Rock of ages

Tourism puts ancient drawings in public eye but leaves them exposed to danger

No, sexually explicit pictures did not begin with Marilyn Monroe in Playboy magazine in Chicago in 1953. Three thousand years ago, in the far northwestern reaches of China, men and women were getting their rocks off in what you can call either fertility rituals or sex orgies. Graphic depictions of their deeds, carved in stone, can be seen even today.

The rock art, in Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region, includes engravings showing as many as 300 men and women in mass flagrante delicto more than 1,000 years before that expression was even conceived.