The canonical eighteenth-century novel Hongloumeng (Dream of the Red Chamber) archives the intangible heritage of perfume culture in late imperial China. Chapter 1 explores the material culture of perfume and the spiritual, philosophical, and social subtexts of smell through a close reading of the novel. I argue that the author Cao Xueqin’s engagement with the sense of smell is twofold. On the one hand, he illustrates how culture tunes neurons cognitively and aesthetically: smell acts as an embodied form of knowledge to conceptualize time, space, gender, class, sexuality, and morality; aromas also elevate the everyday into an aesthetic way of living. On the other hand, he indicates the fragility of this painstakingly choreographed order of things. Overall he weaves an allegory about contamination as an inevitable human condition through smell. Unwittingly he forecasts the onset of a modern olfactory revolution premised on the arguable impurity of China.

Examining two of the most influential novels of late imperial China, Ransmeier’s essay finds enslaved people to be both omnipresent and unremarkable in this period. Both the high Qing era The Dream of the Red Chamber and the Late Ming The Plum and the Golden Vase are set in opulent households doomed to decline, in part by the emotional needs or sexual appetites of their fallible male protagonists. Consuming these narratives, readers become invested in their fate, and accept a world in which human trafficking, slavery, and sexual exploitation played a natural part of domestic life. While unfreely obtained labor was a characteristic feature of the households described in these epic novels and played a central role in attending to the creature comforts of elite masters and mistresses, and while the authors did not necessarily obscure the emotional struggles of individual enslaved people, neither text advocates for social change. The essay also shows how both Dream author Cao Xueqin and the anonymous author of Plum bind their protagonists to karmically determined ends, deploy enslaved people in service of their storytelling, and take advantage of the predominant hierarchical system of their time, creating worlds in which no one was truly free.