In early-twentieth-century Shanghai, prostitution was variously understood as a source of urbanized pleasures, a profession full of unscrupulous and greedy schemers, a site of moral danger and physical disease, and a marker of national decay. It was also discussed as a painful economic choice on the part of women and their families, since it was sometimes the best or only income-producing activity available to women seeking employment in Shanghai. The categories through which prostitution was understood were not fixed, and tracing them requires attention to questions of urban history, colonial and anticolonial state making, and the intersection of sexuality, particularly female sexuality, with an emerging nationalist discourse. Prostitution is always about the sale of sexual services, but much more can be learned from that transaction: about sexual meanings, about other social relations, about sex as a medium through which people talked about political power and cultural transformation, about nationhood and cultural identity. In some respects, China’s modern debates about prostitution echoed those of Europe, where scholars such as Judith Walkowitz (England) and Alain Corbin (France) have traced the themes of medicalization and the desire to return prostitutes to an (imagined) safe family environment. 1 In China, prostitution was also invoked in urgent public discussions about what kind of sex and gender relations could help to constitute a modern nation in a threatening semicolonial situation. What it meant(to participants and observers) for a woman in Shanghai to sell sexual services to a man changed across the hierarchy and over time, as understandings of prostitution were shaped, contested, renegotiated, and appropriated by many participants: the prostitutes, their madams, their patrons, their lovers and husbands, their natal families, their in-laws, the police, the courts, doctors, the city government, missionaries, social reformers, students, and revolutionaries. Studying pros-