The genres of kunqu opera and tanci song, appearing in the Ming dynasty, were the first instances of the use of Wu dialect in literature. By the turn of the 20th century it was used in several novels that had prostitution as a subject.Snow, p. 33. In many of these novels, Wu is mainly used as dialogue of prostitute characters. In one work, Shanghai Flowers by Han Bangqing, all of the dialogue is in Wu.Snow, p. 34. Wu originally developed in genres related to oral performance. It was used in manners related to oral performance when it proliferated in written literature and it was widely used in fiction about prostitutes, a particular genre, and not in other genres. Donald B. Snow, author of Cantonese as Written Language: The Growth of a Written Chinese Vernacular, compared the development of Wu in this manner to the patterns of Baihua and Japanese vernacular writing.
