In the center of Shanghai, on the corner of Xizhang and Yan'an Roads, stands a six-story building called the Great World. In the 1920s and '30s the Great World was the center of sensual delights, a libertine's Nirvana, a veritable Oriental pleasure palace. Courtesans minced about on the ground floor in a haze of precious incense. The second floor featured theater performances, barbers, steam baths and earwax extractors. Farther up, there were peep shows, love-letter booths, and purveyors of rubber clothing and other specialized gear. The higher one went, the more revealing the silk dresses of the waitresses, courtesans and masseuses became. On the top floor they wore next to nothing. And there, somewhat oddly amid all this dissolute pleasure, a number of marriage brokers had set up their stalls.

By the time I saw the Great World for the first time, in the 1980s, it had become a state-run "Youth Palace." A troupe of rather tired acrobats and a few tawdry shops selling plastic gewgaws were all that was left of its former glory. The Great World had been denounced by the Communist government as "a paradise for monsters and demons and a den for enemy agents and traitors camouflaged by beautiful music and graceful dancing." Judging by the way things are going in Shanghai today, we might soon be able to look forward to a revival.

The key word in Chinese for sensual pleasure, including all the varieties of sex, is shufu, meaning comfort or physical well-being. East Asians, unaffected by the puritanical phobias of the Christian West, do not usually make fundamental distinctions between one form of sensual pleasure and another. Sexual freedom is not limited by metaphysical taboos, only by social ones, which can be just as inhibiting, of course, but leave more room for licensed, and thus unashamed, physical indulgence.

For Westerners, whose desires (for whatever reason) are not fulfilled in their own societies, Asia has often seemed like a sensual paradise. Many Japanophiles, including some great scholars, began their adult lives as anxious homosexuals in the provinces of the Anglo-Saxon world. In Japan, such men could feel, well, "comfortable." The same was true of pre-Maoist China, and remains the case in parts of Southeast Asia—and not only for homosexuals. Thailand does not attract planeloads of Germans or Australians just because of its fine beaches and temples.

Money has something to do with these erotic attractions, as does the warm weather and possibly even a history of colonial domination by the West. But the notion of the hot-blooded Orient, with its promise of unimagined pleasures, its Madame Butterflies, geishas, singsong girls and other submissive seductresses, is much older than modern tourism. It already existed in ancient Greece and Rome. Mark Anthony was mesmerized by Cleopatra, that quintessential Oriental seductress; and later, the Christian Emperor Constantine railed against the decadence of Oriental paganism, with its worship of love goddesses and temple harlots.

Asians, in the Western mind, were not only more lascivious but also more sophisticated. These are only perceptions, of course. One might even call them prejudices. But it is true that the idea of shufu—of unembarrassed physical indulgence, of lolling about in bathhouses and massage establishments—is more common in East Asian countries than in Europe or the U.S. even today.

I do not know where the contemporary equivalent of the old Great World is to be found. Each person must find his own way to Nirvana. But I do have a vivid memory of trying to find, in the course of one night, the perfect barbershop in Taipei. Barbershops in Taipei, it should be explained, tend to offer more than haircuts. To ask for one would indeed seem a trifle eccentric. In any case, my friend and I went from one place to the next, in search of ever greater pleasure. None was entirely to our satisfaction, until we ended up, around 2 o'clock in the morning, in a room bathed in total darkness. All we could hear, as expert hands kneaded us here and there, was the sound of soft sighs and muffled groans from other customers. And then, all of a sudden, our love goddesses lit matches, revealing for an instant their worn and wrinkled faces, one more hideous than the other. I realized then the futility of our quest, for if sexual paradise exists at all, it is buried deep inside one's own head.

Ian Buruma, a professor at Bard College in New York, is the co-author of Occidentalism: The West in the Eyes of Its Enemies

Aug. 18, 2004	Aug. 19, 2003	Aug. 20, 2003