MovieChat Forums > Yuk po tuen: Tau ching bo gam (1991) Discussion > What does the original Chinese title mea...

What does the original Chinese title mean?


"Yu pu tuan zhi: Tou qing bao jian"
That can't translate to "Sex And Zen", can it?
Thanks.

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It literally translates as "The jade pillow's illicit affairs mirror" however, the colon in the English title, which does not appear in the Chinese, may indicate that The Jade Pillow is the title of the tale as a whole with The mirror of illicit affairs being a chapter, or individual story within the context of The Jade Pillow. I would have to watch the movie to give a better account of the title and what it means. This just comes from looking at the Chinese written on the DVD cover.

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Thanks, dude.

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Jade Pillow means woman's body. and the mirror means you can see the world and see yourself.

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"Jade Pillow means woman's body."

Ah! Thanks.

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I don't think I can type Chinese here. I began to wikipedia this movie on the chinese wiki database and found a whole lot of history behind it.

First of all Yu Pu Tuan is a softcore porn trilogy produced in Hong Kong, meaning the correct pronunciation of the movie title should be "Yuk Po Tuen zi Tau Ching Bo Gam". It is also based on an erotic novel from a 17th century chinese novelist Lee Yu.

Yu Pu Tuan/ Yuk Po Tuen is a play on words in Cantonese as "Yuk" (Jade) also rhymes with "Yuk" meaning "flesh". I don't know where the "pillow" idea came from because the phrase doesn't actually mean anything, it implicitly means a pack of flesh jumbled up together, thus softcore porn.

Tou ching is "committing an adulterous affair" and Bo Gam is the "precious handbook/ guideline/ the bible" so the entire phrase would mean "the precious guide/ bible to having an affair".

This cracks me up because we used to make fun of the whole movie series in grade school in Hong Kong. Yu Pu Tuan will always be a Hong Kong softporn classic.

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Very interesting. Thank you, KTP.

So is part of the significance of jade in Chinese culture -- apart from that it's a precious stone -- that it's a pun on "flesh"?

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