The late imperial social order anchored married men and women in stable family relationships, organized around the principle of separation of the sexes. But what happened to men or women who abandoned the family, or were forced out of the family, or were denied a family? When things fell apart, as they did in Ning Lao T’ai-t’ai's world at the end of the Qing dynasty, wives were rented, daughters were sold, and unattached men at the bottom of the social hierarchy banded together to survive. In other times of stress, such as the Taiping Rebellion in the mid-nineteenth century, parents put female infants to death so they could count on rearing a son who would carry on the patriline. Social disorder, then, was always encoded with sexual and gendered conflicts and tensions, ranging from female infanticide and suicide to rebellion and the collapse of dynasties.

Maintaining social order was the charge of the emperor, who, by wise governance, ensured that heaven, human society, and earth remained in harmonious accord. The ruler received a “mandate” from heaven to assume this weighty responsibility. Chaos in society and in the natural world (drought, flood, earthquake, or rebellion) signaled that heaven's mandate had been withdrawn. Free-floating sexuality not only threatened the social order; it also endangered the emperor's hold on the Mandate of Heaven. Some of this danger lurked close to the throne, as the early philosopher Han Fei Zi warned: