NY Post
by Alexandra Klausner
No one can accuse aristocrats in China’s Han Dynasty of being prudes.
Long before actress and Goop founder Gwyneth Paltrow was selling “magical” Yoni eggs — meant to balance chi and enhance female health and pleasure — the ancient Chinese were inserting kinky doodads in both the living and the dead.
The 2,000-year-old tombs of Chinese royalty and elites, excavated near Shanghai between 1995 and 2011, reveal a varied collection of sex toys including bronze dildos, along with everyday items such as urinals and loofahs, reported IFL Science. The items will be on exhibit at San Francisco’s Asian Art Museum on Feb. 17.
Jade was an exalted and priceless material in ancient China that was used to create “deaths suits.” Thought to ward off spiritual evil and preserve the body, jade was inserted into the orifices of the wealthy deceased.
“The jade plugs are used to seal the body and keep in vital essences that can leak out during life and death,” curator Fan Zhang of the Asian Art Museum told IFLScience.
“Basically, it is to maintain the chi. The most important orifice was the mouth, and we have a beautiful example of a mouth seal in the shape of a cicada in the exhibition.”
As for the living, there were custom dildos and other sex toys for enhancing pleasure. …