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I HAD never heard of that sexy literary character Ximen Qing and ''the cow house'' until earlier this month when Wan Jianquo was sentenced to four years in jail in Hebei province for publishing 60,000 copies of Jin Ping Mei, the Chinese literary classic known in English as The Golden Lotus.

  Its erotic explicitness and sexual aerobics have kept the censors of The Dragon Throne and The Proletarian Dictatorship in a lather for four centuries.

  A measure of its threat to the socialist motherland is Wan's sentence. He got 35 minutes inside for every copy he published. This was clearly a book that had to be read even, given its Ming Chinese script, by proxy.

  A verbal plot precis first introduced me to Ximen Qing. The ''cow house'' came later.

  The character of Ximen Qing straddles the work in more ways than one. He is the rich playboy with one hobby in his Who's Who entry, and he gets all the women. He is the most fortunate of men in a life complicated only by sexual technique - until, that is, he gets his compulsory comeuppance.

  Above the occasional bouts of ribaldry, Jing Ming Mei claims to be a morality tale.

  They all say that, these historical porn classics: ''We have to illustrate the immorality or else nobody will appreciate the morality by contrast,'' they explain improbably. ''Anyway, we're very well written.'' It is their way of sneaking increased salesinto posterity.

  In what is one long story with many branch tales, Ximen Qing takes as a concubine Pan Jin Lian, a poor wench sold originally as a wife to a rich but ugly confectioner. She makes passes at his handsome brother who, upright policeman that he is, rejects them.

  She then falls into the trousers of Ximen Qing, who helps her kill her husband.

  She, the ''Golden Lotus'' becomes number one ''wanton woman''. She joins Li Ping-er, the ''Little Vase'', already established in wantonness with Ximan Qing, and brings with her Chun Mei, the ''Spring Plum'' as ''wanton woman'' number three.

  Lengthy permutations on wantonness follow until Pan and Ximen are finally, and quite properly, killed by the miffed brother-in-law.

  Getting hold of the unexpurgated four-volume edition of the Jing Ping Mei in Hongkong takes a little persistence in the shops. There are many expurgated versions for Girl Guide troops which somehow lose entirely the cautionary details of the sexual imbroglio. There is an English language version of 50 years ago which kept the erotic passages - but translated them into Latin, lest the servants might understand.

  Just to show you what a small town this can be, I am indebted to a friend, who is also a member of the Obscure Publications Tribunal, for the literal translation of a particularly choice scene from Chapter 27, which adequately explained why Wan in Hebei went down for the time he did.

  My friend assures me that the book will never be prosecuted as obscene in Hongkong because it is classified as a literary classic (see what I mean?). However, this protection does not necessarily extend to its piecemeal adoption by newspapers, so you will forgive me a certain circumspection.

  In translation, Chinese sexual analogy displays a vivid reliance on the near mythical edges of botany and zoology.

  Hence in Chapter 27 we encounter a ''flower heart'', a ''snail spitting'' and a ''golden dragon searching for a melon''.

  At one point ''golden prunes'' fly about in the vicinity of the ''mouth of the frog'' - and I can tell you from the forbidden precincts of the context that if one of the ''prunes'' had actually hit the frog, there would have been one hell of a hiatus in the story involving Ming ambulances and casualty departments.

  I never knew that chickens had tongues, let along that anything of womankind resembled one. I did not need to get past the first of 12 references in the chapter to the ''cow house'' and its ''window'' to understand their whereabouts.

  I shall refrain from further reference to them, not to point out any sexual delicacy but from fear that early Ming gynaecological terminology is so ''politically incorrect'' that feminists would not let me live the week out.

  In Chapter 27, Ximen Qing and Pan Jinlian have been drinking wine in the back garden. She is tipsy and has fallen asleep on a mattress beneath a grape trellis. He has gone for a pee behind a peony plant. These people have facilitating gardens.

  He returns to find her stripped without a shred of silk save for a pair of bright red shoes. It aroused his wanton heart. Heady with wine, he also took off his clothes and sat on a nearby stool. A quite understandable reaction I think.

  The stool is without political significance. There are no references to stoves.

 Suffice it to say he took off the bright red shoes and, with their laces, tied her feet to two sides of the grape trellis.

  What follows takes place in the dangerous imagery of the farmyard and involves that peculiar sexual ubiquity, the feather duster. Its positioning on the lady gives the impression of a ''person wearing the feather'' - a civil servant - being upside down, which should please more or less everybody.

  Chun Mei, the ''Little Vase'' comes on the scene and utters a line in common sense which rings today down Chinese literature: ''I do not know what you two are up to in broad daylight, but if somebody walked in on this it would look really weird!''   Sensitive to the detumescing effects of the vicar calling unannounced, Ximen says: ''Is the back door locked?''   ''I locked it myself,'' she replies.

  Relieved, he gets back into his stride: ''Little oily mouth. Watch me hit the silver goose with the golden bullet!''   A while later he takes from his silk purse his ''wanton equipment''. I am not sure whether this kit services the mood or brings it on in the first place.

  Watching the drama unfold from behind a hedge of discretion, I can tell you that it consists of a ''silver supporter'' (a plate stand? I am still trying to work this one out), a ''sulphur ring'' - something one should not leave home without - and ointment, in case there was an accident with the plate stand, possibly.

  He informs the trellised lady that now he is into the swing of things, he will do his favourite ''old monk striking the bell'' trick.

  They must know some pretty feisty monks because, at the end of Chapter 27, they have a ruined mattress, a tumbled-down trellis and a broken sulphur ring.

  Dr Cham Ming-wing, head of Chinese at the Baptist College, says the Jin Ping Mei is an invaluable period insight into the emotions of family and concubinage at the time, and that its erotica is an artful description of love and jealousy - exactly the sort of judgement that gets it a visa through the obscenity ''heavies''.

  He says my edition is the fullest, but the very devil to get to academic colleagues across the border. Unless they show up in person at the customs house and swear on their copies of Hustler that it is for personal academic use, it is impounded.

  T. L. Tsim, broadcaster and director of the Chinese University Press, believes the book is on limited circulation around the central committee and their 12 honoured friends. Mao, he says, would know it as a keen borrower from the Forbidden City Imperial Porn Library.

  Dr Cham said that for the porn browser, it was a hard slog deep into the Jin Pang Mei before he hit pay dirt. Not in my edition it isn't.

  In the last volume there are two score pages of illustrations each describing the theme of a chapter. You should, but can't, see the one for Chapter 27! 



But it's not porn, officer