This paper attempts to criticize the aestheticism of Hu Lancheng in the context of modern Chineseness by exploring its origin. My focus is on Hu's indebtedness to women, especially to two modern Chinese female writers, Eileen Chang [Zhang Ailing] and Zhu Tianwen. I argue that Zhu's novel Notes of a Desolated man is a unique attempt to finish her mentor's incomplete projects, "On Women" and "On Chinesse Women." Interestingly, in her novel Zhu deflects Hu's Utopia of ritual propriety-music to an erotic Utopia. The paper also examines Hu's representation of aestheticism by returning to the primal scene of the Chang-Hu love affair, and reads it as a religious/mythological event. Hu's My World and My Life is likewise read as his ambitious book to transcend Chang. The paper concludes that Chang is the source for of Hu's system of aestheticism.