she says in
Promiscuities
. ‘The terms the Taoists used to describe women's genitals were metaphors of beauty, sweetness, artistry, rareness and fragrance … affection for women's genitals seemed, at first reading, hilarious, but also enchanting – like a life-enhancing comedy. Other Western women to whom I showed the Chinese translations had the same reaction.

‘We should look at that response,' Wolf concludes. ‘Just imagine how differently a young girl today might feel about her developing womanhood if every routine slang description she heard of female genitalia used metaphors of preciousness and beauty, and every account of sex was centred on her pleasure – pleasure on which the general harmony depended.'

Even in the highly sexed culture of Ancient China, sexuality had its special heyday. In the Han dynasty, from 206 BC to 221 AD, sexual desire, both male and female, was regarded
as a powerful force of Nature, and female desire in particular, as Naomi Wolf puts it, ‘was studied with the care that we now focus on the ecosystems which keep us alive and well'.

The most famous Chinese sex advice dates from the Han period, when Taoist philosophy was at its apogee. A modern Chinese sexologist, Jolan Chang, in a 1976 book,
The Tao of Love and Sex: the Ancient Chinese Way to Ecstasy
, distilled this ancient advice into a package accessible to Westerners. Much of it might be characterised as a distinctly feminine approach to sex. The point is made by Chang, as it is in another key modern Taoist sex guide,
The Multi-Orgasmic Man
by Mantak Chia, that the Ancient Chinese had no word for impotence. Taoism advocates a fail-safe technique that modern interpreters of the Tao call ‘Soft Entry', by which a man can enter his partner when he does not have a bone-hard erection, or even when he is semi-flaccid.

Chang extracts from the Ancient Chinese texts specific instructions for better sex, four of which involve men learning how to arouse their female partner.

He must know how to feel his woman's nine erotic zones.

He must know how to appreciate his woman's five beautiful
qualities.

He must know how to arouse her so he can benefit from her
flooding secretions.

He should drink her saliva, and then his ching [semen] and her
chi [breath] will be in harmony.

Chang also details ten signs of female desire that men ought to be able to recognise:

She holds the man tight with both her hands. It indicates that
she wishes closer body contact.

She raises her legs. It indicates that she wishes closer friction of her clitoris.

She extends her abdomen. It indicates that she wishes shallower thrusts.

Her thighs are moving. It indicates that she is greatly pleased.

She uses her feet… to pull the man. It indicates that she wishes deeper thrusts

She crosses her legs over his back. It indicates that she is anxious for more.

She is shaking from side to side. It indicates that she wishes deep thrusts on both the left and right.

She lifts her body, pressing him. It indicates that she is enjoying it extremely.

She relaxes her body. It indicates that the body and limbs are pacified.

Her vulva is flooding. Her tide of yin has come. The man can see for himself that his woman is happy.

The age of China's distinctive blend of sexual frankness and poetic lucidity did not come to a close with the end of the Han dynasty. In
Yufang Bijue
(Secret Instructions of the Jade Chamber), a Taoist text of several hundred years after Han, we can read of a technique for
coitus obstructus:
‘When, during the sexual act, the man feels he is about to ejaculate, he should quickly and firmly, using the fore and middle fingers of the left hand, put pressure on the spot between scrotum and anus, simultaneously inhaling deeply and gnashing his teeth scores of times, without holding his breath. Then the semen will be
activated but not yet emitted. It returns from the Jade Stalk and enters the brain.' (Taoist masters would charge eager pupils vast sums for revealing the precise location of that key pressure point between the scrotum and the anus; it is sometimes described in translation as ‘the million-dollar point'.)

Reay Tannahill, in her book
Sex in History
, paraphrases another typically juicy section from the seventh-century
Yek Tê-hui
, a sex manual by Master Tung-hsuan, a physician of the time: ‘The Jade Stalk, he said, should hover lightly around the precious entrance of the Cinnabar Gate while its owner kissed the woman lovingly or allowed his eyes to linger over her body or look down to her Golden Cleft. He should stroke her stomach and breasts and caress her Jewel Terrace. As her desire increases, he should begin to move his Positive Peak more decisively, back and forward, bringing it now into direct contact with the Golden Cleft and the Jade Veins, playing from side to side of the Examination Hall, and finally bringing it to rest at one side of the Jewel Terrace. Then, when the Cinnabar Cleft was in flood, it was time for the Vigorous Peak to thrust inward.' Tung-hsuan, Tannahill adds, recommended the use of a penis ring, both to keep the Jade Stalk erect but also to stimulate the woman's Jewel Terrace during intercourse.

How sexually developed in antiquity, it may be wondered in the light of such advanced sexual material from China, was that civilisation's neighbour and great rival Japan? Given the more obscure, inward-looking and secretive Nature of ancient
Edo
compared to China, it is of little surprise that there is far less material on the sex life of the Ancient Japanese.

The most marked feature of the earliest religion of Japan, the Shinto cult, was animal worship, but evidence from various surviving erotic paintings show that even thousands of years before the geisha was heard of it, Shinto was profoundly hedonistic, as much so as the contemporary Greek culture. While early Chinese sexual manuals were mainly written for the health of male, old Japanese sexual texts centre more on the playful spirit required by both parties to enjoy sex.

Sexuality in Ancient Japan was celebrated through gods such as
Izanagi
, ‘the male who invites'; and
Izanami
, ‘the female who invites'. The deity
Kunado
was represented by a penis. Worship of the ‘Heavenly Root' – the penis – was universal, with wooden and stone phallic symbols commonplace in town and country. They were thought to possess powerful healing and revivifying properties.

One custom was to dedicate beautiful young girls to the service of
Kwan-Non
, the Japanese Venus. The great temple of
Asakusa
was dedicated to her. Sacred prostitutes, in effect, they belonged to a religious order of nuns called
Bikuni
. It was a privilege to become a member of the
Bikuni
, girls being selected for their beauty and lovemaking prowess from all classes, including those employed in the more commercial brothels. Shinto temples, additionally, were the scenes of sexual orgies easily rivalling ancient Roman
Bacchanalia
.

Then there is the question of Japan's most famous contribution to the history of the orgasm, the egregious
Ben Wa
(‘Joy') balls allegedly invented by a Japanese courtesan of unknown vintage, but called
Rino-Tama
and responsible for one of the staples of the modern sex shop.
Rino-Tama
it was who discovered that placing two marble-sized balls of suitable design inside the vagina could for a woman be like having a permanent portable vibrator in place. Hours spent moving about with
Ben Wa
balls installed could supposedly culminate in a subtle and discreet, yet impressive, mini-orgasm.

The earliest ‘love beads', also known later as geisha balls, are believed to have been egg-shaped hollow balls carved from ivory. Subsequently, the casing would be made of gold or silver with a small weight – mercury in very ancient times – placed in the centre to roll around, creating rotating sensations within the vagina and sensitive surrounding tissue that could be orgasmic for practised women. The balls can be held low in the vagina or directly behind the G-spot. In the modern context, they are said to help to tighten and strengthen the pubococcygeal (PC) muscles, giving a better ‘grip' during intercourse, as well as
controlling the bladder and preventing incontinence with advancing age.

Some
Ben Wa
users swore by a specialised trick of the trade, which was to make just one of the balls hollow, the other ball solid. By their rubbing together in the vagina, a special kind of ‘ringing' vibration would be set up, said to be still more conducive to a sly dose of orgasmic bliss on-the-hoof. Other women in Ancient Japan and later times have also enjoyed using
Ben Wa
balls for intercourse, and say their male partners enjoy encountering the smooth spheres during penetration.

Although the Chinese were the first Eastern people to bring advanced sexual knowledge into the public sphere with explicit sex manuals for the common man and woman, the original body of specialised, esoteric knowledge about sex, the Tantra, which later appears in Hinduism, Buddhism and Taoism, seems to have begun its development in Ancient India.

It is in the Hindu world, rather than in China, that the pursuit of the ultimate orgasm, irrespective of reproductive considerations, was revered as something close to a religious quest. The Ancient Hindus were more explicit than the hedonistic Greeks about pleasure. They considered earthly life had three distinct and equal purposes: religious piety
(dharma)
, material prosperity
(artha)
, and sexual pleasure
(kama)
.

Every inquisitive schoolboy in the West in the twentieth century learned at some stage of the
Kamasutra
, and knew that in it the penis is called the
lingam
and the vulva, the
yoni
. But the
Kamasutra
is a relatively recent, third-century AD text – 200 years more modern, for instance, than Ovid's
Ars Amatoria
. The
Kamasutra's
most distant roots, however, can be traced to around 4,000 BC among the Harrapan tribe, which inhabited the area of present-day Sahiwal in the Pakistani Punjab.

The Harrapan worshipped femininity. Their goddess Shakti was represented in the form of a
yoni
. Sex was a way of combining male and female energies. Women were respected as well as revered, and rape was punishable by death. The growing
sexual cult required males to do everything in their power to cherish and satisfy their wives. Impoliteness to women was banned, and neither could females be bought or sold.