The novel centres around the life of a scholar named Zhang Qiugu, who leaves his wife to spend time with famous courtesans in China's pleasure districts.
[4] In the 20th century, many intellectuals criticised it for its erotic content, and during the intervening years it "fell into oblivion",[3] with the result that by the 1980s it was difficult to obtain even a Chinese copy of the novel.
[3] Wang Tao, a man who knew Zhang Chunfan, said that the novel was based on the author's real life love affair with a courtesan in Shanghai.
[6] Mainly due to commercial reasons, Zhang Chunfan found difficulty in ending the story at an opportune time, so he continued the novel until he exhausted his imagination.
[7] He thought the moral is "one should play the game [of] sexual aberrations...the smart way so as to avoid monetary loss and family scandal", not that one should abstain from it altogether.
[12] Wang said it "does not merely tempt readers with depraved episodes and sensual female characters" but also includes instructions on how to deal with prostitutes of all levels, "how to squander money the right way, and, most important, how to become a versatile and responsible libertine".
Hu Shih and Lu Xun accused it of being, as paraphrased by Wang, "a showcase of the bad taste and frivolity of late Qing literati writers".
[7] David Wang argued that because the author had not ended the book at an appropriate time, the second half of The Nine-tailed Turtle is "a dreadfully boring work.