Drama Kings: Players and Publics in the Re-creation of Peking Opera, 1870-1937 9780520932791

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Drama Kings

The publisher gratefully acknowledges the generous contribution to this book provided by the Asian Studies Endowment Fund of the University of California Press Foundation.

Drama Kings Players and Publics in the Re-creation of Peking Opera, 1870–1937

Joshua Goldstein

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS • • Berkeley Los Angeles London

University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu. University of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles, California University of California Press, Ltd. London, England © 2007 by The Regents of the University of California Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Goldstein, Joshua, 1965– Drama kings : players and publics in the re-creation of Peking opera, 1870 – 1937 / Joshua Goldstein. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-520-24752-9 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Theater — China — Beijing — History. 2. Operas, Chinese — China — Beijing — History. 3. Mei, Lanfang, 1894 – 1961. I. Title. PN2876.B37G65 2007 792.0951'156 — dc22

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Contents

List of Illustrations

vii

Acknowledgments

ix

Introduction

1

Part One. (Re)Framing the Genre, 1870 – 1919 1. Late Qing Institutions of Peking Opera

17

2. From Teahouse to Playhouse

55

3. The Experimental Stage, 1895–1920

89

4. May Fourth Realism and Qi Rushan’s Theory of National Drama

134

Part Two. Peking Opera to National Drama, 1920 – 1937 5. Landscape and Figure, Nation and Character

175

6. The Limits of Reform

209

7. The Gendering of National Culture, Or, The Only Good Woman is a Man

237

8. Nationalization through Iconification

264

Epilogue

291

Notes

297

Bibliography

335

Index

355

Illustrations

Additional illustrations, keyed to the chapters of this book, and a glossary of Chinese characters, are posted at http://www-ref.usc.edu/ ~jlgoldst 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13.

Tan Xinpei The Four Famous Dan, from Northern Pictorial Lithograph of teahouse brawl, by Wu Youru Teahouse floor plan Guangxu-era teahouse Seating at the Reform Customs Theater Mei Lanfang in contemporary dress as title character in Deng Xiagu Mei Lanfang in contemporary dress as Li Renfen in A Thread of Hemp Mei Lanfang in (new) ancient costume in The Goddess Scatters Flowers Mei Lanfang in (new) ancient costume as in A Thousand Pieces of Gold for a Smile Shang Xiaoyun as Bojidi in Modengjia Girl Advertisement for Mei Lanfang cigarettes Chart of dan roles from late Qing to the Republic

25 42 59 64 65 82 120 121 124 125 166 203 248

vii

14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19.

Xun Huisheng as Li Feng in Meilong Town Cheng Yanqiu as Zhang Huizhu in Tears on a Barren Mountain Mei Lanfang riding with Mayor James Rolph in San Franscisco Mei Lanfang at reception in Hawaii Mei Lanfang receiving honorary doctorate from Pomona College Set of stamps commemorating Mei Lanfang, 1962

253 261 274 274 275 293

Acknowledgments

As with many other aspects of my life, my karmic debts as an academic are beyond my capacity to summarize in these acknowledgments, much less actually repay. I would have to begin, however, with my mentors and classmates at the University of California, San Diego. Joseph Esherick and Paul Pickowicz demonstrated patience bordering on the masochistic when they decided to accept a fidgety welfare advocate into their program with the hope of making him into a Chinese historian. I’m still hoping to become one some day, and continue to rely on their advice and scholarly acumen in pursuing that goal. Dorothy Ko opened intellectual doors for me that I would never have thought to look behind and has provided insights from a conceptual plane that I am occasionally able to glimpse but will never be able to attain. Takashi Fujitani was incredibly generous with his time, energy, and guidance, particularly during some unexpectedly trying moments. Masao Miyoshi, James Holston, George Lipsitz, Lisa Lowe, and Suzanne Cahill were great teachers who helped me form the basic ideas behind my research. As important as these mentors were in training me, my classmates were even more so in sustaining me. Conversations with Madeleine Yue Dong and Michael Chang have been invaluable, and both of them have tried their best to save me from intellectual embarrassment. Sue Fernsebner, Xiao Zhiwei, Andrew Morris, Eric Cazdyn, Elena Songster, Cecily McCaffrey, Liu Lu, Mark Eykholt, Wang Liping, and Julie

ix

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Acknowledgments

Broadwin all read chapters, brought new sources to my attention, and helpfully critiqued my work; and Jim Cook was a guardian angel. I have also had the tremendous good fortune, both during and after graduate school, of being financially supported in writing this manuscript, both directly and indirectly, by a number of institutions. While I was at UCSD, the Gleich fellowship helped me through the most intensive year of research and writing. The Yale Council on East Asian Studies gave me the better part of a year to work on this and another book, and Valerie Hansen, Deborah Davis, and Helen Siu were always generous with their time and encouragement. And Franklin and Marshall College provided a semester’s leave and summer stipends that allowed me to complete my manuscript. During my time in Beijing, several scholars and Peking opera experts were extremely generous and helped me get my bearings. Professor Guo Weidong took me under his tutelage for a year of coursework at Beijing University and has been unfailingly helpful in guiding me through the intricacies of doing research in China ever since. Professor Liu Yigao was a patient teacher. Mei Shaowu and Tu Zhen made this stranger feel quite welcome in their home and at the dinner table one chilly day over ten years ago; and the opera aficionado Wu Xiaoru also gave me some of his valuable time. Two years of working with the University of California Press have been crucial to making this book a reality, not simply as a material fact of publishing, but as (I hope) a readable work of scholarship. My greatest thanks go to Colin Mackerras and David Strand for their perceptive comments on the manuscript, as well as for providing the book with a title. Reed Malcolm, Kalicia Pivirotto, and Mary Severance held my hand each step of the way, and two anonymous readers at UC Press also provided crucial feedback. Finally, Erika Büky did an amazing job of editing the manuscript—any errors of writing and interpretation remain entirely my own, but that any sentence or footnote in this book is readable at all, let alone properly and consistently formatted, is due to her. Finally, a constellation of friends and academics has helped me in sundry ways through the many years with this project. Doug Anthony, Tani Barlow, Jennifer Callahan, Eileen Chow, Kirk Denton, Sharon Marcus, Scott Schaffer, Dina Suggs and Mark Swislocki all were subjected, in either oral or written form, to parts of this book and were generous with their feedback. Charlotte Furth, foremost and most youthful among many other young and friendly colleagues at the University of Southern California, has been a fantastic guide through the fogs of acad-

Acknowledgments

xi

eme. Michael Kowalski and his family always let me eat more than my share of potatoes gratin at Christmas supper, even if I spent most of Christmas afternoon being antisocial, hunkered down in the attic over a duffel bag full of photocopies. I dare not count how many times my sister helped me get an elusive library book or my mother and father emailed a crucial file, overnight mailed a paper, or otherwise bailed me out—in addition to just being a constant, supportive presence, quick to offer an ear or a weekend ski trip, even if I tended to turn both down. And the most thanks of all—too much to fit into a sentence, or a book, or a life—to Cynthia Freeman, for keeping me laughing and sane and crazy and going. This book is dedicated to those who struggle with love to stay awake.

Introduction Jingju [capital drama]? Pingju [Beiping drama]? Jiuju [old drama]? Guoju [national drama]? The people of the nation call it by different names. Before Beijing became Beiping it was called Jingju; afterward it was called pingju. The capital is old—a great place—so Jingju is also called old drama. Promoters of new drama [spoken drama] see Jingju and call it old drama. Promoters of Jingju think it should be called national drama. It is all the same drama, but the names are unclear. The name needs to be rectified. Sun Danhan, “Jingju? Pingju? Jiuju? Guoju?” Xiju xunkan (Drama Biweekly), 1936

In July 2001 China Central Television launched its eleventh national channel, CCTV 11, dedicated to broadcasting traditional Chinese opera and music to all of China’s thirty-four provinces and autonomous regions. Though its programmers boast more than two hundred kinds of Chinese musical drama in their broadcasting repertoire, the genre that dominates CCTV 11’s fourteen hours of daily air time is Peking opera: daily programming usually includes more than an hour of Peking opera singing and music lessons and a broadcast of a full-length performance. Also, in the prime-time lunch and dinner hours, the voices of Peking opera’s greatest stars of the 1930s can usually be heard singing their signature roles to a hungry nation. These programs, of which there are hundreds, involve today’s star actors performing actions and gestures in sync with sound recordings from past decades, in a sort of reverse karaoke. For a historian researching Peking opera, these shows offer not only a wonderful insight into the vocal and staging techniques of actors past but also a daily reminder of the iconic stature of Republican-era actors in shaping Peking opera into a genre of national importance, then and today. 1

2

Introduction

Peking opera is by far the most famous of China’s approximately 360 theatrical genres. It is also the only one that, despite being named after a locatable city, is not merely categorized as a regional drama (difang xi) but put in a category of its own, either explicitly or implicitly placed under the rubric of “national drama” (guoju). Yet, despite its valorized position, the origin of Peking opera remains controversial, because Peking opera is a composite and ever-shifting fusion of several melodic and dramatic forms.1 For many drama historians, this is precisely why discerning its aesthetic essence and combing its tangled past into a manageable history pose such an enticing challenge. Although almost all parties agree that Peking opera began to cohere as a form sometime between 1790 and 1860, the term Peking opera (jingju, jingxi, or pingju) does not enter common usage until the early twentieth century, and it originates not in Beijing but in Shanghai: Pingju: these two characters start being used after the Republic [1912]. It first appears during the early years of the Republic. When foreign students returned from abroad, they did not know what this thing pihuang was, but when they came back to China they first had to go to Shanghai, and all of Shanghai’s best actors were brought down from Beiping. When they also saw that this thing, pihuang, was being sung in all the theaters, they simply assumed that this must be the Beijing melody-style (qiangdiao), so they called it jingxi [capital plays]. After the central government moved south [in 1928], Beijing [lit. northern capital] was renamed Beiping [lit. northern peace], and it was no longer good to call it capital plays, so they renamed it pingju, and this is the origin of the name pingju. Actually, the denizens of Beiping never called it jingxi or pingxi.2

The simple answer, then, according to Qi Rushan—probably the most influential, encyclopedic, and prolific expert on Peking opera in the twentieth century—is that Peking opera (whether written as jingju, jingxi, or pingju) is merely a label pasted on to dramas performed, for the most part, in a style comprising several dozen melodic themes otherwise known collectively as pihuang.3 This simple answer masks a technical complexity that is revealed the instant this label is peeled back. The above passage continues: During the Qing dynasty, before the Tongzhi reign [1862–75], the most popular styles in Beiping were yiqiang, kunqiang, and bangziqiang. At this time bangzi and pihuang were not yet fully developed. Around 1860, bangzi and pihuang were competing neck and neck with kun and yi styles, and with all four styles roughly equal, no one style deserved to be named jingxi, so at that time there was no word jingxi. In fact, at that time [pihuang] was usually called erhuang, and even the word pihuang did not exist. Only at the end of the Qing did newspapers begin to use the word

Introduction

3

[pihuang] or huiban [the Anhui drama troupes’ style]. Anyone who wanted to hear pihuang performed might alternatively say they were going to hear huiban, but absolutely no one said huiqiang [Hui tunes or style]. The Anhui troupes before the Tongzhi period all mainly performed the kun style and did not specialize in pihuang until Cheng Changgeng, who did so at the end of his career. He first sang kun opera, and later added pihuang. At that time actors sometimes said the two characters, jingqiang [capital melodies], but this meant a specific style of Hui melody [i.e., it did not mean jingju or Peking opera].4

To avoid excessive terminological complexity, in this book I generally use the Anglicized term Peking opera. This term in fact brings its own significance to the discussion: it emerged during the era under study, and, being in English, bears the traces of colonial modernity, a context of great importance in shaping the genre’s identity.5 What we call Peking opera is a modern construction: its parameters, performance, and disseminations were greatly affected by the conditions of colonial modernity. And though few scholars dispute that Peking opera is of relatively recent vintage by Chinese standards, its modernity is much more controversial. Even though the current scholarly consensus is that Peking opera did not coalesce until about 1845, it is still generally depicted as fundamentally isolated from issues of modernity and foreign imperialism—historical factors that, by any standards, were already shaping Chinese history. There is a powerful impetus to construe Peking opera as wholly traditional and purely Chinese: this is a picture of exaggerated contrasts, the outlines of which were etched during the Republican era (in particular the May Fourth era, 1915–25), amid the multiple crises of foreign imperialism, regional fragmentation, economic upheaval, and political and cultural revolts. But just a brief glance through the newspapers and tabloids of the late Qing and Republican eras reveals that Peking opera was the height of fashion not only in Beijing, but also in treaty ports such as Tianjin, Shanghai, and Hankou, urban spaces in which imperialist intervention, foreign cultural influence, and modern urban technologies were at their most visible and explicit. In the 1920s and 1930s, Peking opera stars set fashion trends, negotiated contracts with recording companies and movie studios, and socialized with foreign and Chinese dignitaries, bankers, and journalists. Nevertheless, Peking opera was seen as somehow in modernity but not of it. This apparent contradiction makes interpreting its development in these decades all the more fascinating. This study is neither a search for Peking opera’s historical origins nor

4

Introduction

the obverse, an attempt to strip away the obfuscations of false consciousness to reveal Peking opera as a purely modern manufactured myth. Rather, the question I am asking is this: Given that Peking opera was a composite of forms that was (and still is) in flux, what were the historical forces that made it seem urgent to all concerned—its aggressive detractors as well as its reformers and preservationists—to assign it a fixed essence, even though they were all quite aware that this very action represented yet another layer of influences reshaping the form? How did the changing discursive and social context of the late Qing and Republican eras—the explosion of mass-reproduced commercial print and visual media, the ascendance of discourses of the nation and the individual, changes in how gender was conceived and performed, and the economic and social experiences of colonial modernity—influence how Peking opera was perceived, produced, and performed? And how did efforts to define it influence what it could represent and how it could do so? These questions are all the more relevant because Peking opera throughout this period was arguably China’s most commercially dynamic and widely advertised, watched, and written-about form of cultural entertainment. Thus this study, while concentrating on the transformations and conceptualizations of Peking opera as a genre, is ultimately concerned with illuminating issues of late Qing and Republican era history, particularly urban popular culture and gender construction, and their intersection with national formations. My approach to Peking opera is indebted to the works of numerous scholars, most obviously Eric Hobsbawm and Terrence Ranger’s work on “invented traditions,” an idea that sparked its own veritable subgenre of cultural history based on the now almost axiomatic assertion that “the very appearance of movements for the defense or revival of traditions, ‘traditionalist’ or otherwise,” indicates a “break” in historical continuity, a modern rupture with the past.6 Yet, though I argue that Peking opera’s formation as a genre is intimately interwoven with technologies of colonial modernity, I also hope to reframe the premises of the invented-tradition approach. It is often assumed that behind every invented tradition lurks a discernible ideological agenda, or that unveiling the manipulated and constructed nature of such practices somehow demystifies them and weakens their ability to mobilize participant-spectator affect; in most instances neither assumption has proved correct, and certainly neither applies well here. Indeed, many of the artists and scholars of the period seem to be perfectly aware that they are constructing Peking opera, (re)interpreting it, and shaping it into a tradition; and they seem remarkably comfortable

Introduction

5

with the paradox of inventing tradition—was this not what it meant to be an active participant in one’s own culture, history, and nation? The beautifully oxymoronic neologism invented tradition ascribes a kind of manipulative agency to a tradition’s inventors and a false consciousness to its consumers that requires reconsideration. Rather than build on the dubious opposition of modernity and tradition, I instead approach Peking opera as an object of a certain kind of knowledge production, enmeshed in the context of colonial modernity. Evidence for the assertion that Peking opera’s development and spread was shaped by technologies and practices of colonial modernity is plainly laid out in the chapters that follow, but a brief description of what colonial modernity implies is in order here. A framework most prominently championed by Tani Barlow and a recent generation of postcolonial scholars, it proposes that Western-modeled modernization and colonialism must be grasped as integrally interwoven processes involving “discursive powers that increasingly connect at key points to the globalizing impulses of capitalism.”7 This framework proposes neither a wholesale importation of “modernity” from the West (an assertion untenable in most cases, and certainly in that of China, where elements of arguably modern commercial, urban, and social relations date back to at least the late 1500s) nor a simple substitution of an alternative national modernity—a distinctly Chinese modernity, say, which shifts issues of inequality, class, and gender into an essentialized nationalist framework. Rather, the term highlights how the context of colonial domination compelled the reorganization of institutions, technologies, and practices so as to address and negotiate its threat, resulting in a translation of colonized societies’ production and reproduction processes into frameworks interpellated by the dominant powers (in China’s case both Western and Japanese). A colonial-modernity framework is thus highly compatible with the analysis of colonialism as a process of knowledge construction pioneered by Bernard Cohn and expanded on by scholars applying and modifying the theories of Michel Foucault, such as Timothy Mitchell and Partha Chatterjee. In his work on colonial India, Cohn recognized that colonialism involved far more than merely the brute force of invasion, that “in coming to India, [the British] unknowingly and unwittingly invaded and conquered not only a territory but an epistemological space as well. The ‘facts’ of this space did not exactly correspond to those of the invaders. Nevertheless, the British believed they could explore and conquer this space through translation: establishing correspondence could make the unknown and the strange knowable.”8 This process of reclassi-

6

Introduction

fying “facts” not only imposed British notions of property rights and laws on Indian socioeconomic relations but also reached into the cultural practices and history of the colonized: “Cultural forms in societies newly classified as traditional were reconstructed and transformed by and through this knowledge, which created new categories and oppositions between colonizer and colonized, European and Asian, modern and traditional, West and East.”9 Vernacular languages were classified into systematic grammars, artifacts and texts into archeological taxonomies, the laws of the Mughal Empire and Hindu and Muslim communities into corrupt forms of despotism and theocracy that needed subjugating to Britain’s more judicious rule. Mitchell, Chatterjee, Barlow, and other postcolonial scholars have added to this insight by showing that these processes were not simply the acts of colonizers on the colonized, but that anticolonial nationalists, nativist modernizers, and the “semicolonized” elites of China often participated in similar projects of knowledge production, with the goal of helping to forge more powerful and manageable state forms that might ultimately contribute to the struggle to resist colonial domination. While such an approach may sound abstract, I attempt to present a generally chronological narrative, grounded in an array of evidence that demonstrates these notions to be historically concrete. Chapter 1 describes the basic institutions of Peking opera in the nineteenth century. It introduces a variety of economic and social institutions—Qing court patronage, commercial acting troupes, schools for actors, and commercial theater networks—to demonstrate how Peking opera, from the moment it coalesced as a recognized dramatic form, was as much enmeshed in the social and political structures of the Qing imperial metropole as it was in a network of touring and commercial expansion. These developments were made possible through technologies, such as steamships, railroads, and newspapers, that point to the importance of the context of colonial modernity. In this highly commercialized and prestigious convergence between Qing imperial and colonial modern networks, the social dynamics of gender performance played a central role in Peking opera’s ascendance: the dominating presence of the laosheng actor (who took the roles of older male characters, models of late Qing masculinity) was crucial to the form’s social and cultural elevation. Chapter 2 focuses on the teahouse theater as a microcosm of late Qing social relations and cultural tastes, then traces some of the basic shifts in the organization of Peking opera theaters as social spaces catalyzed in the early twentieth century by the introduction of the new-style

Introduction

7

playhouse centered on the proscenium stage. The influence of architectural space and audience socialization are discussed throughout the book and are also the primary focus of Chapter 6. These themes will be immediately familiar to historians of modern European and American theater and popular culture: the works of Norbert Elias and Michel Foucault on the social disciplining of the public and of Jean-Christophe Agnew, Jeffrey Ravel, James Johnson, and Lawrence Levine on Parisian, English, and American theaters of the eighteenth and nineteenth century all serve as bases of comparison.10 Another useful point of reference is provided by Timothy Mitchell’s analysis in Colonizing Egypt of the integral connection between disciplinary practices and modes of representation. Following Foucault, Mitchell argues that the colonial reorganization of Egyptian military forces, schools, villages, and cities all involved processes of ordering space to make populations legible and manageable, a process he calls enframing: “Enframing is a method of dividing up and containing. . . . Within these containers, items can be isolated, enumerated, kept.”11 Mitchell points out that the disciplining effect of enframing is inseparable from its representational effect—the construction of reality as an exhibition, of social spaces as material realizations of conceptual models. The supposed superiority of enframing technologies is based on this effect: the organized colonial city is said to be superior to the squalid and disorderly native one, the modern school of self-managed learning superior to the religious one of masterly authority over pupils, because these spaces are material realizations of legible conceptual models. The new playhouse theater functioned similarly. With its detailed blueprints, numbered and assigned seats, and division and isolation of activities— purchasing tickets at ticket booths, snacking and chatting in the lobby, watching attentively in the auditorium—it was an explicit technology of enframing aimed at a new Chinese public of national citizens, its selfdisciplining order clearly superior to the uncivilized, status-riven chaos of the teahouse. In later chapters, I elaborate on Mitchell’s concept of enframing to describe a shift in the dominant practices of representation in Republican-era urban China more generally. Great efforts were made to create and enforce a demarcation between social reality and cultural representation, a division that would be crucial in reshaping Peking opera as a genre, and gender as it was performed on the stage. Chapter 3 places the changes in the Peking opera theater in a broader historical context of late Qing and early Republican efforts to reform the Qing polity into a Republican nation-state. From the 1890s to the 1910s, a vibrant concatenation of reformist experiments converged in the Peking

8

Introduction

opera theater, both in the onstage productions of plays—which increasingly treated contemporary and global issues using all the technologies available in the new-style playhouse—and in the audience, particularly with the integration of women into what had previously been the allmale space of the public theater. Theaters were at once spaces of social liberation and gender experimentation and sites over which various social fractions—male actors and the newly emerging female actresses, male and female fans, foreign-educated students, and wealthy patrons— competed for control, while drama as a medium of cultural communication came to be seen as crucial to shaping citizens’ political attitudes and social behavior. This atmosphere of experimentation dissipates rather abruptly, however, in the May Fourth era, and chapter 4 is devoted to explaining the various factors that contributed to Peking opera’s transformation from a relatively loose and elastic dramatic form to a much more rigidly delimited genre used almost exclusively to represent “traditional Chinese” subject matter. While chapter 4 starts with a discussion of May Fourth intellectual attacks on Peking opera as an inherently feudalistic and backward art form—arguments quite familiar to those acquainted with the dominant historiography of the May Fourth movement as the pivotal event of modern Chinese cultural radicalism—it also suggests the need to revise our dominant narrative of the era. Indeed, from the study of a popular cultural form like Peking opera, we find that the May Fourth moment was as much defined by the discursive engagement of intellectuals reductively characterized as conservatives as by selfproclaimed radicals. More important, the dichotomies so characteristic of this moment (for example, tradition versus modernity, Confucianism versus science and democracy, Chinese versus Western) were not the enlightened products of a Chinese cultural avant-garde—a notion that, despite its centrality to Chinese historical materialist orthodoxy, is profoundly idealist. Rather, they took hold so quickly and pervasively because they articulated experiences already embodied in urban daily life practices and public spaces, including—but not at all limited to—commercial theaters. Part 2 of the book is dedicated to describing Peking opera after the May Fourth moment. In the 1920s and 1930s a concerted effort was made to construct the genre as a model of Chinese national culture. In these decades the Peking opera stage was dominated by male dan actors (male performers of female roles), epitomized by the Four Famous Dan (Mei Lanfang, Cheng Yanqiu, Xun Huisheng, and Shang Xiaoyun). Chapter 5 takes as its subject the Peking opera star, both as a national

Introduction

9

celebrity and as a character on the stage. As stars and their images circulated throughout the nation, they became subjected to endless gossip and scrutiny, publicity that manifested the close interconnection between a growing commercial investment and the public’s increasing emotional investment in these national figures.12 The attention paid to stars’ personal lives and political commitments in the tabloid press not only informs us of the networks of patronage and influence to which stars were indebted; it also intersects with an increasing emphasis on the actor’s ability to convey the deep emotional interiority of characters onstage. This concentrated attention on the actor as a public citizen who specialized in crafting and portraying the psychologically complex individual was, of course, related to other social and institutional trends, and this discussion continues in chapter 6, which describes the continued attempts to reform theaters and acting schools in order to foster the proper cultural habits of self-regulating citizenship. The changing terrain of gender performance and homo- and heterosexuality within the theater converge in the description in chapter 7 of the rise of a new form of female role known as the huashan (lit. flower gown/garment). If women were becoming increasingly influential in urban theaters, both as actresses and audience, why was the Peking opera stage overwhelmingly dominated by male dan actors? Borrowing in part from the works of Judith Butler, Eve Sedgwick, and Faye Dudden,13 this chapter explores the ramifications of the representational practices of enframing for constructions of sex and gender, arguing that this regime of representation clearly had uneven effects on the public perception and reception of male and female actors. Chapter 8 goes on to describe the rivalry between the two most famous male dan actors, Mei Lanfang and Cheng Yanqiu. Both men undertook tours of Western countries as a way of raising Peking opera’s status as a globally significant cultural form. Peking opera’s journey to the United States and Europe reveals remarkable parallels between the discourses of cultural nationalism that recast Peking opera as national drama and the discursive categories of Orientalism.14 Mei Lanfang’s eventual victory in this rivalry also tells us something of the weakness of Republican-era state institutions (with which Cheng Yanqiu was more cozily aligned) when compared with the diffuse power exerted by the commercial media (Mei Lanfang’s most actively cultivated and supportive source of patronage). The dominant thread of this narrative, which spans more than seven decades, is Peking opera’s steady rise to national prominence, a rise that

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Introduction

is full of tensions and transformations inflected by China’s shift from a troubled empire to a troubled republic. Early Peking opera was influenced by Qing court patronage: during Tan Xinpei’s heyday in the late Qing, the genre was closely associated with the patronage of the Empress Dowager Cixi, renowned as an opera addict. Yet when the Qing dynasty fell, to a chorus of denunciations, Peking opera continued to thrive. It was beloved by both Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai, who had an expensive load of Peking opera costumes and other paraphernalia shipped to the remote Communist base area of Yan’an during the war against Japan in the late 1930s. During the same years, the Japanese puppet government of Manchukuo dubbed Peking opera its official national drama, hoping to use it as part of a project of cultural assimilation by playing on Peking opera’s historical connection to the Manchu court and its great popularity among Han Chinese. And at the same time, in remote southwestern China, where the Guomindang (GMD) built their base during the Anti-Japanese War, Peking opera was being promoted and warmly received as a key part of the Chiang Kai-shek government’s cultural programs promoting national resistance against Japan. In other words, within a few decades Peking opera went from being closely associated with the Qing imperial court—whose existence and legacy Republican leaders attacked as obstacles to Chinese nation building—to being a cultural form so integrally tied to the idea of a Chinese nation that governments across the political spectrum all saw it as a powerful tool for building cultural nationalism. This book is devoted to tracing some of the sociopolitical and discursive processes responsible for shaping Peking opera between these two historical moments. We will be as interested in the historical forces that motivated Peking opera’s construction into a monument of Chinese national culture as in the aesthetic timbers out of which this edifice was built. It will be useful, therefore, to present a brief sketch of the genre—an introduction to the basic melodic and stylistic components from which Peking opera was formed.15

Peking Opera in the Nineteenth Century: a Melodic Patchwork In the early Qing dynasty (1644–1911), the most popular forms of drama in Beijing were kunqu and yiqiang, both of which originated in the Southern Yangzi (Jiangnan) region. Handling wen (civil) themes and generally centered on a romance involving a beauty and a scholar, kunqu was accompanied by gently paced music supplied by a small orchestra

Introduction

11

called the wenchang (lit. civil stage), which was led by two flutes (dizi) and included minimal percussion. Kunqu very rarely directly portrayed martial (wu) themes, and, although full of graceful physical movement, included little in the way of exciting acrobatics.16 In contrast, other dramatic styles might stress wu themes (or alternate between wen and wu). The orchestras for the highly acrobatic martial plays, the wuchang (lit. martial stage), were dominated by drums and gongs. Kunqu was the only form of drama in the Qing to hold the privileged designation ya (elegant, refined; cf. yabu, lit. elegant register). All other dramatic forms, whether portraying civil or military themes, were designated as either huabu (lit. flower registers) or luantan (assorted melodies) and viewed as predominantly popular forms. The yabu designation is usually associated with imperial court favor, and, through most of the Qing, kunqu was the primary genre staged within the Forbidden City. Yet some huabu forms were popular with the court as well. Yiqiang was performed inside and outside the palace grounds throughout the Qing. Other drama forms, like bangzi, “clapper” operas (a broad category of highly percussive dramas with a variety of regional forms), were seen as cruder and were not permitted in the palace; this more polarized difference was expressed not through the ya and hua opposition but by the opposition of ya and su (plain, popular, crude). In the 1780s, a newcomer from the west (Sichuan and Shaanxi), qinqiang—an exciting and more su style—arrived in Beijing. Qinqiang was a regional subtype of bangzi. The leading exponent of qinqiang was Wei Changsheng. Wei was a charismatic male performer of female roles, a dan (women were generally prohibited from performing publicly in the Qing, though troupes of actresses sometimes performed in households and at private affairs). Wei Changsheng quickly became notorious for his bawdy antics, and qinqiang was banned from Beijing in 1785. Wei then took the style to Jiangnan, where many of his techniques for portraying female roles, especially hairstyles and costuming—in particular the qiao, a sort of small stilt that gave the illusion of the actor’s having bound feet, and was hence particularly useful for portraying flirtatious or lascivious female characters—were picked up by Jiangnan actors of various styles. Wei’s bangzi influence was not long absent from the imperial capital, however. In 1790, in celebration of the Qianlong emperor’s eightieth birthday, a general call went out to Jiangnan opera companies to visit Beijing and join in the festivities, partly because of their mastery of kunqu, but also because Qianlong was entranced by the huabu dramas of the south, including yiqiang (also known as yiyangqiang, or jing-

12

Introduction

qiang). These troupes, known as the Anhui companies, were a hit with both the court and Beijing urbanites generally, especially when spiced with Wei’s qinqiang influence. Greeted by great success in the capital, many of the southern companies chose to remain in Beijing, though they continued to recruit most of their young apprentice actors from the Jiangnan region. The most successful and renowned of these companies were the size of a small battalion (including up to 150 actors, musicians, and stagehands) and came to be known as the Four Great Anhui troupes. One of the central melodic modes that these companies used (one that was dominant in yiqiang) was known as erhuang. These troupes, with one or two rises and falls along the way, dominated the Beijing drama world for most of the nineteenth century and were the key institutions whose creative alchemy would, over a period of several decades, result in the development of Peking opera. By consistently absorbing fresh local styles and offering a blend of wen and wu, ya and su dramas, they managed to appeal to the tastes of an urban audience ranging from small local peddlers to high-ranking officials. Aside from kunqu, which was still a favorite among the literati, by far the most popular melodic style up to the 1830s was erhuang. The most esteemed troupe of the 1830s, the Sanqing (Three Celebrations) Company, was led by a dan actor, Gao Langting. Gao specialized in erhuang. Despite the fact that Gao was stocky and more than thirty years old, a venerable age for a dan actor, it was claimed that “the moment he steps onto the stage he is the essence of womanliness, with not a whiff of brawny force. He always entrances those who see and hear him into forgetting he is a fake woman.”17 The primary historical sources for this period, a dozen or so highly literary diaries of opera buffs, are almost exclusively dedicated to extolling and ranking the dan performers of the time (more than 160 are described), and there is no doubt that Beijing’s opera world was overwhelmingly dominated by men who specialized in performing female characters. All the Anhui troupes, and most of the leading troupes in the other varieties of opera (including bangzi and jingqiang) had a dan at the helm until the 1830s. Around this time several sheng (male role) performers of a local Hubei style called handiao became extremely popular in the capital, and the Anhui companies started recruiting them into their ranks. The core melodic mode for handiao, known as xipi, included many frenetic and bright melodies especially suited to acrobatic wu performances. With these xipi performers, the Anhui troupes presented programs that mixed kunqu, erhuang, and xipi. Far and away the most impressive figure of the

Introduction

13

day was the laosheng Cheng Changgeng (1811–79), an Anhui native who took over as head of the Sanqing company. Although great dan actors did not fall into obscurity, from around 1850 until 1910, laosheng actors bestrode the Beijing drama world, heading the majority of the capital’s largest opera troupes. Similarly, kunqu did not disappear, but by the 1870s it was taking a backseat to xipi and erhuang. By the turn of the century the term pihuang —combining the pi of xipi with the huang of erhuang—was commonly used to describe the dramas performed by Beijing’s major drama troupes. Though combining xipi and erhuang was typical by the 1870s, and the term pihuang was common by the 1890s, it was by no means a closed musical system. Throughout the late nineteenth century it was fashionable for pihuang troupes to perform alongside bangzi companies, resulting in mutual influences. Melodic variations were constantly being invented. The 1860s and 1870s saw a radical change in the main instrumental accompaniment, from the paired dizi (flute) to the huqin (a twostringed fiddle).18 In the 1880s, the laosheng Tan Xinpei (1847–1917) began assimilating many erhuang melodies previously used only by dan characters into his performances.19 In the early twentieth century, Tan exchanged melodies with his friend Liu Baoquan, the era’s most famous performer of dagu (lit. big drum song), a much simpler musical style that shared very little with Peking opera. Yet, according to the drama historian Wu Xiaoru, when Tan sang these tunes “from beginning to end everyone felt they were Peking opera (jingxi) and not dagu or anything else.”20 This brief sketch of Peking opera’s melodic makeup substantiates that the composite dramatic form called Peking opera was indeed constantly changing throughout the nineteenth century. The project of identifying the genre’s stylistic or musical essence is like trying to draw straight lines distinguishing blues from rock and roll, and both from R & B: it can spark meaningful discussions and generative critiques and histories, but in many ways the distinctions are irresolvable. The most productive and succinct approach perhaps follows the spirit of Wu Xiaoru’s observation: like so many other cultural phenomena, Peking opera was hard to describe succinctly, but people felt they knew it when they saw it. Such a “definition” forces us to pay as much attention to how the term itself was deployed and defined as to the form and content of the dramas so defined and the processes by which they were produced and consumed.

Pa r t On e

(Re)Framing the Genre, 1870–1919

Chapter 1

Late Qing Institutions of Peking Opera

Cheng Changgeng’s first performances on the Beijing stage in the early 1830s were disastrous. Alternately ignored and heckled by audiences, the proud young laosheng performer vanished from the stage for three years, during which he practiced assiduously.1 When next Cheng opened his mouth onstage, at a prestigious private “competition” to perform one of the most challenging roles in the laosheng repertoire—that of Wu Yuan in the play Escape from Zhao Pass (Wen Zhaoguan)—Cheng unleashed the most powerful and influential voice of his generation, a voice which, it was said, could “soar through the clouds and split rocks, its reverberations trailing deliciously around the rafters, and amid this superb, soaring clarity conveying still another deeper and more powerful note.”2 Cheng became identified with some of the most challenging male lead roles, including that of Guan Yu, the paragon of loyalty from the Three Kingdoms saga and a deity in the pantheon of the acting world. It was a role with strict protocols of makeup and costume that Cheng utterly transformed. Indeed, Cheng Changgeng was so central to the consolidation of Peking opera that several drama historians have called him its founder.3 A thrilling performer of heroic roles onstage and a commanding personality offstage, Cheng headed both the Three Celebrations Drama (Sanqing) Troupe and the Beijing Actors’ Guild for nearly twenty years. One brief biography from 1927 attempts to capture Cheng’s daunting stature: 17

18

(Re)Framing the Genre [Members of the acting community] called him Big Boss (da laoban), and he continues to be remembered by this name even today. He had no flaw to be ashamed of in either his artistic qualifications or his personal character. . . . His stage presence was awesome, even inspiring fear. An anecdote conveys this. Once, at a private performance (tanghui), he performed Guan Yu in Attacking Changsha (Zhan Changsha). His expression was so aweinspiring, his eyes so scorching, that the audience found it impossible to look at him directly. When he took the stage and struck his entrance pose, it was like a true god descending, and made the audience all unconsciously rise from their seats in reverence.4

On his deathbed in 1879, Cheng passed the leadership of his Three Celebrations Troupe to the laosheng actor Yang Yuelou (1844–90), bypassing one of his young students, the laosheng Tan Xinpei (1847–1917). It is said that although Cheng knew Tan was destined to become the most acclaimed laosheng of the next generation, he was convinced that under Tan’s leadership the Three Celebrations would disintegrate, that Tan would be unwilling to make the sacrifices necessary to keep the troupe together through times of economic stress. Tan did indeed become the greatest star of his generation, leading the drama world in a full-speed charge down the path of individual stardom and commercialization. That Peking opera was dominated in the decades of its consolidation (1850–1910) by performers of laosheng roles is remarkable; throughout the preceding century the stage had been ruled by male dan, cross-dressing male performers of female roles. Men performed the roles of female characters in all the styles that contributed to the mélange of Peking opera, from the “refined” (ya) style of kunqu, to the more folksy or “crude” (su) styles of xipi, erhuang, and bangzi.5 Male dan typically had brief careers, during which the most successful were admired for their elegance, youthful beauty, and charm; these graceful youths served as the muses for numerous compilations of laudatory criticism and misty poetry by aspiring literati. Indeed, most of the historical sources on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Beijing drama are dedicated to young dan actors. Yet it was on the backs of the bearded laosheng that Peking opera rose from its middling status as an agglomeration of mainly su styles to unparalleled cultural prominence in the late nineteenth century. The unprecedented popular appeal of the laosheng’s masculine performance in this era no doubt reflects the militarization of popular culture in the midst of cataclysmic rebellions—the Taiping (1850–64), Nian (1860–74), and Muslim rebellions (1870–80s)—and military confrontations with colonial powers—the First Opium War (1839–42), the

Late Qing Institutions of Peking Opera

19

Second Opium War (1858–60), the Sino-French War (1884–85), and the Sino-Japanese War (1894–95). But what made the male lead actor the nucleus around which Peking opera consolidated was his specifically gendered position both within the drama world and the greater society; it was crucial that these leaders of Peking opera were not feminized dan, that they had, instead, a masculine persona both on- and offstage. Cheng Changgeng was certainly not the single-handed progenitor of Peking opera, but his eminence as the greatest of the “First Three Outstandings” (qian san jie, three laosheng who dominated the stage from 1850 to 1879) makes him an excellent guide to the institutions of Peking opera during its years of consolidation. Tan Xinpei—known as the King of Actors (liyuan dawang) and undisputed leader of the “Later Three Outstandings” (hou san jie) 6 —aptly demonstrates both the continuation of the male lead’s prominence from 1880 to the end of the Qing dynasty (in 1911) and the sea change brought about by increased commercialization of the acting world. In the span of two generations, Peking opera rose from a folksy and innovative mix of local melodies to a favorite style of both the imperial court and the commercial teahouse crowd, a combined fan base that launched it to new and eventually national heights. This chapter provides sketches of the key institutions of Peking opera—court patronage, the Actors’ Guild, troupe organization, acting schools, and touring networks—along with descriptions of these laoshengs’ on-stage and off-stage personas. In addition to providing background for my subsequent analysis, my goal here is to examine the environment out of which Peking opera emerged and to understand why the laosheng played such a pivotal role in Peking opera’s consolidation in these decades.

The Qing Court and the Actors’ Guild The Qianlong emperor (r. 1735–96) developed his addiction to drama on his first southern tour in 1751, during which he was treated by Jiangnan elites to cavalcades of dramatic performances. (Jiangnan is the prosperous region around the Yangzi delta from which hailed the bulk of Ming and Qing scholar-officials.) On returning to Beijing, Qianlong commanded his Jiangnan officials to select the best drama troupes from the cities of Yangzhou and Suzhou to attend the capital for his mother’s gargantuan sixtieth-birthday celebration. Hundreds of actors made the trek north for the festivities:

20

(Re)Framing the Genre From the Xihua gate to the Gaoliang Bridge outside Xizhi gate, over the space of ten li [about three miles] stages were erected, each with their own separate area decked out with lanterns. Merchant stalls were not to be seen on either side of the broad heavenly road. Here was the splendor of the empire, the treasures of the imperial palace, inaugural ribbons were festooned like flowers, whole booths laid out in brocade. . . . Every ten steps there was another stage, southern tunes and northern melodies, music from the four directions, the ingenious techniques of young actors, stirring songs and dancing costumes. Before [a passerby] had ceased hearing the [drama] just passed, the one in front was beckoning.7

Over the next fifty years the court observed every major imperial birthday with a similar theatrical smorgasbord. Edicts in preparation for Qianlong’s eightieth birthday in 1790 began appearing two years in advance of the event.8 The Three Celebrations troupe—which Cheng Changgeng headed in the mid-nineteenth century—hailed from the Jiangnan region and came north to the capital for the event; it was soon followed by the Four Delights, Gentle Spring, and Spring Stage troupes. These four troupes, which came to be known as the Four Great Anhui Companies, were the drama troupes mainly responsible for the coalescence of the form that was later dubbed Peking opera. For the Qing court, dramatic performance was a regular component of imperial celebrations, seasonal festivities, and monthly rituals. The palace grounds and summer retreats contained more than twenty theaters, some of them architectural masterpieces three stories high.9 The Qing had initially inherited its offices for the handling of court actors from the Ming (1368–1644), but by Qianlong’s day these institutions had undergone several changes. Under the Ming, the majority of court performers had been women organized into the Jiaofangsi under the supervision of the Board of Rites. They were officially registered as “‘beggar households,’ which the commoners call the ‘great poor’ [dapin]. They live in an area outside the city walls. . . . [G]ood people will not have relations with them. . . . Their women dress in underclothes and are professionals of the pillow and sleeping mat. These women got their start when emperors executed a criminal and then registered the surviving wives, and officials call on them for salacious purposes.”10 Although the majority of Ming actresses survived in poverty, a small subset became courtesan celebrities and sterling figures among the late Ming literati. In hindsight, the rise of such courtesans was seen as evidence of decadence, the primary cause of the Ming’s collapse. The Qing court planned to avoid such moral failure by purging the acting profes-

Late Qing Institutions of Peking Opera

21

sion of women, thereby shielding their bannermen and officials from temptation. The Yongzheng emperor effectively banned female performers from the court in 1723, replacing them with several hundred eunuchs.11 The court’s prohibition led to a customary ban on actresses performing in commercial theaters as well. As a result, attractive young boys came to monopolize female dan roles on the Qing stage, and, like their female predecessors, doubled as courtesans offstage. Women’s involvement with Qing drama was further limited when the Qianlong emperor issued an edict banning them from the commercial theater audience.12 In 1740 Qianlong transferred the administration of drama to the Southern Bureau (Nanfu) under the Bureau of Imperial Household Affairs (Neiwu fu). During the great birthday celebrations of Qianlong’s reign, it was the Southern Bureau that oversaw the influx of Jiangnan performers. Under Qianlong the number of court actors ballooned to more than a thousand, divided into two groups: the Neixue (lit. Inside School) for court eunuchs, and the Waixue (lit. Outside School) for the hundreds of Jiangnan newcomers.13 The Outside School actors were by far Qianlong’s favorites, adept both at kunqu—the ya style deemed appropriate for court performances—and at a variety of more su styles, collectively called luantan, that were typically much more lively and racy. These Jiangnan actors—among them the Anhui troupes—were also extremely popular with the Beijing public, and after the celebrations many of the best Hui troupes chose to remain in the capital. Not all emperors are opera buffs, however. The Daoguang emperor (r. 1821–50) decried the court’s obsession with drama as “extorting the ordinary people’s fat and grease to provide the pleasures and entertainments of important officials and misdirecting unauthorized taxes to the detriment of my common people.”14 In 1827 Daoguang gutted the Outside School, banned actors from the palace, and reorganized the approximately four hundred remaining Inner School eunuchs under a new office, the Shengpingshu (Bureau of Ceremonial Music, lit. Bureau of Rising Peace).15 Daoguang’s shake-up had a significant effect on Peking opera’s formation. His purge sent hundreds of Jiangnan actors who specialized in kunqu into Beijing’s streets to look for work. There they mixed with Beijing’s commercial drama troupes, which mostly specialized in the xipi and erhuang styles. Daoguang apparently hoped that, with commercial troupes shut out of the palace and the pernicious affects of the Outside School removed, the court would remain isolated from luantan’s crude influence and remain a reserve of refined kunqu.16 Beijing’s commercial

22

(Re)Framing the Genre

theaters, however, were energized by the influx of purged actors, and it was under their creative influence in the commercial teahouse theaters that xipi, erhuang and kunqu underwent the cross-pollination from which Peking opera, and great actors like Cheng Changgeng, soon emerged.17 In addition to training and managing the Inner School’s eunuch actors, the Bureau of Rising Peace also supervised Beijing’s professional acting community. But this small office, located in the court, could hardly oversee the daily activities of the myriad actors scattered throughout Beijing. Instead, daily authority over the capital’s professional actors lay in the hands of the actors’ own guild, the Liyuan Gonghui (lit. Guild of the Pear Garden).18 The Actors’ Guild oversaw the city’s professional actors. All newcomer actors to Beijing had to register with the Actors’ Guild, as did every acting company, private teacher, and training school, and the guild could bar actors from performing in the city if they violated its rules. The Actors’ Guild was a religious as well as professional and community organization, part of a vital subculture that in many ways helped actors survive the poverty and intense discrimination they faced. Actors had their own complex pantheon, including the “trade founder,” Laolangshen, who, legend held, had once been incarnated as the Emperor Xuanzong of the Tang dynasty, himself a great actor of chou (clown or comic character) roles. Every actor’s home had an altar to Laolangshen, and incense was offered to him before every performance, usually by a chou.19 Guan Yu (aka Guan Gong, Guandi), the revered martial deity and paragon of yi (righteousness, loyalty, charity), was also greatly respected, and all business dealings for the year were hashed out on Guan Yu’s ritualized birthday. Ritual rules and practices were manifest in all manner of daily backstage activities and annual celebrations. The first actor to apply makeup for a performance was always a chou; actors with painted faces could not talk before a mirror; backstage seating and prop arrangements were strictly and intricately mapped and invested with ritual significance; sets of auspicious plays, one involving a generous sprinkling of chicken blood, had to be performed on particular dates, including lucky plays for “trunk opening” and “trunk closing” days (marking the beginning and end of the actors’ working year); a week-long celebration, accompanied by a meatless fast, was held in the ninth month to honor the god Jiuhuang, a deity linked to music.20 Along with providing a center for these ritual activities, the guild offered monetary relief for poor actors and held charity performances every year. Just as significant, it provided actors with a properly maintained burial ground, as described in this inscription:

Late Qing Institutions of Peking Opera

23

In this charitable (yi) burial ground, friends are joined in righteousness. . . . The material categories [high and low, expensive and cheap] are grouped according to differences; but qing [emotion, sentiment] is the same for all, and qing is the source of yi. . . . We of the Pear Garden practice a trivial skill, and the sons of the Pear Garden have no associates among the great men, no companions among the gentlemen scholars, yet in bearing the trials and tribulations of birth and death, our feelings are no different from theirs. What is more, we have had to leave forever our villages and families and journey several thousand li; no strangers, lineages, or organization will care for us. Who will offer us a field for our tombs, seven feet in which to lie down in peace? The building of this burial ground testifies to our loyalty and righteous feeling.21

Affairs internal to the community, such as disputes between guild members, fell fully within the guild’s purview. The government provided no funding to maintain the guild, which survived primarily on a small fee required of registered troupes for every performance. Beijing’s Actors’ Guild was not, however, completely independent; it housed a suboffice, the office of Jingzhongmiao general affairs, an intermediary between the court’s Bureau of Rising Peace and the acting community. Through this office the court could appoint particular actors as guild heads and summon favorite troupes or actors to perform at court. The guild was more than a welfare organization: it was a structure for social legitimation. By organizing a formal guild with gods, rituals of membership, and publicized ethical tenets, actors proclaimed themselves morally responsible professionals in a social and political environment that otherwise treated them as degenerates. The agrarian-based imperial state did not consider actors properly productive subjects, as their labor yielded no tangible products like that of farmers and artisans. Dependent solely on the excess wealth of others for their livelihoods, actors seemed to the state like flies drawn to the urban market districts where decadent wastrels whiled away their fathers’ fortunes. Like courtesans, actors prospered by appealing to the (base) desires of their customers, often beautifying themselves in makeup and powders and fawning after their customers. Such uniform subservience to anyone willing to foot the bill was a misfortune that many other jianye (mean professions) also endured. The customarily hereditary nature of the acting profession was reinforced by state household-registration practices and laws forbidding actors and their descendants from taking the civil service exams. All of these factors accumulated to reinforce the social impression that actors’ low social and economic status was linked to an inherent moral turpitude. With so many strikes against them, actors turned to their guilds to

24

(Re)Framing the Genre

help fortify their professional and religious subculture and to assert, albeit in a limited fashion, their autonomy and social rectitude. Guild heads (of which there could be a handful at any given time, though they were not equal in rank) were usually chosen by their fellow actors, but the position was confirmed, and at times conferred, by the Qing court. Heads were selected from the most famous and respected actors in the community and were overwhelmingly exponents of male roles. Mei Lanfang’s grandfather Mei Qiaoling (1842–82), for instance, was never appointed as guild head, though he was the most celebrated performer and teacher of dan roles and the leader of the Four Delights Troupe. The politically outspoken dan actor Tian Jiyun (1865–1925) did finally manage to accede to the post of guild head, but only after first performing as a pihuang laosheng to allay the guild membership’s discomfort at violating an old custom.22 Though all actors were stigmatized, those who most clearly bore this stigma in the form of feminization—the dan—were subordinated even within the profession itself and were barred from performing important rituals involving the worship of vocational deities. “Those who sing the little dan roles have the lowliest character, so such matters as taking gift money during a play and asking patrons to order plays [a subservient practice which was common at private parties] are handled by the dan.”23 Peking opera’s rise in status in the late nineteenth century was closely linked to these court and guild institutions. It was not until 1860, the tenth year of the Xianfeng emperor’s reign, that the Daoguang emperor’s ban against allowing outside actors and luantan styles into the palace was temporarily relaxed.24 In that year the Bureau of Rising Peace invited the Three Celebrations, Four Delights, and Spring Stage troupes to perform in honor of the ailing emperor; Cheng Changgeng was put in charge of the massive performance. This was pihuang’s first formal performance in the palace. Xianfeng so adored Cheng Changgeng’s skills that he bestowed on him a title of the fourth rank and declared Cheng the new head of the Jingzhongmiao, a position Cheng would hold till his death. For the next two decades, Cheng’s authority in the acting community went essentially unchallenged and earned him the affectionate and respectful nickname “the Big Boss” (Da laoban). Moreover, with this formal invitation pihuang rose on the ladder of social tastes. It had been popular with Beijing locals since the 1830s, but acknowledgment by the court gave it new legitimacy in elite circles.25 From 1860 onward, court performances increasingly featured pihuang dramas.26 Imperial patronage permitted the spread of pihuang among officials and Manchu roy-

Late Qing Institutions of Peking Opera

25

Figure 1. Tan Xinpei as the heroic general Huang Zhong in Dingjun Mountain (Dingjun Shan), ca.1905. From Guoju huabao (National Drama Pictorial) 6, no. 1 (1932).

alty. By the 1870s the amateur performance of pihuang had joined kunqu as a favorite hobby of Manchu princes, their patronage greatly boosting the economic and social status of pihuang actors. The Qing court’s infatuation with pihuang reached its height under Empress Dowager Cixi. In 1883 Cixi struck down the ban on inviting outside actors into the palace. The Bureau of Rising Peace took on the role of informing her about the commercial theater scene so that she could summon the hottest popular stars to exhibit their skills at court. These invited actors were given the title “attendants of the inner court” (gongfeng neiting) and brought in under the pretense that they would offer instruction to court actors.27 It was both an honor and a daunting task to perform before the court: its aesthetic standards were high and its

26

(Re)Framing the Genre

patrons capricious. The actor Sun Yiyun, for instance, was being perfectly true to the script when he sang the line “The sheep enters the lion’s mouth, never to return” while performing the play Yu Tangchun for the Empress Dowager Cixi. Before Sun knew it, however, he was being ejected from the palace, for Cixi had been born in the year of the sheep.28 Cixi was an opera addict. From 1883 until her death in 1908 she selected seventy-seven “attendants of the inner court,” who sometimes had to race to and from the palace several times a week.29 In these years Tan Xinpei’s fame soared. Tan might well have become the “King of Actors” of his generation in any case, but Cixi’s favor assured his position. Cixi regularly bestowed Tan with gifts of silver and gold for his performances, but her patronage carried perks beyond mere monetary wealth. In one instance, pressured by a government push to ban opium use, Tan, an addict, went into withdrawal and straggled into the court only after repeated summons. On learning the reason for his tardiness, Cixi ordered that Tan should always have his opium and never have to worry about the pesky laws banning it.30 For his part, Tan knew that Cixi’s patronage afforded him extraordinary liberties. According to one anecdote, when Tan was invited to perform at a private party for a greatgrandson of the Qianlong emperor, he asked first for a smoke and then demanded jokingly that a member of the Grand Council kneel before him and request his performance. Purportedly, after a few minutes “somebody rushed in and, without waiting for Tan to speak, said: ‘The boss has condescended to come.’ He entreated Tan and prostrated himself before him. Who was this man? It was the Grand Councillor Natong.”31 True or not, the anecdote makes it clear that increasingly intimate associations with the imperial court had raised Peking opera to new heights of social prestige.

Beijing’s Rotation System One of the defining characteristics of Peking opera troupes was their size. With the cast (which had to be large enough to perform about ten scenes, or from six to ten hours of drama per day), musicians, stagehands, wardrobe managers, and apprentice actors, major troupes numbered more than one hundred people. Cheng Changgeng’s troupe, like the other Anhui companies, all lived, worked, and took their meals together in large courtyard compounds called daxiachu. Keeping such an enterprise together required a strong sense of community. This solidarity was of

Late Qing Institutions of Peking Opera

27

course part of the teacher-disciple relationship, but it was further insured by the troupe’s payment system. “In the past Beijing drama companies talked of baoyin [lit. packet of silver]. After an actor’s baoyin was settled, it could not be revised for the whole year. Whether the head of the troupe made a profit or a loss was no matter for the actors, and this situation lasted for many years without change.”32 For an actor to join another troupe in the middle of the year was grounds for guild disciplinary action, but it was almost unheard of. Under the baoyin system the troupe reciprocated the actors’ semi-indentured loyalty and dedication by taking responsibility for almost all their needs, including meals and housing, even through the hard times, such as imperial mourning periods, when troupes were prohibited from performing for one hundred days. This strong professional bond was in part economically practical—a lone actor was hardly viable without a troupe—but it was also reflective of actors’ status as an underclass that had invented its own subculture of almost familial bonds. Several backstage taboos reflect a powerful anxiety about the troupe’s fragility. Playing chess was prohibited because it involved saying wo zou, which means both “My turn” and “I’m splitting” (that is, leaving the troupe). Umbrellas could be neither brought nor mentioned backstage because the term for umbrella was a homophone with the word for breaking up (san).33 Mutual respect between troupes was also highly important in the acting world, and there were many customs of “play morality” (xide) that discouraged cutthroat competition. For instance, if a certain actor gained a reputation for specializing in a particular play, other great actors would avoid it, even if they were also extremely proficient in the role.34 And during the mourning period for the Tongzhi emperor in 1875, Shi Xiaofu, head of the Spring Harmony troupe, imperiled the survival of his own company by lending money to Mei Qiaoling’s collapsing Four Delights Troupe.35 However, the theater world of nineteenth-century Beijing certainly did not lack for commercialization: Beijing’s pihuang drama business was probably the most commercialized theater business in the empire prior to the 1870s. Beijing’s teahouse theaters were the largest and most substantial in the land, seating between seven hundred to a thousand people. Actors in the largest pihuang troupes were divided not only by the type of character they performed (sheng, dan, jing, or chou) but were also ranked in four categories according to their artistic excellence and popularity. The top rank was known as toudeng, the second as erlu, the third

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as sanlu, and the bottom as bandi, or the dragon train (longtao). Actors’ pay differed according to rank.36 This ranking was apparent in the format of a typical day’s performance, which lasted between eight and ten hours, averaging a dozen or so separate plays in a predictable sequence. A show usually began before noon with a few plays called the “small set” (xiaozhou); these featured young or less skilled sanlu performers playing to a nearly empty house. The “middle set” (zhongzhou) plays began in the early afternoon and were usually romantic scenes performed by firstand second-string actors, particularly dan, who, after their performance, would either join their admiring patrons upstairs or leave the theater to “brush out their hair, incense their costumes, or take a catnap to await a visit from their patrons.”37 The last plays, extending into the early evening, were the “big set” (dazhou), typically historical dramas led by a famous first-string laosheng or wusheng (military male character) with an extensive supporting cast.38 Audiences could thus time their attendance according to the actor or type of play they wished to see. By contrast, kunqu companies were far less stratified; they did not have a set system of internal ranks, and the order of performances changed from day to day.39 If pihuang companies were more commercialized and stratified than other kinds of drama troupes, nevertheless star-centered individualism was not yet an issue in the 1860s and 1870s. Small hints of a weakening of collective practice were appearing—the wusheng player Li Chunlai began a collection of costumes exclusively for his own use, and Cheng Changgeng began cornering the use of his company’s finest musicians40 — but an overriding group ethos governed the Pear Garden. Cheng Changgeng and other stars could often be found acting supporting roles, allowing lesser-known company members a chance to shine.41 And, despite his towering stature, Cheng refused to perform separately from his troupe. On one occasion he was invited by the Qing court to perform with members of another troupe: The Court of Censors held a New Year’s party. They invited the Four Delights Company to perform and wanted Changgeng to give one item as a guest actor. Changgeng refused. A certain member of the imperial family further urged him to come, but even despite that he refused. The crowd got angry and seized Changgeng, locking him under the stage pillar and insulting him. They asked why he would not sing, and Changgeng replied flippantly that he had a sore throat. Later, a busybody inquired into the real reason. Changgeng replied, very seriously: “How could locking me up frighten me? What I feared was that I should not be able to face my brothers in the Three Celebrations.”42

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For Cheng, the troupe’s collective identity still outweighed his individual reputation, and, with Cheng as the Pear Garden’s undisputed patriarch, Beijing elites knew that when they booked him for private performances (tanghui), they were expected to invite the entire troupe. Next to daily performances at commercial theaters, tanghui were the most important source of income for opera troupes, paying far better on a daily basis than did public theaters. Typically ranging in length from one to three days, the most common tanghui were annual guild festivals, ritual lineage celebrations, and big birthday shindigs for wealthy notables. The elites who commissioned these performances undoubtedly would have preferred hiring only their favorite actors, but under Cheng’s leadership the Actors’ Guild had the power to discourage such selective invitations. In 1869 the guild considered expelling the comic actor Liu Gansan for secretly accepting an invitation to appear at a tanghui without the rest of his comrades. Liu was only censured and fined, a show of leniency less for Liu’s benefit than for that of his students, who would also have lost their positions in the acting community had their master been expelled.43 This cohesiveness of opera troupes—the certainty that a complete group of actors, musicians, and stagehands would be bound together for the entire year—was a necessary condition for the unique rotation system of theater and troupe interaction which developed in Beijing’s public theaters. By the mid-1800s, Beijing was home to dozens of permanent and semipermanent commercial theaters, ranging in scale from open-air thatched sheds to large stone and wooden buildings housing ornately filigreed stages and seating for several hundred spectators. Beijing’s nine largest and best-respected permanent theaters were all huddled around the thriving commercial district just outside the Qian Gate, in the Dashalar and Fish Market areas. They were Sanqing Yuan, Qinghe Yuan, Guanghe Lou, Guangde Lou, Zhonghe Yuan, Yuxing Yuan, Qingle Yuan, Tongle Yuan, and Tianle Yuan. These nine theaters dominated the drama scene in Beijing from around 1840 to 1900, and all of Beijing’s greatest drama troupes performed in them.44 Beijing’s teahouse theaters were the largest permanent commercial theaters of the empire before 1868. To fill their many seats, they needed to recruit audiences from all walks of society, and hence the troupes performing in them needed to provide a diverse range of plays, from refined kunqu romances to acrobatic luantan military sagas. The troupes themselves had to be unusually large to achieve such artistic range. As a result, the Beijing-style teahouse nurtured the wide range of dramatic styles that formed Peking opera.

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Rather than make long-term contracts with a particular drama troupe, the teahouse theaters and troupes arrived at a sort of group compromise. Each month was divided into several four-day periods. A troupe performed at a specified theater for one period and then moved on to another. For the theater owners, this arrangement was far more stable than contracting with a single troupe for an entire year: if one troupe went a little cold while another was packing the house, no single theater either suffered or benefited too much. All the theaters charged around the same price of 130 coppers per seat (and significantly more for elite boxes), reducing competition. For the players, it was a fairly short trek from one theater to the next, and their facilities were all essentially the same. The system cushioned the leading troupes and theaters from the most perilous lurches of popular opinion while also leaving room for some competition. A company that proved very popular rotated through the largest theaters more frequently than the other troupes, and failing companies were eventually pushed out of the circuit. As the late Qing encyclopedist Xu Ke described it, in Beijing, “the theaters are like inns, the troupes are like passing guests. Each company performs plays at an individual theater, four days count as a cycle, and after each cycle it begins all over again.”45 This highly reliable scheduling system depended on the cohesiveness of the drama companies and the fact that everyone involved kept to the same strict calendar. Every year at the opening of the drama season (Guan Yu Day), the major theaters consulted with Beijing’s leading drama companies to arrange the year’s schedule. The new schedule was haggled over, with the most popular troupes vying for the best theaters, and vice versa. Smaller or less popular troupes would pick up the crumbs, lucky to get a few days performing in one of the big theaters. Once the rotation schedule was decided upon, it was posted by the Qian Gate. The theaters and troupes then negotiated their specific contracts, working out the details of how the daily box-office receipts would be divided. Guan Yu Day was also the date that the big troupes all renewed and revised their yearly contracts with their actors, and thus was essentially the only day in the year when an actor could legitimately switch troupes or negotiate a different salary. This system made it possible for a huge commercial theater business to blossom with hardly any advertising. Somehow thousands of men were going to the theater every day in Beijing, following their favorite plays and actors without consulting newspapers or dialing 1–800-PK-OPERA. The rotation cycle was posted publicly in lively commercial areas like

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Qian Gate, with the occasional emendation by paper posters or chalkboards advertising novel or charity performances.46 Shows started daily around noon, with the less famous performers first, and continued until sundown, with several beautiful dan appearing in the early afternoon and the most famous laosheng featured in the “big set” amid the vaulting acrobats and clashing cymbals that served as the finale. Which plays would be performed tomorrow was anyone’s guess; even the members of the acting companies were usually kept in the dark and could find out only by paying a bribe to the head stagehand. With almost no advance advertising, the main plays were announced early on the morning of the performance by means of a public code. Just inside the theater’s main gate, the key props for the day’s show would be arranged so that any opera fan could instantly know what play was scheduled. “For example, if they put out a pair of xianren dan [lit. carrying pole of the immortals, a barbell-like pole weapon] and two pairs of slinging stones, it was Yanyang lou (Bright Spring Pavilion). If they put out four pairs of fighting hammers, it was Ba da chui (Eight Great Hammers). If they set out several wine jars and a pair of long-sickle spears, it was Ehu cun (EvilTiger Village). . . . A cloth backdrop of a pavilion was Yubei ting (The Pavilion of the Royal Monument).”47 The Beijing commercial theater system was thus able to thrive by means of a dense network of shared customs, knowledge, and professional practices. Without any headlines or advertisements, audiences knew precisely where and when their favorite stars would perform, even if they were uncertain precisely what play they were going to see. Peking opera rose in popularity and prestige because of an alternating synergy and tension between the court and commercial arenas; but in both arenas it was clearly the individual actor’s prestidigitation that was the main attraction. The polishing and handing on of these skills was essential to the profession’s survival.

Daxi: Beating the Opera In the late nineteenth century, amateur pihuang clubs proliferated, particularly among Beijing’s languishing Manchu elites.48 It was not uncommon for the gifted among these devoted amateurs (known as piaoyou, lit. ticket friends), with their literary skills and passion for opera, to become topnotch vocalists. Some were so impressive at singing their signature plays that they served as teachers for professional actors. Piaoyou clubs (piaofang) formed in Beijing, Shanghai, and other cities and were an important

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social nexus of patronage and artistic interplay. Their members often enjoyed singing at tanghui and occasionally donned full costume to participate in charity performances (yiwu xi). Yet, with a handful of famous exceptions, few piaoyou ever took the plunge into professional acting. The line between amateur and professional was clearly drawn: a piaoyou, even when acting publicly in a play side by side with professionals, was not permitted to accept money for a performance. For most piaoyou, such money came at too high a price, for it meant renouncing one’s status to become a member of a despised community. A handful of piaoyou, like the actor Zhang Erkui (1814–60), one of the Three Great Laosheng, took the risk.49 Born near Beijing to a family of minor officials, Zhang was pivotal in developing ways of modulating Anhui and Hubei melodies to make them compatible with Beijing dialect.50 The owner of the Spring Harmony Troupe had once urged Zhang to xiahai (lit. dive into the sea—that is, become a professional) and become the troupe’s leading actor and patriarch, but he had refused. When Zhang eventually did turn professional, his elder brother was dismissed from his official post.51 There was a qualitative barrier between amateur and professional as well: despite the virtuosity of some piaoyou vocalists, Peking opera required more than just wonderful singing. Gesture, posture, movement, and gymnastic ability were also important. Developing the proper physical techniques required years of sinew stretching, foot crunching, and lung roaring from a very early age. Beatings also seem to have been key to the making of professional actors. Actors called the training process daxi (lit. beating plays). Two institutions for beating plays into young actors existed: large training schools known as keban, and private training with a single master teacher, the sifang. Most nineteenth-century keban were not wholly independent institutions but were attached to professional acting troupes in an arrangement described as yi ban dai ban, “each troupe carries a training school.” Acting companies needed to train new generations of performers to maintain their vitality, and they took in students from other acting families as well as talented poor children whose parents could not afford to feed them. The troupe’s adult actors trained and supervised the children, who earned their keep by appearing on stage in the first plays of the day. The first recorded independent keban dedicated solely to the training of young actors date from the 1850s.52 Independent keban were such a burdensome and tenuous economic undertaking—providing room, board and training for dozens of children on the income earned by the child

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performers themselves—that few survived for more than a decade.53 The Empress Dowager Cixi subsidized several independent keban, but her largesse was usually not consistent enough to sustain them. By far the most famous and longest-lived independent keban in the history of Peking opera was the Fuliancheng. Originally funded by a wealthy northeastern merchant, Niu Zihou, and under the iron-fisted management of the patriarch actor Ye Chunshan, it was founded under the name Xiliancheng in 1904. In 1912, with Niu, whose fortune depended on trade with Mongolia, in dire financial straits, the school was purchased for five thousand yuan by Shen Renshan, a businessman and opera fan. The school then changed its name to Fuliancheng and continued under Ye’s tutelage until his illness in 1933, when his son became headmaster.54 Actors called life in the keban “seven years in the big prison,” so punishing were the conditions.55 Children were indentured into the keban between the ages of six and ten. Parents signed contracts stipulating that during the period of schooling, the keban would provide room and board. In return, any money earned by the child (who was expected to begin acting onstage within a year) would go to the school. The contracts stated that children would under no circumstances be withdrawn from the school: “[Even] if there are heavenly calamities, injury, or death through illness, each individual has their fate,” the school was not to be held responsible.56 Given these restrictions, and the living conditions at the schools, even the most desperately poor parents might have thought twice about enrolling their children. When the mother of Zhang Junqiu (a famous dan performer of the 1930s) took him to enroll in the Fuliancheng, “there was no alternative, and she took him with a pained heart and grinding her teeth. As soon as they entered the backstage of Guanghe theater she saw the children of the keban, all with gaunt yellow faces, running to and fro, their faces never getting clean because they all washed the makeup off in the same big communal pot of water.”57 She feared her frail child would never survive such conditions and took him home again. The keban, like many other Peking opera institutions, was structured according to paternalistic teacher-disciple bonds. On entering, a student was given a two-character stage name: each generation of students shared the same first character, like brothers. After six months the teachers conferred about what type of role—sheng (man), dan (woman), hualian (painted face), chou (clown, comic character), wu (martial, stressing acrobatics) or wen (civil, stressing singing)—a student was best suited to perform. These decisions were based on a combination of crite-

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ria: face shape, attractiveness, voice quality, physical build, gymnastic ability, and personality. After fulfilling their contracts, many students stayed on with the keban as teachers or performers, and even those who left for work in other troupes were expected, sometimes even obligated, to give the keban a portion of their earnings for several years. Most graduates of the Fuliancheng kept in close touch with the school for the rest of their lives, performing with their classmates and teaching the next generation. As for the less talented graduates, if they were not fit to serve as musicians, they were shepherded into specialized jobs as stagehands, costume and prop managers, or performers of the small but ever-present parts of soldiers and servants. The masters of keban quite rightly boasted that no student who graduated would lack for a job in the acting world; for, like the other backbone institutions of the acting world (the Actors’ Guild and the drama companies), the keban stressed community solidarity and survival. In the Fuliancheng, the students’ day started before dawn with gymnastics, stretching, stage walking, and vocal exercises. Accounts of students’ first few months in training describe children turning purple or fainting from pain during stretches. Leg stretches were the meat and potatoes of training: boys were made to lean with one leg pressed against the wall at nose height for half an hour, or to stand flamingo-style on one leg, holding the other above the head for minutes at a time. Then came the back stretches: “Students who had just entered the school could not arch their backs, so the teacher would put his leg over a stool, have students lie over his leg on their backs, and with one hand press the legs, with one hand the chest, and limber up their spines.”58 Dozens of handsprings, somersaults, and kicks followed. After a few hours of this mat work came a small breakfast, and then more leg lifts and stage-walking practice until lunch. Each character type had a distinctive stage walk: the bold, swinging stride for painted-face heroes; a heel-to-toe, gliding gait, almost like rolling gently on wheels, for qingyi (demure, virtuous women characters); a fetching, coquettish lilt for the huadan (lit. flower dan— young, flirtatious girls), and so on. “Walking is an immeasurably important basic skill for actors. Whether an actor’s stage appearance is goodlooking or not is immediately linked to his stage walk,” wrote the star actor Li Hongchun.59 After lunch, the students of Fuliancheng headed to the Guanghe Theater in a daily procession that was almost legendary. “The rules for marching were very strict. We students all wore the same black student’s gown, flat shoes, and clean-shaven heads, and walked with heads

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straight, no talking, no glances to east or west, otherwise we would be punished on returning to the keban.”60 In summer the uniform was hemp cloth and a grass hat, with umbrellas and slickers on rainy days. In bad weather the theater was always full, because Fuliancheng was the only troupe that performed regardless of the weather. The boys gave daytime performances, even after most theaters had shifted to evening shows, and ticket prices for these stayed low, attracting a crowd of old regulars and university students who were a forgiving but astute audience. Even as late as 1930, “tickets were not sold to women, in order to protect the boy actors from any sexual stirrings from seeing them.”61 Children not performing in the show remained at the school and practiced martial skills, singing, and stage gestures. When the other boys returned from the theater, all had dinner together and then broke into groups to practice singing parts and learn new plays. There were no reading or math classes; no other education was provided. Scripts were hardly ever used. Instruction was by demonstration and imitation, both oral and physical. Bedtime was around 10 p.m., though sometimes students were marched out like zombies in the middle of the night for special lessons from particularly famous opium-addicted luminaries, among them Ma Lianliang (a famous Republican-era wusheng player). Otherwise, students slept together, around ten boys to a kang (a large and heated raised earthen platform). At night there was always one teacher “on patrol carrying a lantern, imparting a forbidding presence like that of a military camp.”62 All opera training schools were organized along similar lines, but each school was pervaded by the personality of its master. The master of the Fuliancheng, Ye Chunshan, was rigid and imposing by any standards. In many respects the keban functioned as an extension of the master’s household, and Ye’s sons’ descriptions of family life as regimented and skin-toughening are indistinguishable in tone from students’ descriptions of the school. None of the Ye family girls were permitted to study opera; the children never ate at the same table with their father; no Western clothes were allowed within the home. Ye Chunshan never hesitated to beat anyone in his household or keban who violated his rules, including the cooks. In the Fuliancheng, and in all keban, it appears, beatings were extremely common. I can’t count the number of times I was beaten in my seven years as a student. If you studied a play but couldn’t get it right, naturally you were hit; if you learned a play but performed it badly on stage, you of course were beaten harder; for doing naughty things that are unavoidable for children,

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(Re)Framing the Genre you also got a beating; even if it was another student who messed up on stage or forgot his lyrics, you would get hit, and it was called da tongchang (beating the whole stage), and there was da tongtang (beating the whole school, all the students), and so on. There was a kind of beating for every occasion.63

The keban trained every child in the chops of professional acting, and the talented ones received more refined and personal instruction as well. Actors from outside the school who specialized in performing beloved lead roles were frequently brought in to teach the most promising youths their specialty plays.64 This type of close instruction was at the core of actor training, and, again, the particulars of the teaching style reflected the personalities involved. Some school masters were notorious for their cruelty, and the childhood experience of Shang Xiaoyun (1899–1976), who went on to become one of the Republican era’s Four Famous Dan, provides a harrowing example. Shang Xiaoyun was from a desperately poor family. His father left home when he was quite young, presumably in search of work, and never returned. His mother made soap that she traded in the streets for used paper, which she sold in turn for the small change on which she and her three children survived. Unable to feed her children, who were so thin and bedraggled that even many acting schools turned them away, she finally managed to get Xiaoyun and his younger brother accepted into a training school with a maliciously ironic name: Sanle Keban (Three Happinesses School). After first training in martial roles, Xiaoyun was switched to training as a qingyi because of his physique; probably Xiaoyun was so malnourished that his martial acrobatics were listless and uninspired.65 His main instructor in qingyi roles was Tang Zhuting. While Shang was [practicing] singing, teacher Tang would lean on a chair with his eyes shut tight, beating out the musical meter with a wooden stick. At one point, when he heard Shang repeatedly singing the same phrase incorrectly, Tang suddenly leapt up like lightening, shouting in reproach, “You stupid idiot!” and with that jabbed the stick into Shang’s abdomen. Because he used too much force, the stick penetrated Shang’s abdomen, and when Tang pulled it back out, part of Shang’s intestine spilled out, and soon blood began to pour out and [Shang] fainted to the ground. The other students all quickly carried Xiaoyun to the hospital.66

Fortunately, Xiaoyun recovered, and a few years later—at the age of only fourteen—he was discovered by an extremely popular and established laosheng performer, Sun Juxian, who honored Xiaoyun with the

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lead female role opposite him in some classic plays. Xiaoyun’s younger brother, however, was not so fortunate: around the same time he received such a pummeling at the Three Happinesses that he died from the injuries.67 Of course corporal punishment was not always so baselessly and brutally administered. Though physical abuse was routine, most accounts portray beatings as enforcing training and as creating a kind of emotional bond between student and teacher. There were clearly some cruel and sadistic teachers who injured and even permanently crippled their students, but actors often exonerate their teachers in their autobiographies, stating in the most sincere tones that they are grateful for their teachers’ strict standards. Ye Shengchang describes many such incidents. One occurred at his first public performance, during which he was so nervous that he lost his voice and could hardly squeak out his lyrics. Yet when he left the stage, the crowd applauded and everyone said his performance was fine. “My heart was even more full of misgivings; what was the matter here? How come I wasn’t getting beaten? Truth be told, at that moment I found not being beaten even harder to bear than a beating.”68 In another instance, Ye was studying under Shang Xiaoyun, who by this time was a famous actor. One evening Ye was having stomach trouble, and on the way to Shang’s home to study stopped by a public bathroom and left his wallet on the wall. After he reached Shang’s he realized what had happened and ran back to get it. Fortunately, it was already dark, and the wallet was still there. On returning to Shang’s, Ye practiced with great intensity and did a clearly excellent job. Still, afterward Shang confronted him, “If you were an official you’d lose your imperial seal. Don’t you pay attention to what you are doing? It looks like your heart isn’t in it when you are studying.” With that Shang paddled the boy forcefully, “but after the beating, he looked very sad. I saw this and was very moved, and quickly said, ‘Don’t be unhappy. . . . you were right to hit me!’ . . . As we students were leaving Shang took me aside and gave me [some money], . . . saying, ‘This has no other meaning, I just want you to have these two coins to soothe the pain. Don’t spend them randomly, keep them as a memento!’ I heard him say this and almost started to cry.”69 The physical hardships of actor training had many layers of emotional and social significance. There were no books, diagrams, or student improvisation; training was a physical process, communicating skills from one body to another. Young actors needed to have their bodies reshaped; they were immersed in a set of vocal and physical practices that

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were tremendously difficult until they became second nature (parallels to ballet, foot-binding, tattooing, and Olympic gymnastics come to mind). Physical pain was an unavoidable part of this training, as was the requirement that students begin quite young. Only after being remolded into properly supple and receptive material, physically and mentally, were students deemed ready to receive instruction by expert actors in their specialty plays, a process that stressed meticulous imitation. Adult actors felt an obligation to these boys, who could not yet understand the difficulties that lay ahead of them, and often the beatings and strict punishments were expressions of the teachers’ deep concern, high expectations, and pride. When an adult actor taught a student his signature play, he was performing an intimate and emotional act: he was giving away his secrets, his public identity, and his means of making a living. The importance of this gift was never lost on a student. This description is not meant as an apology for practices of physical brutality and abuse which routinely injured young boys and created much agony and resentment; but it is important to realize that these practices were central to a pedagogy thought to be crucial to a proper aesthetic of performance, and that such practices forged social bonds within the acting community. When these practices were attacked and dismantled during the twentieth century, much more was at stake than merely ridding the drama world of feudal brutality: to many older actors, harsh physical training and the corporal punishment that accompanied it were the only proven methods by which to imbue young actors with the technical skills essential to their livelihood and their art. Aside from the keban, the other major institution for training actors was the sifang, or private training, in which a single master trained a handful of indentured disciples. A youth indentured into a sifang had a status between an adopted child and a bondservant—similar, indeed, to that of a young courtesan in a brothel—living in the master’s home and, if the training was successful, becoming a source of the master’s income. The teacher-student relationship in many ways resembled that in the keban, but with one important difference: the majority of youths trained in sifang were also being molded as male courtesans, commonly known as xianggong.70 These boys were usually trained to perform female dan roles, and throughout the late Qing served as expensive and amusing companions for Beijing’s literati, many of who wrote poems and “registers” ranking and extolling the xianggong’s many charms. The southern drama companies that had settled in Beijing regularly sent recruiters back to the south to purchase impoverished boys around eight years of age

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and shipped them to the capital to replenish their supply of dan performers. Dan actors, especially performers of the youthful and sexy huadan, typically had a very short stage life, often retiring in their thirties; raising and training future xianggong often became a dan actor’s main source of income when he reached middle age. The indentured boys lived and trained with their masters, who, if the boys were fortunate, provided them an atmosphere of calculated opulence in which to attend to their patrons. The most promising such youths washed their faces with meat broth, dieted on choice foods, and smoothed their bodies with ointments so that “three or four months after the training program begins, these boys are delicate and genteel as lovely maidens. One glance from them will create hundreds of charms.”71 Many found these youths’ company far superior to that of the local female courtesans: “For true sensuality in the mortal world, one ought not search among womankind. Why pass through each and every brothel, for one will only obtain counterfeit goods. And Beijing’s common women are merely ten times darker than women servants. A quick and dim-sighted glance over them would acutely reveal the lack of flowers. But in selecting smiles and summoning music [seeking sensual pleasure], one must seek out the Chrysanthemum Registry [the world of actors].”72 Despite the proximity to elite society and the opulence to which many of these youths were exposed, they were also subject to far more opprobrium than their keban brothers, and they experienced abuse and physical neglect even while surrounded with wealth. Many xianggong died young, often before their periods of indenture were over, and even the most respected never lost the moral taint of serving as courtesans. On the other hand, xianggong were an important conduit of elite patronage— both attention and money—for the acting world. Most xianggong houses were in Beijing’s pleasure quarters just south of Qian Gate, along Hanjiatan and Yingtao streets: “A lantern is hung over the gate, along with a plaque reading ‘The Hall of Such-and-Such.’ On entering, guests are greeted by a servant who looks after them with a gentle hand and a quiet voice that is utterly dignified. The rock and flower gardens of these halls, the bronzes, calligraphy, and paintings are tidy and stately. On a first visit one sits in the [xianggong’s] rooms and lightly chats. Just outside the door the servants stand soberly, neither listening nor uttering a word.”73 If the client played his cards right, behaving and paying for his pleasures in a dignified manner, repeated visits would be rewarded with longer, more elaborate, and more intimate involvement.

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The male flowers’ literati patrons eulogized these experiences of beauty, sensibility, and friendship. Their writings dedicate as much space to describing these boy actors’ qualities as drinking companions as they do to discussing their onstage performances; indeed, part of these youths’ allure stemmed from the mutual reinforcement of their embodiment of literary fantasy on stage and their activities as sexual companions offstage. The actors’ traditionally subservient status implied an engagement in sex work.74 Sophie Volpp has lucidly described the intersubjective dimensions of the Ming-Qing literati discourse on actors in her analysis of the exchange of literati poems about the actor Xu Ziyun: “Actors were luxury goods traded among the elite. . . . Their circulation served to create and maintain networks of social exchange, in much the same manner as did gifts of fine ceramic ware, calligraphic scrolls, and ancient bronzes. The cultural prestige of the actor as a luxury good, in turn was predicated on a highly refined discourse of connoisseurship.”75 Volpp notes how literati patrons savored the pathos of “unsatisfied desire, speaking through a haze of longing even as they sit before the actor at a performance,” and she argues that their discursive practice “conflated the homoerotic and the homosocial,” ultimately revealing a great deal about the workings of elite pathos but very little about the subjective experience of the actors they purport to describe.76 Similar observations could be made of the 1834 novel Pinhua baojian (Precious Mirror for Appraising Flowers), which describes the romances and travails of ten young dan actors and their literati admirers. The novel sympathetically presents the plight of the idealized dan, young men with all the refined cultural sensitivity of scholars, forced to live as the objects and playthings of unworthy patrons. “Yet among the [dissolute], there are a few rare gentlemen of compassion and principle, and a few rare Thespians of chastity and propriety. These few fit perfectly the national spirit of ‘passion without lust.’ ”77 In the novel, the most enlightened and lovely of the dan, Qinyan, is relentlessly harassed by a predatory and repugnant would-be-patron named Xi Shiyi, a brute who vainly attempts to treat his hideous case of syphilis by substituting a dog’s penis for his own deformed member. Through such stories the author, Chen Sen, both eulogizes and eroticizes the dan, simultaneously waxing lyrical over their gorgeousness and mourning their oppression, but ultimately he treats his dan characters more as idealized objects than as realistic subjects.78 Most xianggong lived far-from-pampered lives and were generally reputed to suffer even more severe abuse than their brothers in the keban. Xun Huisheng (1900–1968), another of the Four Famous Dan who fea-

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ture prominently in the later chapters of this book, was born to a poor family and became indentured at the age of seven to the itinerant actor Long Qifa. Long’s reputation for being violent with his students and exploiting them as much as possible had earned him the nickname Long Bopi (lit: Long the skin-peeler, Long the exploiter). Xun began training as a huadan in bangzi drama, but Long soon realized that his pupil would bring him even more money as a pihuang performer. One of the techniques specific to huadan was called qiaogong; this involved walking on small mini-stilts called a qiao, which mimicked the look of tiny bound feet. It was a technique that was almost as painful as foot binding. Long’s relentless regimen involved having Xun run after a carriage for miles wearing the qiao. Xun recalled this exercise as brutally painful: “I wanted to escape, I wanted to die! I hated my father, hated my teacher, and hated most of all the person who invented the qiao.”79 By the age of fifteen Xun, whose stage name was Bai Mudan (White Peony), was enjoying enormous popularity, and a large fan club called the Baishe (the White Society), sprang up, with hundreds of members, many of whom were university students. Around the same time Xun’s voice broke, but Long worked him as hard as ever, damaging Xun’s voice and imperiling his future. Xun had already served out the full seven years of his contract, but Long refused to let him go, pointing out that the contract Xun’s illiterate father had signed did not specify the date when the boy’s service should end. Long reportedly announced, “If he definitely must leave, then I’ll fight him to the death! First let me break his legs and cripple him so he can never take to the stage!” Eventually several members of the Baishe plotted Xun’s escape from the back window of Long’s compound and sheltered him until an arrangement could be reached.80 Having briefly sketched the background of two of the Four Famous Dan of the Republican era, I should also outline the training of the other two, the most prominent of this foursome: Cheng Yanqiu and Mei Lanfang. Cheng Yanqiu (1904–58) was the youngest of the Four Famous Dan, and, though the story of his training is milder, like Xun’s it shows the crucial role that patronage often played in a young dan actor’s career. Born to a poor Manchu family, Cheng became indentured to a rather obscure but fairly agreeable sifang master, a Mr. Rong, at the age of six. Cheng initially studied martial roles, but, probably because of malnourishment, he was weak, and his legs often went completely numb during practice. Mr. Rong gradually realized that Cheng was better suited for qingyi roles; then, around the age of fourteen, just as Cheng had won his first major contract with a Shanghai theater, his voice broke. Cheng’s

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Figure 2. The Four Famous Dan, as pictured in BYHB (Northern Pictorial), July 1928.

teacher was poor and could not afford to let him rest, but his fan, and future patron and collaborator, the writer Luo Yinggong, borrowed money from his friends and paid Mr. Rong seven hundred yuan to break his contract with Cheng a year before his study term was completed, thereby saving Cheng’s voice from potential ruin.81 Mei Lanfang (1894–1961) was the oldest and by far the most famous of the Four Famous Dan. The unrivaled superstar of the Pear Garden in the Republican era, Mei enjoyed the most protected upbringing and training of the four Dan. Mei was born into an eminent family of performers: his grandfather, the great dan Mei Qiaoling, had led the Four Happiness Troupe; his father was also a famous dan but died in his twenties; his uncle, Mei Yutian, was the talented huqin accompanist for Tan Xinpei. Mei was raised in his uncle’s home and thereby avoided being indentured and having his reputation sullied by being a xianggong. Every morning Mei trained under a private master or attended the Fuliancheng keban, returning home each evening. Mei’s physical training was relatively light but far from painless: his feet constantly boiled up with blisters from practicing walking in qiao, and his teachers were not afraid to apply the occasional beating.82 Yet, even for the sheltered Mei Lanfang, patronage offered crucial protection. Mei’s aunt was reputedly greedy,

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often forcing her nephew to perform even when he was sick. When the boy’s voice broke, his career might well have been destroyed by such treatment had it not been for Feng Gengguang, president of the Bank of China, who became Mei’s patron and remained his fatherly, generous supporter for decades.

Peking Opera Enters a Higher Orbit: The Formation of Star-Centered Troupes The opening of the Mantingfang and Dangui theaters in Shanghai in 1867 was a benchmark in Peking opera’s consolidation as a genre. Both theaters were deliberately modeled after Beijing’s major teahouses, and their construction was of a scale and sturdiness unprecedented in Shanghai. Moreover, the fact that they were built explicitly to host pihuang performers from the north indicates that a recognizable style was forming. Known in Shanghai as jingxiban (capital drama troupes), Beijingstyle pihuang, with its growing cultural cachet as a court favorite, was a hit with Shanghai’s aspiring elites. By the 1870s it was becoming common for Beijing’s pihuang actors to journey by steamboat to Shanghai, performing for a few months or even years in the burgeoning metropolis. Treaty-port cities, with their flocks of sojourning merchants and single men, were markets ravenous for brothels and theaters. Some Beijing actors with lagging careers hoped for better luck in Shanghai; others, like the laosheng Yang Yuelou—popularly crowned Monkey Yang for his fantastic portrayals of the Monkey King, complete with 108 somersaults in a single performance—went to Shanghai in 1872 seeking even greater wealth and success. Indeed, his salary from Shanghai’s Dangui Theater was 1,200 yuan, around double that of Beijing’s highest-paid actor, Cheng Changgeng.83 Shanghai theaters extended invitations to Beijing actors out of necessity, because Shanghai had no pihuang actors or training schools of its own.84 The Dangui Teahouse recruited almost all its actors from Beijing, and, though its building architecturally resembled those of Beijing, its commercial structure developed very differently.85 With no local pihuang troupes, Shanghai theater owners had to bring pihuang performers down from the north and build their own troupes from scratch. Thus, whereas in Beijing troupes and theaters were economically independent entities, in Shanghai no such division developed: theater and troupe were a single business unit.86 Each theater had a basic troupe (bandi, lit. ground of the troupe) whose actors were proficient but rarely great talents; hence, from

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their inception in 1867, these theaters attracted customers by inviting star actors from Beijing for guest performances (kechuan), with the theater’s troupe as the supporting cast. Lacking an extensive theater district or anything resembling Beijing’s rotation system, Shanghai theaters needed to advertise prodigiously to attract customers, first through street posters, and soon thereafter through Shanghai’s first Chinese-language newspaper, the Shenbao. In addition to publishing advertisements, in 1872 the paper began printing daily performance schedules. The printmedia advertising network, an indispensable catalyst of the rise of theater stars in the late Qing and Republican period, clearly began in Shanghai; it did not emerge in Beijing for another three decades. By then Shanghai had numerous newspapers, including several entertainment tabloids (including Shijie fanhua bao and Youxi bao) devoted to covering the racy gossip from the world of courtesans and actors. This media network had profound effects on the theater business as well as on actors’ careers and social standing. Almost as soon as Shenbao started publishing, an acting-world scandal made its headlines. Yang Yuelou’s 1872–73 stint in Shanghai became infamous after the revelation of the actor’s secret marriage to the young daughter of an elite merchant family.87 But Yang’s trip was historically important in a less melodramatic respect as well, for on his return to Beijing he cut a crucial thread in the tight-knit network of Beijing’s theater system. According to Qi Rushan, on returning to Beijing, Yang “joined the Three Celebrations [Troupe]. He was red-hot and drew a huge box office. He thought his baoyin was low, so he negotiated with the troupe’s head [Cheng Changgeng], who changed his pay. From then on he got a percentage of whatever was made each day. From that day, Beijing’s baoyin rules were shattered.”88 Qi is being typically overdramatic; the baoyin system endured in Beijing for another two decades, and if Yang Yuelou had not done so, some other actor would likely have demanded a similar wage hike. Still, this change in pay from a set yearly sum to a daily percentage of the gross struck at the heart of troupe solidarity and foreshadowed the more competitive and fluid economic practices to come. The commercial touring network, which began emerging in the 1860s with the building of Beijing-style teahouses in Shanghai and Tianjin, expanded steadily over the following decades, catalyzing changes that eventually brought an end to Beijing’s rotation system. The main branches of this new network connected Beijing, Shanghai, and Tianjin; smaller ones reached to Hankou, Harbin, Kaifeng, and other cities that lay on the routes of a growing number of steamships and railroads.

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Touring generated a spiraling commercial dynamism. As travel grew steadily faster and more convenient, its pull intensified: famous actors drew bigger crowds; bigger crowds encouraged investment in larger theaters; larger theaters demanded more capital, a broader customer base, and more mass advertising; and as theaters profits rose, famous actors demanded higher pay. This spiral released unprecedented flows of money, inspiring cultural entrepreneurs in cities across this growing urban network to try their hand at building theaters and attracting stars. Not surprisingly, the combination of rising salaries and increased geographical mobility helped fuel a shift from the tight-knit opera companies of the Qing to the more atomized, star-centered companies that dominated Republican-era Peking opera. Tours by star actors ate away at troupe cohesion. By the 1890s it was commonplace for stars to have their own collection of personally tailored costumes and their own accompanists, with whom they developed their signature arias and without whom they refused (and perhaps found it difficult) to perform. Famous actors could now afford to move out of the troupe compound into private residences; the material basis for troupe collectivity was eroding.89 On this road toward greater professional atomization, it was the irascible, haughty, and incomparable laosheng Tan Xinpei who led the way. Tan had been a disciple of Cheng Changgeng and a member of his Three Celebrations Troupe, but on Cheng’s death Tan switched to the Four Delights Troupe and then left to tour Shanghai. Returning to Beijing in 1884, he formed his own company, the Tongchun Troupe, while living separately in his own private residence. Unlike Cheng, Tan had no compunction about taking liberties with his troupe’s resources, first monopolizing the talents of the troupe’s huqin player (Mei Lanfang’s uncle) and then slowly increasing his entourage until it included a complete orchestra and a handful of personal attendants who accompanied Tan both on- and offstage. From 1883 onward Cixi’s use of the Shengpingshu to summon individual actors to the palace further encouraged the burgeoning star system.90 Tan and Cixi’s other favorite actors found it useful to have their entourage of accompanists and assistants close at hand to respond to her call, and soon such entourages became a mark of prestige among leading actors. Hence, a synergy between the court’s patronage of individual actors and Shanghai’s kechuan system of well-publicized guest performers accelerated the trend toward star-centered organization in pihuang. By the late 1890s, Beijing’s rotation system was beginning to seize up, with Tan, who had essentially moved his troupe into the Zhonghe The-

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ater, most visibly jamming the cogs.91 The catastrophic fires during the Boxer uprising of 1900 were the last straw, burning all but two of the teahouses in the Dashalar theater district to the ground. Although these theaters almost all rose from the ashes within months of the withdrawal of the Allied Eight Powers, the rotation system was not revived. From 1900 onward, companies contracted with theaters for much longer stints, often pinning down their venues for a full year.92 The new play-point (xifen) system introduced by Yang Yuelou now came to dominate Beijing. Under this system, an actor earned a certain fixed sum of money, or points, for each performance, the amount varying with his seniority, the importance of his role, and the perception of his drawing power. This system of being paid by the performance allowed for flexible contracts; a contract need not extend for a full year, and actors were even permitted to work for more than one company at the same time. Contracts were individualized and based on an actor’s popularity; hot actors increasingly haggled for higher pay, thus widening the salary gap between stars and bit actors. Actors became relatively free agents and troupes less unified and stable. This instability affected the arrangements between theater owners and the heads of acting companies. With such commercial and scheduling unpredictability, the rotation system became unworkable. The Beijing public could no longer predict the yearly movements of the opera constellations. They required a new set of instruments with which to map the shifting stars of the drama system. These came in the form of the newspaper schedules, advertisements, street posters, and entertainment magazines of the twentieth century. There is no doubt that commercial trends such as the rise in lead actors’ salaries and the shift to media advertising originated in Shanghai, but we should think twice before attributing the distinctly modernizing influence in Peking opera to “Shanghai culture.” Many scholars have tended to center “Chinese modernity” in Shanghai.93 There are good reasons for doing so: any number of modern technologies and cultural trends made their Chinese debut in Shanghai. But this idea of a “Shanghai modern” is problematic, for it typically entails describing the rest of China as more traditional and portraying modernity as a linear, progressive development. The fetishization of the Shanghai modern thus risks reproducing the teleological assumptions which lie at the heart of the ideological construction of a colonial modernity—that the modern involves dynamic change as opposed to the stasis of tradition; that the Western modern is universal, whereas its adjustments to non-Western contexts are derivative alternatives.

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Although it is important to recognize when and where various “modern” technologies from the West appeared, such developments do not adequately explain the changes in the Peking opera world. Shanghai’s new mass-media advertising and the practice of inviting guest stars clearly fueled the trend towards a modern, star-centered culture, but Beijing institutions also played an important role. Institutional, economic, and even aesthetic and stylistic changes in Peking opera did not emanate from any one geographic location. Even if the most lavish star treatment, the highest ticket prices, and the baldest commercialism seemed to emanate from Shanghai, such enterprising excesses almost invariably had Beijing-trained actors at their center; in other words, Beijing’s keban and other institutions of actor training were crucial components of the emerging star system. The Beijing-style teahouse, that crucial architectural technology whose importation into Shanghai and other cities made star touring possible, also obviously originated in Beijing. The differences between Beijing and Shanghai lie elsewhere than on a simple sliding scale measuring degrees of modernization.94 Although there were certainly ways in which Beijing and Shanghai competed for dominance in the Peking opera world, the genre’s formation involved a profound interdependence and synergy between these cities. To reduce that relationship to a simple dichotomy between modern Shanghai and traditional Beijing is to distort it. Rather, Peking opera’s institutional changes reflect a much broader restructuring of China’s urban cultural network, driven by the empire’s changing political economy under the pressures of foreign imperialism. All this is to say that it was the phenomenon of urban touring itself, not a particular regional influence, which transformed the organization of Peking opera. Of course, drama troupes had roved the Chinese countryside for centuries and continued to do so into the Republican era. When rural vagabond troupes were specifically hired by a village, “it was mostly in order to honor the gods, and maybe happened once a year. . . . Usually all the residents of a village or several villages collectively invited a troupe for that selected occasion.”95 Even if a single wealthy villager hired the actors, it was never in order to directly make a profit, which of course was the goal of urban commercial theaters. Rural companies charged around four to five strings of coppers per play during the Qing, with prices ballooning to ten to twelve yuan per play by the Republican era. “Sleeping on a few benches or a grass mat . . . with their knives, spoons, bowls and chopsticks, and their bodies sprawling left and right, they look like they came straight out of a drawing of a band of refugees.”96

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The Peking opera touring network that emerged in the 1870s was different. Actors like Yang Yuelou and Tan Xinpei were not hoofing it between market towns to perform in grass sheds at local festivals; they were being recruited by envoys from permanent commercial establishments with high overheads that sought to profit from a booming populace of urban nouveau riche merchants seeking to absorb a little of Beijing’s cosmopolitan culture. For these stars, riding the railroads, the countryside of the rural opera troupe appeared as little more than a blur from their carriage window. The living standards of Peking opera troupes in the 1860s, before the era of commercial urban touring, were not all that different from those of their rural counterparts. The average actor in Beijing lived crammed together in the troupe compound with more than a hundred others and made a yearly baoyin of around seventy yuan.97 Cheng Changgeng, the highest-paid actor in Beijing in the 1870s, made six hundred yuan per year, while the other male-role leads (laosheng, wusheng, etc.) in his troupe made four hundred.98 As the play-point system began to replace the baoyin, it probably brought a moderate rise in income to most Beijing actors, with third-string and supporting actors making about five hundred coppers (approximately half a yuan) per performance (which would come to more than one hundred yuan a year).99 For the stars, however, the competitive logic of the more flexible system sent pay scales rocketing. In the 1880s, though Tan Xinpei was still making around 30 yuan a month in Beijing, he made close to 250 monthly in Shanghai.100 In the 1890s visiting stars in Shanghai made set fees of between 1,000 and 3,000 yuan per year, and in 1900 Sun Juxian, on a Shanghai tour, negotiated a share of the daily box office and pocketed an unprecedented 2,000 yuan in a month.101 Always conscious of his status, Tan Xinpei settled for no less than 2,000 yuan when he toured Shanghai the following year, he and his wife then grousing that his pay was skimpy considering that the theater made 12,000 yuan that month.102 Thereafter Tan demanded that his pay double on each subsequent trip to Shanghai; it reached 8,000 yuan for a ten-day visit in 1915. Tan, of course, was a famous actor, but by the 1910s even second-string leads were demanding at least 1,000 yuan for a month in Shanghai. On his first trip to Shanghai in 1913 as a second-string lead, Mei Lanfang made 1,800 yuan for the month, with all room, board and transportation provided; the lead actor he toured with, Wang Fengqing, made 3,000 yuan.103 The pay to perform at tanghui, which had always been higher than that offered by commercial theaters, rose correspondingly. A

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wealthy patron in the 1910s could easily spend 3,000 yuan to treat family and friends to a daylong marathon of top-notch operas. During the first decade of the Republic, with all the new politicians and cliques rubbing elbows and knocking heads in Beijing, tanghui were all the rage, accounting for a hefty chunk of a star actor’s yearly income. By the 1920s the three highest-paid actors, Mei Lanfang, Yang Xiaolou and Yu Shuyan, charged 800 yuan per play for a private performance.104 By the 1920s, when a Shanghai theater wanted a northern star to light up its stage for a month, the owner had to scrape together twenty to thirty thousand yuan. This amount would pay for the star, his musicians, wardrobe, and assistants, and a handful of supporting actors (Shanghai theaters kept a staff of proficient actors who filled in the minor roles). But salary was far from the only expense. All expenses incurred during contract negotiations and all transportation costs (first-class train tickets for the star and his entourage, and steamer tickets for the rest) were the theater’s responsibility. And the list ran on: “Anything a shade less than a top-rank hotel is out of the question, and the most special, grandest suite must be rented. As for meals, either the hotel is asked to provide Chinese and Western dining, or a special chef is hired to take charge of the cuisine. The cost for this is especially huge. All daily miscellaneous items must also be provided by the theater, as well as all the automobile transportation.”105 By the 1920s Peking opera stars were spinning in a much higher and faster orbit than their country cousins slogging along dirt roads. This constellation included Yang Xiaolou, Ma Lianliang, Zhou Xinfang, Meng Xiaodong, Cheng Jixian, Mei Lanfang, Cheng Yanqiu, Shang Xiaoyun, Xun Huisheng, and Xin Yanqiu. Several dozen others orbited in slightly lower spheres, making around four thousand yuan for a month’s work in Shanghai. As a general rule, a Beijing actor’s pay doubled when he or she performed in Tianjin and doubled again in Shanghai. A stint in Tianjin was far less of a production than a Shanghai tour, but it could also be quite lucrative. One critic in 1929 noted that tickets to see a Beijing star in Tianjin were regularly five to six times what they were in Beijing, so that it was probably cheaper in the long run for Tianjin’s opera fans to just pay for their own train tickets and hotel rooms and take a trip to the former capital.106 But we are getting ahead of ourselves, for few could have imagined such exponential increases in actors’ earnings in the early 1900s, when Cixi was still the single most powerful and influential critic in the Peking opera world, and the mass media, product endorsements, phonograph-recording contracts, movies, and the like were still mere glimmers on the cultural horizon.

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The Laosheng and the Consolidation of Peking Opera Cultural historians rightly warn against making reductive correlations between historical events and trends in popular taste; the dialectic between cultural phenomena and historical events is far too complex to reduce the former to a mirror of or reaction to the latter. Yet the way Peking opera trends parallel major events in Chinese history is striking, and I argue that there was indeed an integral link between China’s shift from empire to nation-state and shifts in representational practices in Peking opera. Peking opera’s consolidation under the leadership of laosheng performers coincides with a period of relentless internal and external crisis for the Qing (1850–1911), followed by the meteoric resurgence of dan performers at the dawn of the Republic in 1912. From 1912 to 1937, the Peking opera world was ruled both on- and offstage by dan, especially Mei Lanfang and the other Four Famous Dan. In order to understand how the political shift from empire to republic and changes in gender representation in Peking opera were interconnected, we must begin with the great laosheng, for it was more than a coincidence that pihuang’s consolidation occurred during the laosheng’s heyday. “Big Boss” Cheng Changgeng and “King of the Pear Garden” Tan Xinpei were by far the most influential actors of their respective generations, and their careers shed light on the pivotal importance of masculinity in the ascendance of late Qing Peking opera. Cheng Changgeng’s charisma and leadership in the drama world involved the fusion of two factors: his stunning excellence as a performer and his authority as a patriarch of the profession. Onstage, as the model of Confucian rectitude and potency, Cheng could reportedly be heard clearly even through the theater walls. When Cheng took the stage, the audience, usually rowdy and chaotic, fell silent.107 Cheng was noted for his direct singing style, which lacked flourishes or ostentation. Professionally, he seemed to radiate discipline; it was only after Cheng became head of the Actors’ Guild that it began exerting a pervasive influence over the acting community and convening regular meetings, and only after his death in 1879 that practices of group solidarity began to be routinely violated and the “baoyin rules became a mess.”108 As Sun Juxian, one of the Later Three Outstanding Laosheng, said: “I try to emulate the Big Boss; I did not study his art, but I strive to emulate his conduct.”109 Cheng’s stern demeanor conveyed a spirit of militancy and austerity that was seen as heroic in his time. Following the Allied armies’ humili-

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ating invasion of Beijing during the Second Opium War (1858–60), Cheng transformed his rage into breathtaking portrayals of characters like “the unwaveringly resolute Wu Zixu, the courageously patriotic Zhang Fei, and the righteously moral Mi Heng.”110 Both on- and offstage, the Big Boss’s modeling of respectability, paternal rectitude, and concern for his fellow actors was apt for a time during which pihuang was ascendant but had yet to win the praise of scholars or the extensive favors of the imperial court. Cheng did not simply perform Guan Yu’s role onstage, but was seen by his contemporaries as embodying that character’s central values: loyalty, selflessness, and courage. Cheng never made the highly profitable trek to Shanghai: such a tour would have violated his oath to never abandon his Three Celebrations brothers. Tan Xinpei, on the other hand, was very much a freelancer, making over half a dozen Shanghai tours during his career and attending to Cixi’s incessant invitations for individual performances. Like Cheng, Tan was tremendously accomplished and dignified. But Tan’s style was quite different from Cheng’s. Unlike Cheng’s clarion voice, Tan’s was usually described as overcast or mournful. He was above all an innovator of new and intricate arias, snatching up brilliant scraps of melodies from throughout the Chinese musical universe (he was famous for borrowing melodies from bangzi and dagu) and weaving them into unpredictable but fluent passages of song. Where Cheng’s singing was robust and straightforward, Tan adapted the more flowery dan melodies and integrated them into his laosheng style, evoking feelings of mourning and pathos in his listeners. Unlike Cheng, Tan rarely performed the role of Guan Yu, not out of inability but because his subtle and unorthodox singing style seemed to clash with Guan Yu’s blunt and guileless heroism. But in striving for ornate and marvelous turns of phrasing and melody, Tan earned a reputation as the most gifted improviser in Peking opera history. The desolate qualities of Tan’s voice fitted his characters. In his signature plays, Selling a Horse (Mai ma) and The Empty City Ruse (Kong cheng ji), Tan portrayed heroic men at the end of their rope. In the latter, he played the brilliant strategist Zhuge Liang at his most dire moment, facing the enemy’s army without any troops of his own. In the ultimate gambit, Zhuge Liang orders the city gates thrown open and mounts the city walls to play his zither as if without a care in the world. As the opposing general approaches, Zhuge Liang sings: “Now I happen to be at leisure, so I mount the city walls to play my zither. But none is here to appreciate my music.”111 The enemy, smelling a trap where there is none,

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holds off the attack and loses a chance for an easy victory. If only such a cunning ruse had worked against the foreign imperialists! Even more poignant is Selling a Horse, which finds the marshal hero Qin Qiong stuck at an inn, penniless, unable even to pay the carping innkeeper’s bill. In desperation, he resolves to sell his matchless steed: “The ancients often used a horse as a metaphor for a hero’s valor. Imagine a hero in a strange land, unrecognized and unrespected, having to sell his beloved steed to clear a petty debt. How this weighs upon the heart! No wonder when he sings, ‘My tears stream like ropes,’ and ends, ‘Swinging my arms I drag him away, not knowing whose family will get this horse!’ these two lines feel so sorrowfully impassioned and deeply expressive.”112 Where Cheng was described as capturing a mood of defiance, Tan seemed to epitomize a very different spirit of the Qing’s final years: After 1900 [the Boxer Uprising], Tan’s name was suddenly ringing in the air. There was no woman or child anywhere in the city who did not know Xiao Jiaotian [Tan’s nickname]. Look at his face, withered like a salted pickle, thin as a stiff corpse; and hear his voice, his gloomy-throated song, desolate as the call of a goose, the cry of a crane. When compared with that of Sun Juxian, who is sonorous as a golden bell of the Zhou dynasty, Tan is more popular by far. Tan’s is the song of a dying nation, proof of our ill fate, is he not? 113

In personal conduct Tan could not have been more different from Cheng. Tan was wily, an avid gambler, and rumored to be a loan shark.114 His offstage persona—his limitless ambition and delight in parading his individual privilege—was complemented by his performance onstage, from his disregard for dramatic etiquette to his florid and unpredictable singing style. Where Cheng’s role was that of a severe patriarch who put his troupe’s collective interest above his own, Tan was a pioneer of individualistic, star-centered troupe management, almost charming in his brazen arrogance. One of the tenets of the acting community was to uphold the actors’ etiquette (xide): “Cheng Changgeng was extremely conscientious about performing. If somebody made a mistake, after leaving the stage he would sternly berate him, showing little lenience. But while onstage Cheng would never do anything to embarrass his fellows: this is called xide.”115 This etiquette included such customs as avoiding performing another actor’s signature roles, being willing to perform supporting parts rather than leading roles, and helping fellow actors save face onstage. Tan, by contrast, was notorious for pulling the rug out from under his colleagues, creating several incidents that have become part of Peking opera lore. In one such incident, Tan tried to test

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his rival Wang Xiaonong by suddenly changing the melody in a scene in which they sang a duet. Wang’s instantaneous recovery won Tan’s admiration.116 Tan was more successful in poking fun at the young Mei Lanfang. Tan and Mei were playing husband and wife in a play set in Sichuan. Instead of asking for a bowl of hundun (wontons), Tan used Sichuan dialect and asked for chaoshou. Not understanding, Mei adlibbed to ask Tan what he had said, and Tan replied, “Ni lian hundun dou bu dong!” roughly meaning “You’re such an idiot you don’t even know what a wonton is!”117 Despite their clashing personal styles, Cheng and Tan evinced masculinity both on and off the stage. Their masculinity, and the dominance of masculine figures in Peking opera generally in this period, was a crucial factor in the consolidation of the form. The constant crosspollination between various melodic modes and regional forms of Chinese drama makes it nearly impossible to draw strict lines separating one genre from another. The perception that a particular style is coherent and distinct from another is as much an aesthetically formal as a sociohistorical process. On the formal melodic level, the consolidation of Peking opera involved basing a structure composed of erhuang and xipi melodies systems on a well-established kunqu foundation. On the sociohistorical level it involved an elevation of the status of Peking opera in the Chinese cultural hierarchy and a concomitant raising of the status of the actors who performed it. It was in this regard that the laosheng was indispensable. In the early 1800s, dan actors had led the profession in stylistic innovation, economic power, ties to elite patronage, and general commercial popularity; but they could never gain the sort of social respect, either inside or outside the acting community, attained by Cheng and Tan. In the late Qing acting community, dan were disdained because of their feminized roles both on and off the stage. Moreover, because the popularity of dan performers was usually linked to their physical attractiveness, a dan’s career was usually in decline by the time he reached his early thirties, and it was rare for a dan actor to dominate the popular theater for more than a decade or two. In contrast, the laosheng held a highly respected position within the religious and guild rituals of the drama community; they received their training at the more respected keban and were not commonly expected to cater to the sexual pleasures of patrons. Nor was age a hindrance to a laosheng’s popularity. Both Cheng and Tan dominated the stage for more than three decades and continued to perform until shortly before their deaths. With much longer careers and a

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more respected customary status, famous laosheng actors could exert much more influence on the acting community. Onstage, the laosheng embodied the ideal of masculinity. A great laosheng radiated dignity, inspiring reverence and respect. Though Cheng and Tan evoked this respect in extremely different ways, both were authoritative presences in the acting world. Cheng’s exemplary morality and selfless commitment to his peers was a source of strength to the acting community at a time when Peking opera was still perceived as more su (crude) than ya (elegant) and when commercial success was still not as valuable as cultural capital. By Tan’s day Peking opera was the favorite genre of the court, and a commercial spirit had begun to course like adrenaline through the drama world. Tan enjoyed wealth and status beyond anything Cheng had experienced, and he exerted this personal power to the hilt. Though not known for his noble ethics, Tan was unabashed at asserting his personal authority and insisting on respectful if not deferential treatment. Though fighting for the pride of actors as a community was not at the forefront of Tan’s agenda, his individual style—his brilliance as an innovator and his refreshing and flagrant arrogance—made him the undisputed King of the Actors.118 Cheng and Tan were only the most outstanding laosheng of a period in which almost every major Peking opera company was led by laosheng. During the decades when Peking opera rose to a new level of social respectability, the stage was dominated by military heroes and patriotic scholars played by actors who made their careers performing as models of masculinity. This was a time when the two pillars of Chinese masculine identity—the wen of culture and the wu of military prowess—were being directly challenged by imperialism.119 That the laosheng commanded respect both offstage and on points to the undeniable power and currency that these models of masculinity continued to hold in the late Qing, perhaps even more markedly because of imperialist pressure. These models of masculinity would be far less central and commanding once China became a republic and attempted to take on the identity of a nation-state. With the collapse of the Qing, its models of heroic masculinity fell as well, and a differently gendered set of heroic representations emerged in negotiation with the forms of colonial modernity during the Republican era.

Chapter 2

From Teahouse to Playhouse

The Qing court had a love-hate relationship with popular drama. While several Qing rulers were extravagant patrons of popular opera, the state was far from sanguine about drama’s social effects and viewed public theaters with great suspicion. Theaters, in the eyes of the authorities, were notorious hangouts for ruffians, slackers, gamblers, and insurgents. In addition to waging campaigns to censor and weed out “seditious passages” from popular dramas, emperors throughout the Qing dynasty issued dozens of edicts regulating the construction, location, and clientele of commercial theaters.1 In rural areas, especially in times of unrest, local authorities often canceled scheduled performances for fear that such occasions offered gangs and secret societies prime opportunities for stirring up trouble.2 Urban theaters were no safer. According to popular lore, even the Kangxi emperor was cheated by hoodlums when he ventured into a public theater during one of his legendary outings disguised as a commoner.3 Yet, in spite of their reputation for breeding disorder and moral vice, commercial theaters—commonly known as teahouses (chayuan)—thrived, and it was in this new social space that Peking opera came into full flower during the last century of the Qing dynasty. This chapter describes the late Qing teahouse as a performative space, focusing less on the dramas enacted onstage than on the performance of social roles offstage and the relations between actors and audience. Such an approach allows us to map changing aspects of late-Qing and Republican-era sociality. Through its architectural design and seating 55

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arrangements, the teahouse coordinated the distribution of gendered social and political differences through which late imperial society was organized. Its replacement by the architecturally modern stage (wutai) and playhouse (juchang) during the Republican era implied changes in the fundamental principles of daily social and political practice. Indeed, the modern playhouse concretized a shift in everyday epistemology, in the ways representation was constructed and experienced in China’s modernizing cities. Analyzing the social space of the teahouse and early twentieth-century efforts to reform that space along the lines of the modern Western playhouse offers insight into some of the social and representational issues that coincide with China’s repositioning from an empire to a republican nation-state. On the largest geopolitical scale, the transformation from empire to nation-state entailed replacing the Qing imperial political framework— based on variegated internal differences within the imperial polity—with a Republican nation-state order that downplayed internal differences and emphasized the relative unity of the Chinese national polity.4 A parallel transformation was at work in the microcosm of teahouse and playhouse. The space of the Qing teahouse had been explicitly organized to facilitate the differentiation of social hierarchies: commoners, officials, and actors (who were customarily ranked with prostitutes and beggars) each had their own spaces and standards of conduct. These social hierarchies were superseded in the Republican era playhouse, where, in step with the principles of nationhood, customer-citizens were to be treated with equal respect in what was provisionally a universally accessible public space. A microcosm of the emerging national polity, the Republican playhouse was a concrete example of a potentially liberatory—albeit also potentially threatening and chaotic—space intended to facilitate the leveling of social rank and the enacting of new forms of sociality. Like public parks, squares, sports arenas, and other spaces associated with modern nation-building, the new theaters were as much spaces of liberation from old hierarchies as they were technologies to discipline and reorder society to serve new aims. But what makes the theater especially useful for investigating the deeper epistemological workings of such technologies is that it clearly illustrates the integral linkage between new practices of discipline and a new regime of representation. The cordoning off of representation from reality became the primary organizing and disciplining logic of theater reform, a logic enforced by changes in the relationship between audience and actors, the stage and the seating areas. Not only was this division part of a new set of imported notions regard-

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ing drama aesthetics, but also, and much more important, it marked a fundamental shift in the everyday political imaginary in the Republican era.

The Emergence of Peking Opera and the Rise of the Teahouse Throughout the Qing, the government emitted a steady stream of edicts regulating theater construction and attendance. These typically involved scolding and threatening government functionaries, such as this example from 1762: The number of theaters and wine shops in the area outside [Beijing’s] Qian Gate has more than doubled, and droves of bannermen, runners, etc. are heading there for entertainment. From now forward, the eight banners and ministers are informed, those yamen with authority will perform occasional inspections, and if they discover this rank of prohibited persons, they will immediately arrest them, officials will be investigated and punished, soldiers will be stripped of duty. . . . Notice is to be posted on all theaters and wine shops that bannermen are prohibited from entry.5

As early as 1671, an edict stated that it was “forbidden to ever open a theater in the Inner City of the capital.” Yet, by 1774, another edict ordered: “From now on, no matter if it is an Inner or Outer City theater, bannermen are strictly forbidden from sneaking in to enjoy plays.”6 A few decades later the court was still noting disapprovingly that “because the prohibition against building theaters within the nine gates [of the Inner City] has always been poorly enforced, they are being built along the [area’s] edges, to the point that theaters within the Inner City are growing in number daily.”7 Theaters continued to be built in the Inner City, the most famous being the Jingtai Yuan in Longfusi. An 1803 edict warned that if officials “should disguise themselves and go secretly to the drama or hold banquets without due reason, investigations should be held.”8 Finally, in apparent frustration at the futility of drawing a boundary between the behavior of government functionaries and that of commoners—between the sober sanctum of the Inner City and the unruly commoner quarters—an 1824 edict declared sweepingly: “From now on, anyone asking to build a theater will be refused permission.”9 Though several meters thick and buttressed by a host of imperial proclamations, the ramparts of the Inner City seemed weak when it came to defending against commercial theatricals. While jealous to control commercial drama and wary of spaces dedi-

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cated to its performance, the Qing court was not in the least averse to building stages for private and ceremonial performances: at least seventeen permanent ones were erected on palace lands. These ranged from small indoor installations, resembling open-faced walk-in closets, to magnificent free-standing, three-tiered structures complete with trapdoors from which ghosts and lotus-riding Buddhas could levitate. There were also “temporary stages put up during times of performance.”10 Princes and wealthy families also erected dozens of ornate stages in their private mansions to be used for tanghui. The Outer City was also home to numerous huiguan (guildhalls) equipped with stages for guild celebrations. One 1852 edict begins by trying to distinguish what constituted improper uses of theaters: “It has never been forbidden to hold banquets. However, for a long time people have been vying with each other to make these occasions more extravagant. Dramas are held at night and people bring women along with them. . . . This situation has been worsening daily and is wasteful and improper.”11 The threat of commercial theaters extended beyond their function as gathering places for cheats, rebels, and wastrels. Drama was potentially dangerous for a very simple reason: it was fun. Drama appealed to the emotions, beguiling the senses with music and pageantry. Everybody from ignorant (living) peasants to wise (dead) ancestors, from divine spirits to pernicious ghosts, enjoyed a good song and dance. Drama was seductive, promiscuous, even addictive. It could, and often did, attract the wrong kind of people and excite the wrong kind of passions, and people who have too much fun are neither good subjects nor responsible officials. Yet elites and officials had realized for centuries that popular drama could also serve as a powerful educational tool for propagating moral values and community solidarity. Drama—within the proper social parameters, performed at assigned occasions, and under proper state or lineage auspices to disseminate moral lessons—was wholesome entertainment. But mere commercial theater—drama for drama’s sake, or more accurately, for money’s sake—was much more volatile and potentially disruptive of the social order. Drama, when integrated into the temporal and spatial rhythms of daily life in the empire and performed in well-supervised private or ceremonial theaters on appropriate occasions, was sanctioned and appreciated. In contrast, permanent commercial theaters were seen as nests of vice, and policing them was an endless chore, for in such theaters drama spread beyond its proper temporal and social boundaries, becoming corruptively frequent and chaotically public.

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Figure 3. Lithograph of a brawl at the Fuhe teahouse by Wu Youru. From Wu Youru huabao, vol. 3 (Shanghai: Shanghai guji shudian, 1908).

Incidents like the brawl at the Fuhe teahouse in Yingkou, Liaoning, depicted by Wu Youru, were not entirely uncommon (see figure 3). As the caption describes it, a Mr. Wei, who worked in the magistrate’s yamen, upbraided a Mr. Jin for brazenly flirting with a huadan in a manner Mr. Wei found detestable. The next day, Mr. Jin attended a banquet performance armed with a hidden knife and stabbed Mr. Wei, injured several of his companions, and fled the theater. Clearly it was the government’s responsibility to control public spaces that could breed such violent passions. At issue was not the existence of stages and theaters themselves, but how, when, and by whom they would be used. Drama in and of itself was not the problem; the threat was drama’s spilling beyond its proper social, temporal, and spatial limits. Yet, despite the state’s countless attempts to contain such promiscuous and volatile culture, popular drama thrived, nowhere more vitally than right under the Qing court’s nose in Beijing. By 1800 there were twenty-one permanent commercial theaters or teahouses in Beijing, the largest of which spawned the most popular dramatic genre of the era, Peking opera.

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The permanent, commercial public theaters that emerged in Beijing during the Qing were among the first in China.12 Previously, public theaters were connected with temples or were temporary structures erected at fairs and markets. The theaters of the early Qing were typically built as private theaters during the Ming and began a furtive slide into commercial use over the first century or so of the Qing. One of the first of Beijing’s public theaters was the Zhalou. Initially part of the Zha family estate, it gradually came to be rented out for tanghui and used regularly for public socializing, drinking, and dining.13 In the eighteenth century several other private theaters followed the same path, and, in a related trend, many public eating establishments began installing stages to attract customers. By the nineteenth century, a wide assortment of such public establishments featured drama among the leisure and social activities they provided: There are xizhuang, xiyuan, jiuzhuang, and jiuguan. Xizhuang are called such-and-such tang or huiguan, where officials respectfully entertain guests with refined song and dance, string and flute music.14 Xiyuan are called such-and-such yuan or lou or xuan, and are good for tea talk in a sea of people, with multitudes of actors performing every style. The air trembles with gongs and drums, and the shouts of “Hao!”resemble crows competing for who can yell loudest. Ordinarily when inviting out honored guests one must go to the jiuzhuang, most of which are called tang. There one can banquet one’s superiors with all the proper vessels and trimmings, fat venison, and fine wines. In summer the rooms are airy and quiet without any clamor. For inviting out one’s fellows or arranging to meet with friends on the fly, most go to jiuguan, . . . where there is neither singing nor dancing.15

Xizhuang and jiuzhuang were primarily rented out for private parties. They shared an air of luxury and formality and featured more refined musical performances like kunqu. The jiuguan, at least as they are described above, did not provide musical entertainment. Of course, as with the Zhalou, venues often furtively changed their hats: a more private xizhuang might slowly evolve into a more public xiyuan, and so on. Of these establishments, the xiyuan most resembled permanent commercial theaters. With a capacity of several hundred people, and catering to socially diverse audiences, the larger xiyuan were capable of hosting the biggest drama troupes in Beijing, such as the extremely popular Great Hui Troupes. Because of their size, these venues sought to attract large and socially diverse audiences and could accommodate large drama troupes capable of a range of stylistic performances to entertain such a crowd’s broad range of tastes. It was in these “play gardens” that the

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seeds of Peking opera sprouted and flourished. Serving tea instead of wine, they came to be called teahouses so as to evade government restrictions on theaters. As the Peking opera matured and grew more popular, teahouses became more numerous. A 1785 stele listed eight xiyuan in Beijing; by 1816 there were at least twenty-one; by the early twentieth century there were more than forty teahouse theaters in the capital.16 As the name teahouse denotes, these establishments were as much places to schmooze with the boys as to watch a few plays: “Though teahouses were establishments for the performance of opera, most customers really put drinking tea as the main activity, listening to opera as a supplement. After entering, the audience purchased tea tickets, not theater tickets, and businessmen and political brokers often used the teahouse as a place to discuss affairs and hash out deals.”17 Initially teahouse owners seem to have used drama to attract more customers, but this side attraction gradually came to determine where customers would go for an afternoon of leisure.18 By the 1860s, teahouse theaters had spread beyond Beijing. Shanghai theater venues, though numerous, remained relatively small and shabby by Beijing standards until the opening of the Mantingfang and Dangui theaters in 1867, modeled explicitly on the teahouse theaters of Beijing and designed to accommodate the large pihuang troupes of the north. By the 1870s Shanghai’s Beijing-style teahouses numbered closer to a dozen. Shanghai’s smaller theaters had been dominated by kunqu; but, overshadowed by their larger- scale pihuang competitors, the kunqu theaters faltered. By the 1880s business in Shanghai’s remaining kunqu theaters was so slack that they were closed half the time. The more capacious Peking opera teahouses thrived over these same decades, with ticket prices ranging from one hundred coppers to almost one silver yuan.19 By the 1890s, Shanghai’s Peking opera theaters were expanding in size and stuffing in extra benches for seating wherever they could. Tianjin witnessed similar trends: the city’s “Four Famous Teahouses” (the Jinsheng, Qingfang, Xiesheng, and Xisheng) all sprang up in the 1870s. Despite extraordinary turnover in the business—more than 130 theaters were born and died in Tianjin over the next several decades—the Famous Four had remarkable longevity, staying in business for more than half a century.20 In other words, the Beijing-style teahouse, the architectural crucible in which Peking opera coalesced as a form, was seen by entertainment entrepreneurs as an exportable technology ideally suited to serving diverse and growing urban populations such as those in Shanghai, Tianjin, and other burgeoning treaty ports.

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By the 1890s, Shanghai’s teahouses were often larger and more comfortable than their Beijing forebears: “In one place [Beijing] the plays are good and the seats are bad; in the other [Shanghai] the seats are good and the plays are bad.”21 One opera buff recorded a typical evening of entertainment at a Beijing teahouse in his diary: “Tongzhi, third year [1865], July 23, afternoon: Left the [Inner] City to go to Guangde theater with Chen Lianfeng and Yi Shichou to listen to a play. Shoulders rubbed, limbs were trampled, the confusion was unbearable. I had arranged our own box beforehand, and soon Zhi Qiu arrived. I drew in my knees to make room for him. After a short time, Mei Wu and his old friend arrived, squeezing me between them. I could not even wave my fan, and hot sweat came pouring.”22 Shanghai’s teahouses—which, unlike Beijing’s, admitted some women (courtesans and prostitutes accompanying male patrons)—were reputedly better, but far from luxurious: “There are no bathroom facilities for women. Behind the box seats there is a small room with two chamber pots, and the women must go back and find them. If they are already filled up, there is no one to empty and clean them, and women look everywhere and can only leave. . . . Backstage . . . is extremely cramped. . . . In summer and autumn the sweaty air is steaming, and those not accustomed to it cannot stand it.”23 With all the crowding and sweating, it is little wonder that in all three cities dozens of theaters were torn down and built up, renovated, and expanded throughout the late Qing. In the last decades of the nineteenth century, a handful of Peking opera actors began to emerge as stars. Taking advantage of the new railroad and steamship lines and newspaper advertising, they began touring China’s major cities, drawing huge crowds. To accommodate these clamoring fans, the teahouse owners could only cram yet more benches into their already packed houses. The crowds that swarmed to see these stars were a powerful economic impetus for the changes in theater construction and organization that occurred in the Republican era; but there were political, social, and artistic reasons for reforming the teahouse as well. The progressive dramatic artists who led the way in theater reform in the early 1900s grew to view the teahouse as a manifestation of everything that was wrong with the imperial social order. The new Westernstyle stage or playhouse, they believed, was far more cultured and befitting of a rising republic. What was the spatial and social order that the teahouse embodied that these actors and dramatists so urgently wished to abolish?

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You Are Where You Sit: The Teahouse Theater as Social Text Modeled on the Beijing teahouses of Dashalar (the entertainment quarter), the architecture and seating arrangements of teahouses until the early 1900s were generally the same in all three cities (Beijing, Shanghai, and Tianjin) where Peking opera was in vogue. Figure 4 provides the basic floor plan of a late Qing teahouse; figure 5 is a Guangxu-era (1875– 1908) depiction of a teahouse during a performance.24 The stage was a wooden, square platform a couple of feet above floor level and projecting into the room. A roof above the stage, often concave to magnify acoustic projection, was supported by two pillars in the stage’s front corners, which were often decorated and carved with a paired poem. At the back corners of the stage were two doors, the stage entrance and exit doors. Between them were a table and a few chairs arranged symmetrically. There was seating on the ground level on all three sides of the stage. The front area, filled with either square or long tables, and chairs facing opposite each other—not facing the stage—was the “pond,” predominately occupied by male commoners. Ding Bingsui described the pond as follows: There was always a number of seats whose line of sight was blocked by the pillars, and so it was impossible to see the whole stage. These seats were called “eating the pillar”; they were always the last seats to sell after all the other seats were filled. The audience seated here was constantly leaning and peeking left and right finally to get a complete picture of the action on stage, it was really uncomfortable. . . . The audience sitting on either side of these long tables essentially sat facing each other; when they wanted to watch the stage they had to turn, “Right, face!” or “Left, face!” Watching a whole afternoon of plays was literally a pain in the neck. A few inches above ground level to the left and right of the stage were the “corridor seats” [langzuo].25 These seats were usually the cheapest in the house. On either side of the stage were some long bench seats. Facing the stage from the left and the right, they could not see the actor’s front. The people sitting in these seats were all old opera buffs, the kind that listen with their eyes closed, tapping the beat with their hands and wagging their heads like old bookworms. When they found an actor’s singing outstanding, they would immediately shout praise; if an actor sang off-key or out of time, they instantly booed [dao hao] intolerantly. . . . These old opera nuts showed up almost daily, and most were steady customers. Actors really respected and feared this handful of customers because they were the genuine experts on vocalization, melody, rhythm, pronunciation—their real bravos [zheng hao] and sarcastic boos convinced you that they understood

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Figure 4. Simplified floor plan of a typical teahouse.

it all. An actor who often earned their cheers would slowly rise. On the other hand, one that got regularly rained with dao hao would eventually be unable to continue singing.26

The most expensive seats in the house were those on the second level. Often partitioned by wooden screens into private boxes, these were

Figure 5. Anonymous Guangxu-era painting of a teahouse theater performance. The “scattered seats” off to the side are visible here, as are the columns supporting the balcony that obviously obstructed the downstairs audience’s view of the stage. Several audience members are immersed in conversations, and many have their backs to the stage. A dan actor can be seen going up the stairs to visit with a patron in the “official seats” in the balcony. From Liao Ben, Zhongguo gudai juchang shi (Zhengzhou: Zhongguo guji chubanshe, 1997), 27.

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reserved for elites and officials. The seats directly opposite the stage were called the “straight seats” (zhengzuo); those to either side of the stage were the “official seats” (guanzuo). These private boxes could usually hold six to ten people and were furnished with a tea table, some chairs, and sometimes a short bench. At the teahouse, the audience in the pond were tallied by person, and those upstairs by box. Usually the pond was full of unlettered city folk and clever merchants, so the people upstairs disparaged them as “the bottom of the well” (xia jing). Of the gentlemen officials, not one did not go upstairs . . . to the so-called officials’ seats. The seats by the stage exit were always most valued, and mostly were already reserved by frivolous youths. . . . Those upstairs most enjoyed plays full of batting eyelashes and amorous confessions, of sneaking through gates and scaling garden walls. . . . The pond likes brawls and battles, attacking rebels, thieves and murder. Therefore a typical day’s plays must combine the civilian and the military in proper proportion.27

The architecture of the teahouse was finely tuned to demarcate and reinforce social divisions. The occupants of each type of seat could be literally located not only in terms of status but according to their aesthetic likes and expertise. Opera genres reiterated these social and spatial divisions: elites favored the wen (civil) and ya (elegant) kunqu dramas; commoners devoured the wu (military) and su (crude, folksy) plays. Ya and su styles were not so much blended (though stylistic cross-pollination did occur) as alternated throughout the program. The social stratification of the teahouse was intended in part to prevent the troubles that could arise when status signals got crossed. Just outside the theater, in the streets of the entertainment district, such misunderstandings were not uncommon. For instance, “in the Jiaqing [1796–1820] period, an official censor was passing through Dashalar by coach, but the street was clogged by a crowd. Seeing a group of beautiful young men, he mistook them for dan actors. He reviled them. The group was furious and destroyed his coach.”28 Thankfully, inside the theater, status was much more legible. Even off the stage, dan actors remained in costume when mingling with patrons. These patrons vied for the best seats, especially those over the stage exit door, where knowing glances could most conveniently flicker between a patron and his favorite dan as he left the stage: “Those who flirt with the dan actors are called dou [duelists, fighters], and they struggle over the seats above the stage exit. . . . For one tea table in the official seats, the tea ticket costs seven times the scattered seats in the pond. Two dou often occupy one tea

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table and vacate their seats when the dan actor drops in to pay his regards, standing between their servants, [who] do not have tea tickets and are said to be ‘railing sitters.’ ”29 Often dan would join their patrons upstairs (as shown in figure 5), keeping them company through the rest of the day’s performance. According to scholars’ diaries and novels like Precious Mirror for Appraising Flowers, it was quite common for actors to accompany their patrons to a wine house or restaurant after the show. Other dan would line up beside the stage doors and make eyes at those sitting in the balcony during the performances.30 The patron-actor relationships enacted in this most public of forums was between status unequals, conferring social prestige upon the patron and confirming the actor’s status as marginalized and feminized. As illustrated by the story about the censor assaulted in his coach, such status-based feminizing of other men could be hazardous if misdirected. The subculture of the elite opera patrons can be understood only in this context of social relations. Their passion for great acting was not just aesthetic; it was often suffused with ressentiment. It was noble for a patron to admire a fine young actor’s talents precisely because such admiration demonstrated that, as a true aesthete, the patron chafed against the constraints of social status. Writings on the pleasures of the “Chrysanthemum Registry” (jubu, descriptive lists of Peking opera actors, primarily dan) reveal that the experience of intimacy with an actor was deeply entwined with a fantasy of leaving behind the falsities of status-bound officialdom to enter a realm of pure companionship and beauty. For instance, throughout the scholar Zhang Jiliang’s 1829 Diary of the TearSoaked Golden Stage (Jin tai can lei ji), accounts of romantic interludes with actors are interlaced with the author’s bemoaning of the sad state of officialdom. In the following example, the author begins by describing a romantic moment between actor and patron, and then goes on to paint a pathetic picture of his life as an official in the capital: The wind and the swallow make a pair, the low-toned flute never sounds alone. Dead drunk as usual, that is how they are. Those with wakeful eyes who pass by [and see the pair] despair that something is missing in themselves. . . . In the Tang and Song, [gentlemen] still valued being transferred to the capital. In the Yuan and Ming, promotions to outer posts became glorified. Coming to today, minor officials in outer posts are richer than the marquis in the capital. Even at farewell banquets we [in the capital] eat decoy pheasant [clay decoys used for hunting], and at the music-accompanied feast, lament over chickens’ ribs [items of little value but which one is loath to part with, such as official posts in the capital].31

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Here the bonds between literati and actors are idealized as an escape from the tedium and rigidities of workaday life. The teahouse thus provided a space in which elite men could repeatedly and publicly enact the fantasy that their desires and affections transcended mundane concerns, while never actually threatening the hierarchical differences—and economic exchanges—that made this pleasurable fantasy available to them. The teahouse allowed various social groups to indulge in different kinds of aesthetic enjoyment based on their relative social positions. The impoverished old opera buffs could sit cheek by jowl to the stage and lose themselves in the music for a few cents. Officials and the rich, entering and exiting the theater through passages reserved for their use, were raised above the hubbub in balconies, with their wealth and importance visible to all below—including the actors whose careers depended on their largesse. Commoners in the pond were at liberty to chat or watch as they chose, and to jostle about if they wanted to be more or less involved in the performance. As later chapters show, during the Republican era the customs and laws regarding women in public theaters were subject to frequent change and debate: the details of when and where women were allowed to sit in the audience or perform onstage differed from city to city and from year to year. But throughout most of the nineteenth century, the situation was fairly straightforward: respectable women had no place in the teahouse’s blueprint of status and gender relations. Women could watch plays at private parties (often sitting separately or in the upstairs boxes), but the Qianlong emperor had banned them from public commercial performances, and this ban was generally upheld by custom through the rest of the Qing period, particularly in Beijing.32 Still, anecdotal compilations like the encyclopedic Qing bai lei chao of 1917 recount incidents of elite women braving this social opprobrium. In one story, set in the 1830s, a stodgy official conspired to chase women from the upstairs pews of a theater. He stopped the play and shouted upstairs (for it would have been improper for him to go up himself), “Members of good families are forbidden to attend theaters, so any women who have come must be prostitutes. I will wait for you to come down and then register your names.” The women ignored him. Only after he threatened to drag them and their husbands to court did they flee the theater.33 In contrast, in Shanghai it was common to find women in teahouses by the late 1800s; many, though certainly not all, were prostitutes or courtesans. Shanghai teahouse owners struck up informal deals with brothels and hired boys whose job was to run to the brothel and fetch a

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courtesan upon a patron’s request. A tea ticket for a courtesan was twice the price of the man’s, and her cup was green as opposed to the usual white, helping to mark her presence.34 As one can easily imagine, however, this loophole was quickly taken advantage of by women from “respectable families” who discreetly frequented Shanghai’s theaters with some regularity. If anyone doubted that the theater’s corrupting influence was spreading, the Yang Yuelou case of 1873 made it plain to all. The case involved the daughter of a wealthy Cantonese merchant family who, while attending the theater along with her mother (the businessman’s concubine), fell in love with the wusheng actor Yang Yuelou. They married in a clandestine wedding; the girl’s father accused Yang of abducting her, and the Shanghai magistrate had Yang interrogated, tortured, and imprisoned.35 The case shows that the restrictions on theater attendance, even in Shanghai, were not based upon sexual difference alone but upon the intersection of sexual difference with issues of morality and status. Women of good families were to be protected from exposure to the teahouses’ corrupting atmosphere. Prostitutes, on the other hand, could be expected, if not always permitted, in such an environment when their place and status were explicitly delineated and publicized in accordance with the logic of the teahouse as a space of clearly mapped status differences. With the advent of Republican-era theater reforms aimed at removing enforced status differences from public society, the very sticky question of whether women should be seated differently from (excluded, seated separately from, or seated with) men met with a wide range of solutions, and it was not until the late 1920s that most major urban theaters completely eliminated sex-segregated seating.36

The Teahouse as Marketplace Sociologically, the teahouse was organized to delineate status relations; economically, it was a complex commercial space. In his book Worlds Apart: The Market and the Theater in Anglo-American Thought, JeanChristophe Agnew argues that the seventeenth-century English theater reflected popular anxieties regarding the social instability of the marketplace.37 The late Qing teahouse theater did not merely evoke such sentiments: it quite literally was a marketplace. Teahouses were not merely businesses selling a single item—drama—for a cash payment, but marketplaces with an array of items for sale. Economically speaking, few people in the teahouse were exclusively focused on the activities onstage: the teahouse owner, who profited through the sale of tea tickets, used the

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opera primarily to attract more customers; for the snack vendors, towel tossers, tea pourers, and table tenders (ushers), the seating area served as a marketplace. Tea drinkers were paying cash to socialize over tea, melon seeds, and snacks as much as to catch a show. Even the actors were engaged in salesmanship that extended beyond the stage platform, for their livelihood depended not only on their onstage talents but also on their offstage performance, for example in the role of courtesan. The teahouse was a raucous combination of market, meeting hall, theater, and brothel parlor. For the management, teacups served essentially as ticket stubs, physical evidence of whether a customer had paid, which were tallied up and checked against the cash grossed at the end of the day. In Beijing, theater owners then gave a set percentage of the gross (usually 60 or 70 percent) to the drama company. There were many more mouths to feed among the teahouse staff, but the theater owner was not responsible for their wages: Old-style theaters had no employees. . . . The other serving people, at that time called kanzuor [table tenders], not only did not get even a minimal salary, they also had to hand over a percentage of their tips. Even the “hall sweepers” [sao tang, cleanup workers] were paid no wages, . . . and the customers never came in contact with them. They all swept up after the crowd scattered. Do you think customers would wait until after closing to give them a little tip while the broom-dust was flying? Of course not. The hall sweepers’ income was made by collecting cigarette butts and selling them to be rerolled at cigarette stalls in Tianqiao; the copper foil could be melted for copper, the cigarette cartons and other paper scraps could be sold for money, and sometimes customers would drop and lose something. . . . The vendors who balanced trays hawking cigarettes and melon seeds, and the towel tossers, and so on, none got a wage.38

The teahouse accommodated happily captive customers who all could use a cushion to soften their seats, tea and a towel to stave off the heat, and perhaps even a platter of dim sum and a courtesan to butter up their business associates. Rather than hiring this elaborate staff, the teahouse owner essentially rented out the theater as a marketplace to this cast of vendors, servers and gleaners. Judging from contemporary descriptions, watching this offstage cast of characters was half the fun. Table tenders dangled the requisite cigarettes from their mouths and gold watch chains from their vests, smugly indifferent when the house was full, oily and obsequious when it was not.39 Tea pourers scurried to refill tin teapots lest short-fused customers

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begin banging their lids like opera cymbals. The towel tossers, like a team of snipers armed with washcloths, whizzed steaming towels from the depths of the pond clear to the third-story balcony, avoiding with flawless accuracy the teapots and bobbing heads of customers.40 As in any other marketplace of the time, transactions were negotiated through haggling, sensitively gauged to status and levels of familiarity. There was no depersonalizing ticket booth, gatekeeper, or system of assigned seating that treated all customers as anonymous equals.41 Snack and towel vendors charged according to custom, leaving plenty of room for disputes, according to Sun Yusheng, a leading opera critic: “Each customer was supposed to give some money for the teahouse towel, but the amount was not fixed. At times, if you had run out of coppers, you had to give a silver jiao as a tip. Usually each guest in the straight seats and box seats gave thirty or forty coppers, around twenty for the side boxes, and the basic tip was around ten coppers per person. The frequent arguments about the amount being paid would turn into loud shouting matches that were really detestable.”42 Customers also paid separately for a playbill, typically a small strip of red paper with the titles of the day’s plays jotted down in hasty brushstrokes. Teahouses did not even hold a monopoly on the tea consumed on the premises. Many customers brought their own tea, because the house tea was generally lousy.43 Even so, those who supplied their own tea were wise to stay in the good graces of the tea pourers, for hot-water refills, if not thoroughly boiled, could be hazardous to one’s health. The most fashionable customers had their tea delivered ostentatiously from a neighboring restaurant in ornate and noticeably cleaner cups.44 Such customers did not just talk over teacups; their teacups talked, too. In this environment, the overseeing of seating arrangements was a diplomatic mission of the highest sensitivity. This was a job for the table tenders, who were half ushers, half loan sharks. The stranger in a strange theater received scant attention, but regular patrons could expect broad smiles, prime seats, house calls announcing performances, and drop-of-ahat service. Table tenders are often depicted as the compradors of the drama world, for they were the link between the teahouse owner and the financial and political elites that kept him in the black and out of trouble. These were not easy jobs to land. Teahouses having no ticket booths, large sums of money moved directly from the pockets of the wealthiest customers into the hands of the table tenders; in consequence, they were required to put down a deposit of up to four hundred yuan before they could start working.45 Thereafter table tenders were expected to hand

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over all their ticket takings every few days, in theory leaving them only their tips as income.46 Not surprisingly, like yamen runners, they were always skimming off the top; “If the ticket price was originally eight jiao per person, sprinkle on a few melon seeds, some hot water for tea, and some fruit, and the bigwig customer was suddenly paying five yuan.”47 Quite unlike the silent ushers of the modern playhouse—whose mission is to minimize audience disruption of the performance on stage—table tenders were intentionally self-promoting freelancers in the teahouse market. The audience themselves also behaved as they would in a raucous market. By ignoring the performance, chatting, or loudly vocalizing their appreciation or discontent, teahouse audiences made public statements about the value of the products on display—the performances onstage. Just as in street markets, where customers haggle over and evaluate the merchandise, in the teahouse customers did not dole out their aesthetic currency—their attention—without a healthy haggle. Nor was one expected to keep silent and still so that others in the crowd could take in the show undisrupted. Disruption (renao) was part of the fun; indeed, it was an integral part of the communication between the audience and the actors.

The Permeability of Stage and Audience Space By facilitating a cacophonous merging of onstage and offstage activities, the spatial arrangement of the teahouse helped create a synergy between actors and the audience, who, through their body language and noise level, relayed clear messages to each other and to the stage about their likes and dislikes. When the crowd’s favorite actors strode the stage, audiences could be wildly enthusiastic, vocal, and intently focused. At other times, it was entirely acceptable for audience members to move about the room, hold long and excited conversations, play betting games, and turn their backs to the stage for long stretches of the performance. A day of opera lasted anywhere from six to ten hours, with the popular actors appearing only during the last few scenes. No one, save perhaps the old opera addicts in the corridor seats, could be expected to sit rapt for such a length of time. Such behavior would be unthinkable in a conventional modern Western theater, in which all action and attention is concentrated on the stage, and the audience is expected to be still and silent. Typical modern Western theaters are built to enforce the illusion that the stage and audi-

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ence space are wholly separate: the quiet, darkened audience looks in on the active, lighted stage as if through a fourth, invisible wall. The teahouse made no attempt to create this illusion. Electric lighting did not yet exist, and, though gas lighting was used in the late 1800s, it was risky and hard to manipulate. Because most commercial performances, especially in Beijing, took place in daytime, there was little clear division between lighted and darkened spaces. Light and sound, and with them the audience’s attention, dispersed in all directions. In sum, the teahouse’s social (audience) and representational (stage) spaces were mutually permeable, or continuous. Rather than pretend that the audience did not exist, the actors often addressed them directly. The suggestive eye contact between dan actors and their patrons was all the more seductive for playfully blurring the lines between onstage and offstage scenarios, between the represented drama and the interpersonal interaction with their fans. And the audience reciprocated, communicating with the actors (and each other) through shouts of “Hao!” (lit. Good! Bravo!) Whenever an actor performed a wonderful aria, perfectly executed a movement, or struck a pose crystallizing a character’s emotion, cries of “Hao!” would drown out the orchestra. The exclamation was not intended as anonymous and polite appreciation but as an expression of an individual’s feelings and critical judgments.48 This one syllable was remarkably flexible and expressive: to the seasoned opera fan, a well-timed “Hao!” spoke volumes. There were pengtou hao (meeting up with each other) when actors emerged onto the stage; pengchang hao (fan support, fan flirting), often emitted just before an actor first strode onto the stage, as a show of admiration and encouragement;49 yaocai hao (bravos) to praise the execution of an especially difficult passage or movement; and so forth.50 There were also dao hao (lit. inverted good), which could be delivered with scathing irony to signal an expert’s disapproval, and guaisheng hao (strange-sounding), which were meant to be lascivious or derogatory.51 An anecdote set in the pond of an old-style theater during a performance by Tan Xinpei conveys the almost biological necessity of crying “Hao!” for a true Peking opera fan: As it got later, there were more and more people. Folks had even climbed up to fill the window ledges. . . . At this point, an old man, over sixty, sweat pouring from his temples, was slogging through the pond searching for a seat. A serving boy said, “Where do you see any room? There’s not even room for teacups on the tables!” Looking in all directions, the old man realized there was no way around it, but Tan’s number was about to

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(Re)Framing the Genre go on, and he could not bear to leave, so he asked my friend Mr. Shi, “Please sir, could you just lift your leg.” Shi asked, “What are you up to?” He said, “Let me crouch under the table; so long as I can hear, that’s fine. Begging your pardon, begging your pardon!” Mr. Shi felt sorry for the pitiful old man and moved his leg. Crouching like a monkey on the floor, he kept thanking Mr. Shi. . . . [The play began with some minor characters on stage, and for half an hour there was not a peep from the old man]. Then he tapped Mr. Shi’s thigh, saying, “Begging your pardon, could you move your leg aside a bit.” Shi assumed he was suffocating under the table and couldn’t stand it any longer, so he wanted to let him get some air. At just that moment the hall rang with drums, a daoban melody began, the huqin sang, and Tan entered. Just when he had sung “It is the time of the setting sun,” a crisp “Hao!” sounded from below the stage. The old man had waited for the exact moment, popped his head out to shout a “Hao!” so loud it must have left him mute, and just as fast shrunk his head back under the table like a turtle.52

“Hao!” was not for everyone to voice. A badly timed or inappropriate “Hao!” revealed one’s ignorance as an art critic. On the other hand, a stabbing dao hao could carry a painfully authoritative sting. Even Tan Xinpei modestly sought the instruction of audience members who so chided him. Such dao hao almost always emanated from the old opera buffs in the langzuo. Compared to the raucous tribunal of the standing parterre in eighteenth-century French theaters, and the “gallery gods” of nineteenthcentury American theaters, the occupants of the langzuo exerted a somewhat different authority over the performance. While the parterre could represent “a unified voice which passed judgment on spectacle through a serendipitous mixture of reason and instinct,” the langzuo was not seen as symbolizing the voice of the public masses.53 The occupants of the langzuo were stereotypically failed scholars and poor teachers, cultured but not pretentious opera addicts. Their aesthetic judgments usually involved a modicum of textual authority; their criticisms often aimed at correcting an actor’s mispronunciation of lyrics due, usually, to illiteracy or a regional accent. Several conventions of dramatic staging also bespeak the lack of a strict differentiation between representational and social space. The orchestra, who certainly were not meant to be seen as characters in the drama, were typically seated to the side of or directly behind the actors, with no clear indication that they were in a different space (see figure 4). Prop men (jianchang), dressed in everyday clothes, often shuffled on and off the stage rearranging props or throwing cushions to actors when a

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scene called for them to kneel (in order to keep them from sullying the troupe’s expensive costumes). But the permeability between stage space and audience space is perhaps best illuminated by the evolution of a practice known as yinchang (lit. drink stage). Yinchang refers to the drinking of tea (or wine) by an actor in the middle of the performance in order to loosen up the voice. It was occasionally incorporated into the play’s plot, for several plays involved characters meeting and drinking together. Far more commonly, however, yinchang occurred independent of the play’s plotted action. An actor simply stopped the drama momentarily in order to take a drink. Such interruptions were not seen as the least inappropriate or disruptive. Even Cheng Changgeng, a great stickler for propriety among actors, often took a drink onstage when his voice tired. Cheng’s yinchang was not the least pretentious. A staunch believer in troupe solidarity, Cheng had no servants or personal musicians of his own. When he gestured for a drink, a teacup was simply carried out to him by the prop man.54 But as star actors grew in prestige in the last years of the Qing, yinchang underwent a telling change, traceable again to Tan Xinpei, that pacesetter of star-centering trends. Tan manifested his extraordinary, individuated authority onstage by allowing his three attendants to hover by the stage entrance and exit doors, “all with a selfsatisfied expression”; when he signaled for a drink, all would rush on stage to attend to him. No critics protested that Tan’s method of yinchang interfered with his performance, and soon such ostentation was trendy. By the 1910s the actor Liu Hongsheng had his attendants arrayed onstage, “one carrying the warm teapot, one holding the teacup, and, when they were called for, one poured the tea into the cup, the other specially carried it and proffered it before [Liu]; in special circumstances they would provide a hand towel and he could wipe his face as he drank tea.”55 It was as if Liu was performing as an actor and as a pampered teahouse customer simultaneously. Other actors and actresses in the 1910s made similarly elaborate shows of yinchang, quaffing from elegant teapots and the finest porcelain cups, sitting at little silver tea tables, or enjoying a few whisks from an ostrich feather fan.56 By the 1920s, however, yinchang was under attack, and by the 1930s it was almost unheard of among respectable actors.57 The problem was not simply that yinchang had become gauche; more to the point, it came to be seen as inappropriate no matter how it was executed. Taking a drink in the middle of a performance when the plot did not call for it had come to be seen as a blatant and inexcusable interruption in the flow of

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the drama. Yinchang was an outrage because it shattered the illusion that the stage was a separate world, a representational space utterly separate from the real social space of the audience.58 Hence the ups and downs of the yinchang trend reflect changes not only in actors’ social status but in accepted modes of representation as well. As emerging Republican ideologies and explosive commercial success began to free Peking opera actors from their denigrated social position (see Chapter 3), stars like Tan and Liu began unabashedly displaying their newly unfettered prestige through their elaborate yinchang, and their actions were not seen as aesthetically reprehensible, for the teahouse stage functioned unproblematically as both a social space and a representational space. By the 1920s, however, there was growing insistence that the line between social and representational spaces, between “real” and performed identities, should be clearly drawn. This strict differentiation became a rule of everyday epistemological experience in urban theaters with the convergence of the mechanical, architectural, and social disciplining technologies that were embodied in the new-style theaters, or “playhouses” (juchang) of the Republican era. One of the landmarks in the transition to a different representational model was established in Shanghai in 1908 by an acting family known as the Xia brothers (Yueheng, Yueshan, Yuerun, and Yuehua). They aptly dubbed their novel establishment the “New Stage.”

The New Stage The New Stage was the centerpiece in the Xia brothers’ comprehensive vision of drama and social reform. The theater was partly owned and fully managed by actors. The Xias were spurred by an idealistic political agenda that at times took precedence over economic common sense. Contrary to stereotypes that cast Peking opera as rigidly conservative, Peking opera actors during the decades straddling the 1911 revolution were at the forefront of radical change, both political and aesthetic. The Xia brothers’ bold agenda for drama reform aimed to raise both popular drama and actors, as a social group, to new heights of social and cultural respectability. Their goal of shaping drama into a tool to mobilize a stronger nation was not particularly novel; many intellectuals and students returning from studying abroad were making similar pronouncements at the turn of the century. What was unique about the New Stage was its marriage of this cultural mission with a commercial organization that was financially self-sufficient and reached a large and varied audi-

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ence. Most literary societies interested in drama reform and Western forms of fiction writing were scholarly groups like the Chunliu she (Spring Willow Society), which drew their membership and readership from the educated ranks of elite society. In contrast, the New Stage was a commercial experiment that gainfully employed dozens of theater workers and actors from the lowest social strata. Together with the actor Pan Yueqiao and ten other investors, the Xia brothers established a joint-stock company called the City Shaking Company (Zhenshi Gongsi, later renamed the Enlightenment Company, Kaiming Gongsi), the idea being that they would shake up and wake up the South Market area of Shanghai to a new, flourishing commercial and cultural life. As adjuncts to the theater, they opened several small businesses, including a shop that sold a patent medicine to cure opium addiction. The Xia brothers also spearheaded several other organizations in the acting community: an elementary school for the children of poor actors; funds for retired actors; and a volunteer fire squad which participated heroically in the attack on the Shanghai arsenal during the 1911 revolution.59 Even putting aside the laurels they have sprouted since becoming legends of the drama world, the Xia brothers seem to have been remarkably brave and dedicated. Over their sixteen years in business, they relocated four times, sometimes simply because the area in which they were located had become part of a foreign concession and the brothers refused to run a business on non-Chinese soil. They were equally stubborn in their resistance to the other dominant power of China’s treaty ports, the underworld mafias. When touring in Hankou they stirred up quite a bit of trouble by refusing to acquiesce in the expected practice of having dan actors pour tea for the mafia bosses in the audience.60 They also refused to perform at tanghui, despite the great financial sacrifice, because they viewed such performances, with all the ingratiating customs they entailed, as humiliating to the acting community.61 Adamant that actors be accorded equal citizenship and no longer treated as depraved members of a “mean” profession, they insisted that the public and the press stop referring to actors by deprecating terms like xizi and lingren.62 For these they substituted the word yiren, “artist.” Central to the New Stage’s popularity was its innovative theater and set design. Xia Yuerun had returned from a trip to Japan in 1908 with blueprints for a modern-style theater, complete with a rotating stage, a Japanese novelty that enjoyed a brief vogue in Chinese theater design. The most lasting innovation entailed the construction of a stage shaped

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like a half moon, replacing the rectangular platform that had been used in teahouses up to this time. The change was hailed as revolutionary, transforming the visibility of the stage. The stage columns that obstructed the teahouse audience’s line of vision were eliminated. More important, the new semicircular, framed (jingkuanghua) stage changed the relationship between the audience and the performance space. The teahouse platform had been like a pier protruding into and above the crowded pond, with the audience on its three sides having very different, even wholly opposing, perspectives on the performance. The rectangular stage made no provisions for scenery or backdrops, which in any case would have been rendered ineffective and inconsistent by the varying lines of sight. Peking opera sets had been almost barren, consisting of a table and chairs, a few props, and an embroidered curtain (shoujiu) that hung in the back but was by no means to be construed as dramatic backdrop. The sets of the Xia brothers’ productions were far more elaborate and vibrant. The set painter Zhang Jinguang and Xia Yuerun toured the most famous scenic sites of Jiangnan, photographing and sketching gardens and temples that Zhang recreated as dazzling backdrops. The Xias staged mostly Peking opera and civilized dramas (wenming xi), many of which were recognizably “traditional,” others based on contemporary themes or adapted from European classics. Some sets were styled after bourgeois living rooms; other dramas were flooded in colored lights; in one play, a real automobile motored onto the stage.63 The new-style stage was cut off from the audience space and essentially projected an image in one direction, out toward the audience. Electric lights and spotlights illuminated the stage while keeping the audience space dim, reinforcing the sense that these spaces were distinct and that the stage should command the audience’s undivided attention. Some stages even featured footlights that carved a clear line of illumination between stage and spectator. The organization of audience seating, which in the teahouse had equally accommodated both social interaction and performance viewing, became, in the new theaters, exclusively focused on the isolated, framed, representational space of the stage. Customers no longer faced each other on opposite sides of the tea table; except in the first-class box seats, tables were eliminated, and all seats faced the stage. Implicit in the design was the ideal that everyone in the audience share a roughly equivalent, uninterrupted, and unobstructed view of the drama being performed. Over the next two decades almost every innovation in theater con-

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struction and management was aimed at realizing the ideal of this shared, unobstructed perspective. Seating was arranged not along clearly divided status lines, but along a continuous scale of proximity to the stage which, theoretically, was to be based not on status, or even class per se, but purely on ticket price. A new social logic of public equality and anonymity was linked with the aesthetic imperative of providing the best possible view of the drama. The Xia brothers and their contemporaries viewed this new theater layout as symbolic of modern reform: the inefficient, irrational, and unjustly hierarchical space of the teahouse was replaced by a rationalized public space where all had equivalent access and a shared perspective. The Xias even tried to eliminate the table tenders from the seating process, hoping to end the stranglehold that well-connected elites, gangsters, and their cronies had on the prime seats. Other reforms were clearly aimed at eliminating marketplace activity from the performance hall: ticket booths were built, and snack stalls were removed to the lobby; tea pourers were trained to move discreetly or eliminated completely. By putting vendors and ushers on the payroll, theater managers could ensure their compliance with the new standards of comportment. The architectural layout of theaters subtly began removing marketplace attitudes from the audience’s behavior. With everyone facing the stage, activities like vending, gambling, and conversing loudly with friends became discourteous distractions interfering with the show. The darkened auditorium discouraged both customers and vendors from moving about during the performance. Within a year of the opening of the New Stage in 1908, almost every theater in Shanghai had changed its name from “teahouse” (chayuan) to “stage” (wutai), even if they did not all immediately change their spatial arrangements.64 In the wave of construction that followed, almost every new venue was designed according to these new parameters; many theaters adopted the even more distinctly modern and Western title of “playhouse” (juchang). The last teahouse theater built in Shanghai, the Precious Immortal Teahouse (Guixian Chayuan), opened in 1915, only to close two years later. In Beijing, only the most staunchly “traditionalist” troupes continued to insist on performing in the remaining old-style theaters.65 Meanwhile, the new-style theaters became steadily more circumscribed as places where a commodity, drama (or film), was to be purchased at the door and consumed in a respectfully passive atmosphere. The smorgasbord of social and commercial activities that characterized the teahouse—the drinking, chatting, jostling, towel-lobbing bustle—

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was attacked as “chaos.”66 By 1930, shouting “Hao!” even as a form of polite praise, had come to be seen by many critics as rather uncouth. Such shouts—along with talking, eating, drinking, moving about, and wearing hats inside the theater—had all come to be seen as anathema to public-minded citizens. Western-style theater architecture, technologies (such as lighting, ventilation, and acoustics) and codes of audience behavior came to be seen as models to be emulated. Early reforms aimed at expunging some of the most obvious symbols of amorality from the theater. Marketplace activity was generally viewed as uncultured. Prostitutes were no longer sought out by the management nor blatantly marked for opprobrium by their green teacups. The theater was trying to shed its reputation as a lawless environment and become civilized. Such was the message broadcast in flyers and newspapers by the Civilized Teahouse (Wenming Chayuan) when it opened in Beijing in 1907. Breaking with convention, it was the first Beijing teahouse to open its doors to women, seating them in an area separate from men. Though undoubtedly motivated by commercial interest, this was also an idealistic act, a moralizing mission. “For many hundreds of years,” their opening announcement read, “Beijing’s opera troupes have long been number one [in the land]. Beijing has also been number one for the savageness of its theaters. . . . Now finally there is the Civilized Theater, and the name fits the reality. . . . The men and women of society’s upper crust can divert themselves whenever they wish by listening to some drama.”67 After 1911 this moralizing took on added dimensions, for the social markers of respectability were changing. In the Qing, the teahouse had served as a space in which hierarchical status relations were performed and confirmed. With the fall of the imperial order, previous status markers took on ambivalent, even negative connotations. The designations for seating (official seats, the pond, etc.) were replaced, at least formally, with categories pegged directly to price. These codes of architectural design and social conduct affected onstage activities as well. By the 1920s a whole movement to “clean up” the stage was underway, and almost all the issues raised had to do with enforcing the division between representation and “reality.” Of all the dramatic practices that needed reform, yinchang topped the list. Ostentatious practices like those of Tan Xinpei and Liu Hongsheng, which had served to display these actors’ social mobility and prestige, came to be viewed as incompatible with the disciplining ideology and representational regime of the new-style theater. The existence of the prop man was also suddenly viewed as a problematic disruption. His

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shuffling on and off the stage and his flinging about of cushions so that actors could avoid dirtying their costumes shamelessly ruptured the drama’s internal logic.68 Many critics felt that the best solution would be to scrap him entirely but realized that this was impossible, for the movement of props was a necessary part in the staging of a great many plays.69 One critic floated the idea of dressing the prop man in costume and making him a character in the drama: most critics dismissed the idea as confusing and absurd, but it points to the way such activities had suddenly entered an intolerable limbo between representation and the real. As one critic conceded in a 1930 article, “It does not look good to have someone mixing in and out amid the actors, and a reform should be developed, but this is really a difficult problem, and no one can think up a solution to improve it.”70 The cleanup campaign also went after the orchestra, for it was no longer deemed acceptable that they occupy the stage as if they were part of the drama itself.71 Few of these reforms went forward smoothly or easily: prop men were troubling but indispensable; table tenders were entrenched in the economics of theater management and mafia rackets; towel tossers provided a service customers were loath to forgo, especially in the sweltering summer heat. In 1919 Zhang Jian, the cotton-industry mogul, invited Ouyang Yuqian to his model town of Nantong to serve as head of the town’s new modern-style theater, the name of which was itself a mission statement: the Reform Customs (Gengsu) Theater. Costing sixty thousand yuan to build, Reform Customs represented only half of an extensive program to completely reform Chinese drama: the other half was an acting school, the Actors’ Academy (Ling Gong Xue She). Zhang Jian became quite didactic in his effort to inculcate a new standard for audience behavior. The Reform Customs was a major source of publicity for his model town, and he wanted foreign and influential visitors to be impressed by the orderliness of its residents. A press release in the New Nantong News expressed Zhang’s goals: We all well know how the set-up and atmosphere of the theater can shape society. Musical drama creates impressions with speed and agility and is universally enjoyed throughout our country. In places of public entertainment we see instantly how everyone, regardless of class, unconsciously betrays a great lack of public morality. If more than ten people gather together, you get: a clamor of talking and laughing to rattle the roof-tiles; a mess of spittle and phlegm like the filth in a fish market; the wild, merry dances of drunkards, though there is no alcohol; bosses squatting on tables and bathed monkeys donning officials’ caps; and aside from this dissolute majority it is hard to pick out anyone who stays within the rules of deco-

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Figure 6. The seating in Zhang Jian’s Reform Customs Theater in Nantong, ca. 1920. From Mei Shaowu, ed., Mei Lanfang (Beijing: Beijing chubanshe), 1997.

rum or has any real self-respect. Therefore we Chinese are banned from entering European and American public places. And even if you say this is a small matter, it is a humiliation to our state. Wanting to find a lifesaving medicine to correct this, Mr. Zhang Jian has established the new Reform Customs Theater.72

Signs were posted explaining the theater’s assigned seating system and specifying several other rules and expectations: the management would not clutter the building with extra benches, even at sold-out shows; ushers and tea servers must treat patrons of all classes with the same courtesy; children under six were not permitted in the theater; food was permitted in only the lounge during intermission, not inside the theater; and, except for polite applause and appropriate shouts of “Hao!” quiet should be preserved, especially when dialogue and speeches were being performed.73 Ouyang was proud of the theater’s efficiency and cleanliness. He even hired two youths with dustpans and brooms at the ready, wearing vests imprinted with the request “Please respectfully refrain from eating melon seeds,” who rushed to sweep up any spat-out seeds as soon as they hit the ground, to the public embarrassment of any compulsive snackers.74

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Wu Wojun’s review of the Reform Customs’s opening-night performance of Ouyang’s Yurun zhuyuan (Smooth As Jade, Round As a Pearl) ran in the small newspaper dedicated to theater reform that Ouyang edited as part of the Nantong project. Wu was taken with the audience’s modern behavior and the salutary influence this had upon their artistic appreciation of his friend’s play: “Most admirable and thankful of all, the audience listened silently from start to finish, merging heart and spirit. Those performing and those watching were breathing as one.”75 Ouyang also felt the audience was marvelously polite, but he feared that their silence symbolized a “conspiracy of indifference.”76 When it was over, only two people applauded, and he received no compliments over the following days. Though it failed to remold its audience into revolutionary literati, the theater’s modern facilities and Zhang’s influential patronage soon combined to attract many of Peking opera’s biggest stars to this small town, a day’s journey from Shanghai. Republican elites were as concerned as their Qing predecessors with governing behavior at public entertainments, but the models and methods of control had changed. Where the Qing government had attempted to restrict the timing and placement of popular entertainment as well as access to it, Republican elites aimed to discipline behavior inside the theater itself, in part through lists enumerating proper decorum (no spitting; remove your hat; no guaisheng hao or dao hao; no talking during the performance), but above all through theater design. Tianjin’s Great China Theater (Zhongguo Da Xiyuan), which opened in 1936, was a paragon of the new model, the likes of which could be found in several major cities by that time. A capacious, reinforced-concrete building of nearly eight thousand square meters, it sat precisely 1,817 people on the first and third floors. The second floor was devoted to a rest area and snack concession. Tea tickets and benches had given way to preprinted tickets for advance purchase, designating specific dates and individually numbered seats. Tea and towels, melon seeds and cigarettes, and the peddlers who plied them throughout the show were exiled to the concession area. The individual seats were comfortable but insistent, silently enforcing a new decorum: face the stage, pay attention, no talking among yourselves. Of course, social difference did not suddenly vanish from the playhouse’s spatial arrangement. Indeed, the playhouse had a new form of difference to contend with, as the spread of Republican social and political ideals included admitting women to public theaters. How precisely to manage this difference was a question debated well into the 1920s. When experiments with mixed-sex seating began in Tianjin at the turn of the

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century (a few years prior to the introduction of the new architecture in that city), many viewed the practice as a symbol of society’s deepening moral crisis. The scholar Zhang Boling noted with alarm: “[Most] plays are concerned with adultery, robbery, licentiousness, and heresy. Those on stage flirt with each other, while those in the audience are aroused, and their imaginations soar. . . . [The mixed audiences] are hardly constrained by the rites.”77 The Tianjin authorities chose to strike a conservative balance between the advocates for mixed-sex seating and performance and the hardliners who insisted that women should be prohibited from the perniciously overstimulating environment of the theater entirely: they banned mixed-sex performance but allowed female audiences to sit in a segregated section. Immediately after the 1911 revolution, mixed seating and mixed performances took urban theaters, including those in Beijing, by storm. But within a year or two, theaters throughout the country, including those in Shanghai’s International Settlement, were back under such restrictions, with municipalities selecting various measures to regulate the public mixing of the sexes. In Beijing the police enforced segregated seating fairly strictly until around 1920: women were consigned to separate balconies, and theaters that sold tickets to women (a handful were reluctant to do so) had to pay a small tax for the privilege. By 1920 these rules still held, but mixed-sex seating was permitted in box seats for groups of four or more, thus accommodating “traditional” families. By the mid-twenties, however, there were so many “new-style” families and couples who wished to attend the theater that theater managers pressed the police to allow fully integrated seating. Again, a small tax was imposed on the theaters that did so, but they found it well worth paying.78 By then women were regularly attending Peking opera and even constituted the majority of fans for certain plays and performers. In sum, over the course of a decade or two, the enforcement of sex separation became untenable in the Republic, the idea of any such differentiation being dissolved by the playhouses’ powerful logic of uniformity and discipline. The only type of difference that the new playhouse design continued to enforce consistently throughout the whole of the Republican era was that of class. In many cases the new playhouse itself restricted access by charging higher prices on average and more effectively enforcing payment for admission than most teahouses had done. When they could scrape up the money for a ticket, the poor, who had once bustled about in the pond, were now exiled to the back of the theater, for in a spatial arrangement where everyone in the audience shared essentially equivalent perspective on the drama, the notable difference in vantage was not

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angle of view but proximity. Folks in the cheap seats simply saw and heard the show less clearly and from a location which guaranteed that they could not interfere with the smooth consumption of the higherpaying customers up front.79 In the Qing, when the teahouse stage had been a social space occupied by lowly actors, it was fitting that it be surrounded by poorer subjects, with the elites elevated comfortably above the rough and mean; but in the playhouse, the stage was no longer meant to function as a social space at all. Removing the marketplace from the auditorium effectively transformed the theater into a space devoted to the delivery of drama as a commodity; the actors, isolated behind the invisible fourth wall, were ensconced in a purely representational space, separated from the theater’s social world. The actors’ dissembling of status roles that had been so threatening to the imperial polity was, in the playhouse, safely contained behind this transparent barrier: the national polity was immune from subterfuge by cosmetic disguise.

Conclusion I have, in effect, been proposing that the Republican era playhouse be read as an instance of what Timothy Mitchell, in his lucid revision and elaboration of Foucault’s theory of disciplinary power, has described as “enframing”: Discipline and representation are two aspects of the same novel strategies of power, linked by a notion of enframing. Disciplinary powers acquire their unprecedented hold upon the body by methods of distributing and dividing that create an order or structure in which individuals are confined, isolated, combined together and kept under surveillance. This “order” is, in effect, a framework that seems to proceed and exist apart from the actual individuals or objects ordered. The framework, appearing as something pre-existent, non-material and non-spatial, seems to constitute a separate metaphysical realm —the realm of the conceptual. It is such an “order” that the modern and colonial state claimed to have introduced to Egypt; what was introduced, with this order, was the effect of the world’s division into two realms, the material and the conceptual.80

Appearing as separate and legible from the material instantiations themselves, the order created by enframing technologies becomes a crucial symbol of the superiority of colonial modern technologies over the supposedly disorganized technologies they come to replace. While Mitchell applies this concept to his analysis of military forces, schools, and model villages in colonial Egypt, it can fruitfully be applied to the Peking opera

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theater as well. We have seen how the architecture of the playhouse, by rigidly enforcing the separation of representational and social space, effected changes in stage management, vendor activity, and audience comportment; we have yet to look at the profound implications of enframing for the forms and social implications of representation itself. A comparison with the literary reform movements of the era is illuminating. As early as 1902, Liang Qichao had called for a new, more realistic (xieshipai) fiction that could inspire a revolution in popular opinion, declaring, “If you want to revitalize a country’s populace, you must first revitalize that country’s fiction.” A decade later, a wave of New Culture writers acted upon this impetus, Hu Shi in the lead, proclaiming the emergence of a vernacular literature movement (baihua yundong). The goal, put simply, was to unite the written and spoken word, to make the spoken vernacular the basis for literary production and thereby create a “literature for wide dissemination of ideas among the people.” Vernacular literature would be “literature in the ‘national language,’ ”81 capable at once of addressing and calling into being a new audience—a modern Chinese citizenry. Moreover, the release from the elitist and abstruse conventions of the classical style would liberate young writers to create new literary forms and enable them to more clearly perceive and describe contemporary social realities. The baihua movement, like most modern literary movements, was only a limited success; some even claimed that the literature it fostered had a narrower readership than the calcified classical literature it attacked.82 On the other hand, the search for new literary forms that would redefine the relationship between the written and the spoken word, expand literature’s accessibility, and enhance its ability to represent contemporary society propelled invention and experimentation; new styles and forms proliferated, including realism, romanticism, and naturalism. In the imagined audiences of these new literary forms, the lines between elite and commoner, rich and poor, male and female were to be dissolved, and modern identities—often but not always national, typically but not merely humanist—were posited. The architectural design of the playhouse reconfigured dramatic representation in much the same way, giving impetus to the creation of a multiplicity of new methods of staging and performance which are the subject of the next chapter: wenming xi, reformed Peking operas, contemporarycostume and ancient-costume operas, spoken dramas, regional operas, and serial plays were all deeply affected, if not directly inspired, by the new stage and its backdrops, sets, and lights. The aesthetic challenges,

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limitations, and possibilities the new stage presented for dramatic artists of all these genres were innumerable. The task of this chapter has been to understand how the spatial configuration of the playhouse fundamentally transformed the dramatic mode of address and changed the audience’s experience as a social body. Through its seating arrangement and rigid division of representational and social spaces, the playhouse effectively reordered the audience, suppressing differences of status, class, and gender, at least for the duration of the performance. Reformers like Zhang Jian hoped the playhouse would order multitudes of heterogeneous individuals to conform to a Western-defined universal standard of civilized behavior; but to dub this new identity as national, international, bourgeois, or cosmopolitan would be to obfuscate the fundamentally abstract nature of the enframing process. Enframing shifted the dynamic between representation and sociality, thereby altering the nature of the audience as a social body. Whereas the Qing teahouse was a public arena in which social identities and differences were constantly being performed and negotiated, in the playhouse the public related less with one another than through the representations they consumed together. The audience, joined in silence, were connected through the drama itself, and the onus was placed on the drama to communicate an affective identity to the audience. By way of contrast, the teahouse’s spatial division of elites and commoners corresponded to a distinct stylistic division into the categories of ya and su. Whereas Peking opera’s popular success in the Qing period was based on the ability of opera troupes to perform a wide range of dramas in both ya and su styles, the distinction between these styles remained of great importance, for each style addressed distinct social groups. By expunging the spatial divisions between elites and commoners, the playhouse prompted a search for new dramatic forms adequate to this reorganized public, forms which transcended or merged categorical divisions like ya and su. It is certainly not accidental that in the Republican era, Peking opera advocates strove to reinvent the genre as neither ya nor su but rather as comprehensively national. It would of course be absurd to interpret Republican-era efforts to forge new forms of dramatic address as mere byproducts of innovations in theater design; the urban environment was thick with discursive, political, and disciplinary forces geared toward the construction of new social and political identities, and the playhouse was simply one technology that could serve this function. And it would be equally inaccurate to

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imagine that the playhouse was wholly effective in this regard, for, as with the vernacular literature movement, urban elites gained access to and conformed to the atmosphere of the playhouse more readily than most other segments of Chinese society. At the same time theatricals, especially Peking operas, were enormously popular and accessible, and so drew a far broader range of urbanites into a direct, personal experience with a radical reorganization of representation and sociality. Dramatic genres across the spectrum, regardless of cultural or political ideology, were transplanted into and adjusted to the space of the playhouse, and hence, deliberately or inadvertently, recruited their audiences into the Republican-era experiment of calling new social formations into being.

Chapter 3

The Experimental Stage, 1895–1920

The Xia brothers’ New Stage marked a turning point in theater management, construction, and set design. In the 1910s they put on more than fifty “reformed new dramas” (gailiang xin xi) to audiences over a thousand strong. Such a prolonged burst of new plays was remarkable, but in terms of dramaturgical innovations—enacting contemporary plots in contemporary costumes, injecting stories with revolutionary diatribes, fiddling with musical arrangements, using real swords and spears in military plays—the New Stage marked the blossoming of trends that had been budding for well over a decade.1 In Beijing in 1905, Tan Xinpei had collaborated with the actor Tian Jiyun on a contemporary-costume play directly attacking official corruption.2 In Shanghai, the actors Wang Xiaonong and Feng Zihe mounted plays about contemporary political problems in places as near at hand as Shandong and as far afield as Poland; and in Tianjin the young actress Jin Yuemei became a sensation performing topical dramas with revolutionary messages.3 Though literati elites had commonly mounted the stages in their provincial guilds (huiguan) to deliver lectures, this use of commercial theaters to mobilize vast public sentiment reveals a much more widespread sense of the opera stage as a political soapbox.4 If the experimentation was often politically inspired, it was also aesthetically vitalizing. In Tianjin, Beijing, and especially Shanghai, “new” styles were hatching daily: civilized new drama (wenming xin xi), contemporary-costume new drama (shizhuang xin xi), ancient-costume 89

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new drama (guzhuang xin xi), and reformed Peking drama (gailiang jing xi), among others. The theater in the early 1900s was also a vortex of unprecedented social change, with actresses and students, amateurs and activists all making claims to the commercial stage of the emerging republic. And forces behind the scenes, such as advertising, promotion, and patronage, were coursing through new media networks as well. The first part of this chapter describes the stylistic experimentation that swept the Peking opera stage in the first decades of the twentieth century, referring to these decades as a period of hybridity, a descriptive term that is ultimately a useful misnomer. The second section concentrates on the dynamic social context in which these formal dramatic innovations took place: the “reform” of the acting community, the ban on boy courtesans, and the rapid ascendance of female actresses to national visibility after the Qing’s fall. The third section describes Mei Lanfang’s emergence as the most popular—and also one of the most inventive—actors of the 1910s. During this period actors and actresses, both onstage and off, were becoming increasingly visible and were accentuating their visual appeal as never before. And it is no accident that the “new” winds blowing through the Pear Garden would sweep the dan— and in particular male actors of female roles—to new heights of visibility and fame. The chapter ends by sketching the sudden demise of “hybrid” dramas at the dawn of the 1920s, a historical moment commonly referred to as the May Fourth or New Culture era.

Experimental Peking Opera Reframing Variation as the “New” Why was the word new so ubiquitous in the Peking opera world in the early twentieth century, and why were Shanghai theaters in particular so enamored of it and of the creative cross-pollination and gimmicks it came to imply? Certainly the prevalence of foreign influences in Shanghai provided fodder for the city’s cultural entrepreneurs: missionary schools and foreign theaters staged European dramas and musicals and by 1900 exhibited films; European circus troupes anchored in port; and students returning from studying in Japan congregated in Shanghai seeking new careers and often subversive modes of political engagement and selfexpression. But equally important was the particular structure of productive and marketing forces that constituted Shanghai’s theater business. “Newness” was not simply an objective quality of the content or

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the creative forms that were being performed; “the new” was also a developing framework through which performances were being produced, marketed, and consumed. Beijing theaters had rarely advertised their plays as “new” prior to the 1900s—indeed, under the rotation system, they did not advertise in the conventional sense at all—but this does not mean that they were not commercialized or that they churned out carbon-copy performances. In general, seasoned operagoers were interested in accomplished variation, not novelty. Because plays were seldom formally scripted before the 1910s— actors were in any case mostly illiterate—individual actors had great latitude to improvise and interpret. Competing actors often edited and reorganized plays, or performed them with strikingly different pacing, melismatic ornamentation, or lyrics, and opera fans devoured and scrutinized such variation. These ever-changing variations in performance and musical approach were anatomized into schools or styles (pai) for the purpose of comparison and competition. For instance, the Tan, Wang, and Sun schools each capitalized on the differently innovative styles of the Three Later Outstanding Laosheng. One might say that an actor who managed to establish his own recognized and appreciated school had brought something new to the stage, but this was not at all how schools were conceived of or evaluated at the time. Rather, in the relatively fluid operations of Beijing’s rotation system, reputations and profits came from marketing virtuosity through variation, virtuosity that was publicly acknowledged when the actor was said to have his own established school or style.5 Whereas in Beijing opera troupes and the theaters were economically independent entities, in Shanghai there was no such division; Peking opera theaters owned their own troupes, which were locked into performing at that venue. Moreover, Shanghai lacked institutions for training young pihuang actors, institutions which in late ninteenth-century Beijing were rapidly expanding to meet market demand: Beiping’s Pear Garden began training talents. From setting up keban to taking more disciples in the sifang . . . the numbers were too great to count. . . . With so many people suddenly added to Beiping’s acting world, there was really no place for them to all fit in peacefully, . . . so many followed after each other to other places, first spreading their influence to Tianjin and Shanghai. . . . The common saying expresses it well: “When in a Beijing, a monk; when he leaves Beijing, an official.”6

In contrast, Shanghai’s first full-scale keban, the Little Golden Stage, was not established until 1900.7 Given the shortage of local talent, Shanghai

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theaters attracted customers by inviting star actors from Beijing to give guest performances, the success of which relied on selling the visiting star’s brief and fresh presence. Guest engagements were usually for one month and involved large outlays of capital from theater owners.8 Lacking Beijing’s rotation system, Shanghai theaters advertised through newspapers and posters to inform and attract audiences. High-risk investments in guest stars relied on well-timed media campaigns, beginning with newspaper ads celebrating the actor’s “new arrival” in Shanghai several days prior to his “cannon firing shows” (dapao xi, the first three shows of a new star in Shanghai). Popular entertainments and the print media in Shanghai quickly became mutually dependent. Shenbao was the first newspaper to publish daily theater schedules in the 1870s, listing play titles, venues, and the names of the star actors. By 1877, “curtain times were posted outside theater and storytelling establishments in ‘o’clock’ (dianzhong)” time.9 These practices stood in stark contrast to the cryptic way Beijing theaters announced their shows, with a few props set by the door in the morning. Between 1897 and 1905, around twenty leisure papers were published in Shanghai, supplying audiences with a steady diet of entertainment news and urban gossip.10 Entangled in these proliferating media, Shanghai’s theater world moved to a commercial rhythm quite unlike that of Beijing’s, and in consequence variation came to be replaced by—or recast as—the “new.” By the 1880s, theater advertisements used the word repeatedly. Successful as the guest-actor system could be, the outlays were so exorbitant that many Shanghai theater managers found that “even when they invited Beijing’s big opera troupes down to perform, and to all eyes they would make a big stir, in the final analysis, despite all that hard work, they still lost money.”11 They sought a less risky supplement to the guest star system, but their options were constrained because their supporting casts were permanent hires with limited commercial attraction. To avoid getting bogged down in a dismal routine, managers developed techniques to spice up their daily attractions, leaning hard on their actors, their advertisers, and—after the introduction of proscenium-stage theaters—their set designers. With a new script here, a new musical instrument there, and a spectacular set change with a dose of tenuous adlibbing while the curtain was down, Shanghai’s actors gained a reputation as Chinese drama’s mad scientists, halfway between visionaries and charlatans. The different rhythm through which variation and innovation were conceptualized, categorized, and marketed in the Shanghai system left its

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imprint on Shanghai’s commercial theater business. The new was hard to sustain; caught between commercial demands for variety—audiences expected a theater to show a different play every day—and logistical limitations—a troupe of actors could develop, rehearse, and master only so many scripts in a given time—most Shanghai theaters burned out quickly. Whereas Beijing was ruled by a handful of famous teahouse theaters from the 1840s to 1900, Shanghai witnessed the rise and fall of more than sixty new theaters between 1865 and 1890. In Shanghai, drama proved to be a short-term and volatile entrepreneurial venture, but one with a growing market and which soon became a central feature in the treaty port’s economic and cultural identity. By the 1890s Shanghai’s theater ads were peppered with the character xin (new). The character accreted a further significance in the early 1900s, as advocates for the reform of drama and fiction explicitly equated the word new with their political, social, and cultural agendas. Revolutionary intellectuals heralded reformed xiaoshuo—a term typically translated as “fiction,” but, which when used at its most general, included drama—as powerful social medicines for cultural and political rejuvenation.12 Liang Qichao was a leading intellectual of the age who spent several years in exile in Japan after participating in a radical attempt to reform the Qing government, known as the Hundred Days Reforms of 1898. His 1902 essay “On the Relationship between Fiction and the Government of the People” became the landmark declaration of the power of cultural forms to spark political change. The essay begins: “If you want to revitalize a country’s populace, you must first revitalize that country’s xiaoshuo.” Why so? Because no other writing can move people like xiaoshuo: Often through reading people enter realms of their deepest emotions and their heart’s imagination that they enact but do not understand. These are experiences we cannot analyze. No matter if it is grief, joy, frustration, anger, romantic love, astonishment, anxiety, or shame, we often feel these without understanding them. We wish to describe these feelings, but our heart-minds cannot explain themselves. The mouth cannot proclaim them. The pen cannot record them. But some people can reveal the whole truth and completely set them out. Then we pound the table and say, “Great, great! That is how it is! That is how it is!”13

Soon after writing this essay, Liang began work on a forty-act kunqu drama titled New Rome (Xin Luoma), an epic dramatization of the Italian nationalist movement of the nineteenth century. In the play, Dante appears in the form of a Daoist immortal riding a crane. After delivering

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the play’s prologue, he meets up with his friends Shakespeare and Voltaire, who are “softly floating along, riding their clouds,” and the three fly off together to Shanghai to catch a play (New Rome, of course) at the “patriotic theaters” of that city.14 That Liang Qichao sought to inspire Chinese patriots through a play about political events in modern Italy might seem curious, but equally interesting was his choice of the elite (and by this time declining) genre of kunqu to explore this theme, for it highlights the tremendous plasticity and complexity of “new drama.” Indeed, there was no single stable term for such dramas at the turn of the century. The phrases “current-event new play” (shishi xin xi), “colored-light new play” (caideng xin xi), and “contemporary-costume new play” (shizhuang xin xi) were all common around the turn of the century, but such a designation did not necessarily, or even usually, indicate that the play was inspired by Western dramatic forms. “New” typically contrasted with “old” in that new plays were often from recently composed written scripts, as opposed to the majority of plays that were typically unscripted; they dealt with contemporary subject matter or politically revolutionary ideas, or in some way introduced novel content, props, or characters to the stage; or they employed novel technologies such as colored lights.15 The crucial aspect of the meaning of the “new” in this era is that it was not generally posited as the iconoclastic opposite or dialectical negation of the “old,” as later, in the May Fourth era, but rather as a transformative supplement, an original and rejuvenating addition, an emancipating and marketable novelty. Moreover, the term new was itself riven by internal tensions. A word as dear to advertisers as it was to political activists and impassioned artists, new neatly encapsulated the enmity and the complicity that linked politicization and commercialization in modernity. In the drama world, such distinctions were of keen concern while also being terribly tricky to parse: Was the theater’s electric lighting wonderfully clarifying or dazzlingly mystifying? Were plays about prostitution, colonialism, opium addiction, and abusive patriarchs consciousness-rousing or merely sensationalist? Were stage sets complete with sewing machines, divans, pianos, and motorcars edifying or artless? This experimental era in “new drama” has been either omitted or insulted by most literary historians. In what Dietrich Tschanz has described as “the single most important text for the theater historiography of the period” (the introduction to the drama volume in the Compendium of Modern Chinese Literature, published in 1935), the playwright Hong Shen claimed that real New Drama only appeared after 1917, with the

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activities of May Fourth intellectuals.16 Hong’s judgment, which essentially echoed the May Fourth intellectuals’ attack on Chinese drama, describes all the plays prior to that time as misguided and muddled. This account not only produces a serious historical omission that perpetuates the May Fourth intellectuals’ condescension toward actors and Peking opera; it also oversimplifies the complexity of ideas, forms, and cultural trends at play in this era, forcing “new drama” into a teleological history that reduces them into so many childish stabs at imitating “spoken drama.” The visions presented in new dramas were actually far more diverse and open-ended, and occasionally even successful. Sketching some of the creative trends in the drama world during the first two decades of the twentieth century, reveals how, for a brief period, Peking opera seemed perfectly compatible with the “new.” Two Early Actor-Innovators: Wang Xiaonong and Feng Zihe Though most Peking operas were drawn from a treasury of familiar oral and written classics, they did not lack political bite. When Wang Xiaonong performed a newly edited segment of The Tale of the Three Kingdoms and sang, “Since ancient times, when has it ever made sense to give such a great and beautiful country (jiangshan) to others for nothing?” his audience understood exactly what he meant: Wang was bemoaning the present and attacking the foreign minister, Li Hongzhang.17 It was 1895, and, having lost a war with Japan, Li, the Qing’s representative in peace negotiations, had abandoned Taiwan and other territories to the Japanese victors. A few years later, Wang penned an adaptation of a play which, though set in the Song dynasty (960–1279), clearly decried the suppression of the Hundred Days Reform movement of 1898.18 Wang Xiaonong (1858([?)]–1918) was from a Manchu family, had received an excellent education, and in 1883, at the age of twenty-five, was serving as a magistrate in Henan’s Taikang County. After several conflicts with the local gentry, Wang was stripped of his official post and, disgusted with the world of officialdom, “dived into the sea” of the drama world as a performer of laosheng roles. He was a tempestuous fellow, a notoriously heavy drinker and debaucher, but his sincere passion and intellect enlivened his performances and moved his audience. Over his career Wang wrote and edited more than sixty scripts. Several presented foreign patriotic struggles, with actors dressed in contemporary foreign-style costumes. In 1904 he staged one such opera at Shanghai’s Spring Immortal teahouse to excellent reviews: “Actor Wang

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Xiaonong’s Guazhong lanyin [a play about the partitioning of Poland] sends a profound message. Its structure is refined, the score tragic and dignified. . . . Though ethnic nationalism (minzu zhuyi) is not declared outright, at every moment the play makes barbed hints at China’s current situation.”19 Wang’s play drew parallels between Poland’s fate and China’s perilous situation as a battleground between contesting imperialist powers.20 The play’s message was conveyed and heightened through the dramatic conventions of Peking opera. Role types are used to underline the key qualities of each character: the cowardly Suosunni is a clown; the brave Wuruniji is a laosheng; and the young and impressionable Emperor is a xiaosheng (young man). Battles are waged to drums and gongs, with all the trappings of military operas; and the most moving passages are expressed in song, like this aria sung by the heroic member of the House of Lords, Tu’ersiji: After seeing the treaty, I am no longer myself; I am shocked, my blood is rising. All of a sudden, I have opened my eyes and looked around. It is so obvious: they are cutting the melon of [partitioning] our insignificant Poland. If we allow Turkey to station soldiers in our country, other countries will demand similar treatment, and a share in the profits. If one country stations three thousand soldiers, the other will also station three thousand; the loss of my country is before my eyes.21

Wang Xiaonong seemingly had no qualms about using the formal conventions of Peking opera to convey exotic content. Apparently he did not consider Polish nationalists singing Chinese opera to be an offensively unrealistic distortion, and neither did his audience. Wang also adapted many kunqu scripts into Peking opera, transposing them from the ya genre into the more su style of pihuang. Such a move in the direction of commoner culture made economic sense, since kunqu’s flower was already quite faded; but, even more important, Wang, a disillusioned official, was looking for an alternative to the established elite genre. Kunqu’s shriveling appeal was part of a much greater change in Chinese elite culture. The failure of the 1898 reform movement and the disasters brought on by the court’s support of the Boxers had clearly signaled that the political and cultural structure of the empire needed an overhaul. Though its specific realignment of political forces failed, the adoption in 1902 of the New Policies (Xin Zheng), followed in 1905 by the dismantling of the civil-service exam system, pointed up the overwhelming consensus among the empire’s elite that a new cultural and political structure relating the people to the state was necessary to

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the survival of the empire. As Peter Zarrow has argued regarding the 1898 reforms, growing public involvement in state activities was forcing a reconceptualization of state forms—and cultural ones as well. Ya culture had been conceived as culture for the elite, aloof from commoner tastes; but the idea that cultural forms should explicitly aim at facilitating the differentiation of social strata was being challenged as many intellectuals came to believe that China’s survival depended on reforming culture and extending education to a broader public. Wang participated in this cultural realignment. His lyrics were praised by many critics for beautifully combining erudite poetic lines and vernacular language (baihua).22 He was also known for his long-winded prose passages, stump speeches that could run to more than a hundred lines, during which he often directly addressed the audience like a lecturer. Actors who imitated Wang’s style came to be typed as “opinion-school laosheng” (yanlun pai laosheng), and the insertion of lectures into plays became a common element in the wenmingxi of the 1910s.23 But although Wang’s art blended ya and su with forms of public speechifying, Wang himself was still a product of a status-conscious society, as an anecdote about his relationship with Tan Xinpei reveals. Tan seems to have slept on his political convictions for most of his career, probably to avoid upsetting his royal patroness, but by 1908 (around the time of Cixi’s death) he was active in movements to ban male prostitution and end the humiliating practice of zhan tai (stage standing).24 In 1912 Tan demonstrated his enthusiasm for the overthrow of the Qing by performing at a gala to celebrate the arrival in Beijing of the 1911 revolutionary activists Huang Xing and Chen Qimei.25 Around this time, Wang Xiaonong was in Beijing, and Tan Xinpei called on him. Wang reportedly would not see him, saying: “This so-called artist, he has nothing that will benefit me.”26 Though Wang had “dived into the sea” of the drama world, he apparently still felt himself a special sort of fish. With his literary training, he not only possessed an elitist superiority but could also boast superb Mandarin pronunciation, while Tan, who had never received any formal book learning, had comparatively poor enunciation. But Tan was persistent, and Wang finally condescended to meet him, immediately launching into a lecture on pronunciation that Tan reportedly appreciated. The good impression must have been mutual, for soon afterward the two began performing together. Another actor famous for producing plays both innovative in form and political in content during the last decade of the Qing was the dan performer Feng Zihe (1888–1941). Feng was born into an acting family

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that moved to Shanghai when he was a child. In 1902 he penned and performed a play titled The Flower of Rose Village (Meiguihua), which tells the story of a fictional village. In the story, a vicious tiger is terrorizing the village, so the villagers invite some hunters to rid them of it. But the hunters are hoodlums and decide to stay after completing their job, doing much more harm than the wild beast ever did. A feisty village girl known as Rose Flower (or the Flower of Rose Village) stands her ground, fights the hoodlums, and liberates the village. Feng’s audience understood the play as a political commentary against the behavior of Qing troops in the countryside, and Feng’s character was compared to Lady Liberty.27 Unlike the disillusioned official Wang Xiaonong, Feng was not an elite trying to lead the masses, but rather a young actor who saw education as a path to his own liberation. While growing up in Shanghai, Feng happened to live across the street from a French school open to Chinese students. Feng’s family was eager for him to become literate, and the Xia brothers, his acting teachers, supported his attending the French school at night. Like many other actors, Feng was quick to pursue a chance formerly denied those of his status; indeed, in assertively pursuing liberation from their mean status, Feng and other actors became deeply interested in reshaping late Qing culture and were among the most astute at sensing and leading the charge for cultural reform. By the age of twenty Feng was making over three thousand yuan a month as an actor, and with some of that money he created a school dedicated to educating young members of the acting community free of charge.28 Though they came from opposite sides of the tracks, Wang’s and Feng’s personal and political interests both converged in cultural activism around Peking opera. What was this space of convergence, and what aesthetic and social forms would artists fashion within it? “Hybrid” Dramas In 1904, together with the critic Chen Qubing, Wang Xiaonong helped establish the first publication dedicated to dramatic reform, The Great Stage of the Twentieth Century (Ershi shiji da wutai). The magazine ran articles on drama reform and theory and published scripts that combined spoken and Chinese musical drama styles. Its mission was “to reform evil customs, open up the people’s consciousness, advocate ethnic nationalism. To rouse the national consciousness is our sole aim.”29 In his article “On the Benefits of Drama,” Chen Qubing wrote of drama as a source of national inspiration and salvation:

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To our ethnic brothers we express this aim, to mount the stage and personally perform tragedy and joy, to loudly call out, to lay down a path through tears. . . . Stretching up to every scholar and the multitudes of businessmen; reaching down to women, children, and the illiterate masses; waking the negligent to take a glimpse at their situation, to get in touch with their laughter and tears, sorrow and happiness, the joyful and bitter experiences of life, so that few are not moved to action. [Our] hearts bring change, slowly and gently releasing the emotional excitement, anger, and sorrow that we are unaware we have been thinking.30

For Chen, drama held the promise of breaking through social boundaries between elites and the illiterate masses, men and women, uniting them all through shared emotional experiences.31 What precise form this aroused, emotionally united community would take was uncertain. Liang Qichao and Kang Youwei still foresaw a Qing restoration styled after Japan’s Meiji regime, whereas Chen Qubing and the editors of The Great Stage obviously sided with Sun Yatsen and his Tongmenghui, which was organized around anti-Manchu nationalism. The poet Liu Yazi, founder of the literary group Nanshe (Southern Society) and a member of the Tongmenghui, wrote The Great Stage’s christening essay: Looking in all four directions, the rivers and mountains are as if dead; . . . public morality is not cultivated, there is no hope of unity; . . . the literati all languish in prison, their best years are ten thousand regrets . . . [Only] wondrous dramas can call back our motherland’s spirit. . . . Clearly discerning between the Chinese [Hua] and the Northern Barbarian [Yi] is the beginning of the plan for retribution, and will influence our victory. . . . This organization [the magazine] is the concrete ideological base area [sixiang genjudi] for our entire nation’s society, the emergence of an extraordinary army.32

If Liu was single-minded in his aim to inspire Han unity and purge China of the “lamb-breathed” Manchus, his vision of the dramatic forms to be used for this mission was eclectic. Liu promoted foreign-costume plays, enacting events like the French and American Revolutions, side by side with classics revived to “recover old things.” The Great Stage of the Twentieth Century was shut down by the Qing government in 1905, along with the Alarm Daily (Jingzhong ribao), for subversion, but this prohibition did not much impede the tide of drama reform.33 The magazine was more a mouthpiece than a seedbed; the new forms of drama it promoted had already taken root. These plays differed from typical Peking operas in three main ways: performers wore contemporary dress, enacted contemporary plots, and executed spoken pas-

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sages in local dialect.34 The fad for such dramas also caught on among Chinese students of Shanghai’s Catholic schools, about whose performances the actor-playwright Xu Banmei wrote: “You could say there really was no difference from the new plays being performed in Peking opera theaters. Supposedly the difference was not using drums or gongs or singing, but you couldn’t say for sure if a few students who could sing might not add a few lines of opera melody (yaoban) into the play so it was ‘neither horse nor donkey’; that was quite usual.”35 The return of the students of the Chunliushe (Spring Willow Society) from their studies in Japan (around 1911) added yet another wave of enthusiastic new drama practitioners to the local mix.36 Transplanted into Jiangnan soils, the Spring Willow—composed of such new drama mavericks as Ouyang Yuqian, Lu Jingguo, and Wu Wojun—branched into several related drama companies, including the Spring Willow Stage (Chunliu She), the New Drama Comrades Society (Xinju Tongzhi Hui), and the Comedic Stage (Xiao Wutai). Dozens of other troupes were involved as well, including the Xia brothers’ New Stage, Wang Zhongsheng’s Spring Sun Society (Chunyang She), Xu Banmei’s Social Education Troupe (Shehui Jiaoyu Tuan), the Wailing Society (Aiming Tuan), Zheng Zhengqiu’s New People’s New Drama Society (Xinmin Xinju She), the Cry of the People Society (Min Ming She), Ren Tianzhi’s Enlightenment Society (Kaiming She) and Progress Troupe (Jinhua Tuan), and the New Drama Roving Troupe (Xinju liudong tuan). The Spring Willow dubbed their dramas xinju, a term literally translatable as “new drama” and borrowed from the Japanese shingeki, a Western-inspired experimental Japanese drama that Spring Willow’s members hoped to emulate. Later literary histories by Hong Shen, Ouyang Yuqian, and Chen Dabei pointed to the Spring Willow Society as China’s new drama trailblazers, whose performances were precursors to the nation’s spoken drama (huaju); but in practice the parameters of their new drama were not nearly so clear-cut.37 Ouyang Yuqian recalled that by far the most popular moment in the Spring Willow’s adaptation of Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Hei nu yu tian lu) was the long dance-party scene in which Korean, Indian, and Japanese students all participated, all wearing their national dress and kicking up their heels to Chinese dance tunes.38 Indeed, the vast majority of new dramas, or wenmingxi, performed by these troupes employed a host of conventions borrowed from Peking opera, including character designations (dan, laosheng, chou, and so on), acting and staging techniques (particularly the reliance on improvisation and plot outlines rather than written scripts), and even arias

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and musical accompaniments.39 The success of Ren Tianzhi’s Enlightenment Society relied on Ren’s excellence at spontaneous oration, which he typically directed less at other actors than directly at his audience, shattering any realist dramatic conventions. Zheng Zhengqiu, by far the most successful wenmingxi producer, included songs in most of his plays and encouraged new drama practitioners to study Peking opera and to use song for its emotive force.40 And the most popular new dramas at the Comedic Stage were Ouyang Yuqian’s adaptations from the Dream of the Red Chamber (Hong lou meng), all of which featured Peking opera arias and music.41 Though there were profound tensions over the meaning, social locations, and forms of the new dramas, the image of intellectual-cum-actors setting out on a clear course to renounce Peking opera in favor of a pure huaju is exaggerated. Throughout the 1910s the term wenmingxi came increasingly to connote an eclectic, even unruly stylistic cocktail.42 To write off these aspects of new drama as if they were merely historical hangovers and paint new drama as an immature incarnation of huaju downplays the convergence of innovations from a wide range of social groups and dramatic forms. Such a narrative depicts the Peking opera world as politically and culturally backward, or traditionalist, or motivated solely by commercial greed, in contrast to young actor-intellectuals selflessly devoted to cultural change, whose aspirations were dashed by the lowbrow tastes of the Chinese public and the unprincipled commercialism of the acting world. Evidence points instead to a much more fluid and complex relationship between new drama and Peking opera innovations. The Spring Willow Society and scholars like Liu Yazi and Chen Qubing were important participants in the flourishing of new drama, but they were certainly not the only or the first pioneers; nor was the only inspiration for stylistic innovation derived exclusively from modern Western or Japanese drama. The innovative trends of the era involved a confluence of revolutionary experiments spurred by a sense of crisis and change as the Qing heaved and crumbled, and fueled by a vibrant commercial press, a growing entertainment industry, and the inspired input of youthful reformers, women and men, actors and students. New drama was a broad and amorphous category encompassing dozens of the most important Peking opera performers throughout China during a period that witnessed Peking opera’s most dramatic commercial expansion, the construction of new-style theaters in cities throughout the country, and a rapid rise in pay and social stature for star performers.43

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In these decades Peking opera was an eclectic and open-ended form, as apt for staging contemporary and foreign content as for presenting ancient classics. It would be impossible to summarize the entire range of experiments in form and content in this era. The following passage describing some of the contemporary-costume Peking operas (numbering more than two hundred overall) gives an impression of the issues that this type of reformed drama addressed. Some plays advocated reforming corrupt social habits, like Cry of the Opium Ghost (Yan gui han) and The Black Record of Wronged Spirits (Hei ji yuan hun); some reflected the irrationality and tragic consequences of the old marriage and patriarchal family system, like The Tablet of Blood and Tears (Xue lei bei); . . . some revealed the corruption of officialdom, like Record of the Present Conditions in Officialdom (Guanchang xian xing ji); some advocated social reform, like A Prosperous Citizenry (Guomin fu) and Long Live the Chinese National Congress (Zhongguo guohui wan sui); some extolled the exploits of revolutionary heroes, like The Blood of Wuhan (Ezhou xue), Strange Happenings in Sichuan (Sichuan qi wen), Zhang Wenxiang Assassinates Ma (Zhang Wenxiang ci Ma), Qiu Jin, and Song Jiaoren; . . . some trumpeted the goals of a rich country and strong army and resistance to foreign invasion, like New Camellia (Xin chahua) and Poland’s Savage Subjugation (Bolan wangguo can).44

Another example of this last type of play, Ding Baochen’s The Tragic Demise of Vietnam (Yuenan wangguo can), presents a relentless dramatization of colonial violence, humiliation, and official criminality.45 The play opens with the prime minister singing delightedly that he has deceived the Vietnamese King Ruan and “sold the province of Annan [to the French] for ten thousand chests of silver and gold.” We next meet a village of patriotic peasants who sell their land to build a modern school, only to be butchered by French-supplied troops. From this tragedy a guerrilla resistance is born, but it is deceived and eventually crushed. Finally, King Ruan, awakened to his country’s enslavement, flees across the Chinese border with two orphans, on a mission to study modern knowledge so that they can return to save their country. But the trip is too exhausting for Ruan, who learns on his deathbed that the French have destroyed his ancestral tomb: (He sings): Thinking of Vietnam, I cannot help shedding tears of blood and wailing in grief. We escaped abroad hoping to find a plan to save our country. Who would know that the venomous French would dig up tombs and disinter corpses with such godless barbarism? They treat us, the people of a conquered nation, without the least compassion. My mother and father, I cry out (he spits blood) . . . (speaking): You all must return for me

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to beg forgiveness and repair their tomb. And do not rest for a moment; those French intend to exterminate the Vietnamese people. In the future there may be no tombs to visit. Now that we have escaped abroad, we must not tarry long, but head to Guangdong and from there take a boat overseas to study practical learning in order to take a step toward saving our country. Truly, you must clench your teeth against despair; to restore the glory of the motherland is heroic.46

A bit formulaic perhaps, but the use of emotive singing and acrobatic fight scenes was certainly apt for dramatizing the story. For Ding Baochen, as for Wang Xiaonong and hundreds of others, Chinese dramatic forms remained universally applicable and appropriate for representing global relations, perhaps much in the same way that “realism” seemed adequate to such tasks in the eyes of their European contemporaries. After joining the Xia brothers’ New Stage in 1909, Feng Zihe continued to spin out dozens of new operas. At various times he appeared on stage playing piano, singing American popular tunes, and speaking in French.47 But Feng’s creativity was not confined to integrating snippets of foreign exotica into his act. He was also probably the first dan to develop xin guzhuang xin xi (new ancient-costume plays), a style of play that Mei Lanfang later made tremendously famous. For these plays Feng created new hairstyles reminiscent of Tang-dynasty royalty, designed costumes to conjure a spirit of classical feminine beauty, and used new makeup techniques, including eye makeup styles borrowed from European fashion.48 Feng’s performance techniques were striking as well: As a dignified woman [qingyi] in Treading the Snows of the Heavenly Gate [Tian men zou xue] . . . he brilliantly used his girdle to impart the impression, through mime, of skating and falling, engraving the image of a gentle girl bitterly struggling, hopelessly facing a violent snowstorm. As a young girl [huadan] in Du Shiniang . . . he added to the last act an aria accompanied by a little suona [a trumpet-like instrument], the melody of which was of the highest quality.49

Such unorthodox methods, though in no ways directly marked by Western realist influence, were at the same time far beyond the pale of Peking opera’s established conventions. The advent of new theater architecture—the curtained proscenium stage, changing backdrops, and electric lighting—enabled an array of new staging practices that featured prominently in wenmingxi. For the teahouse stage, which was surrounded by the audience on three sides and not curtained, Peking opera had a highly developed set of conventions that helped punctuate plotlines and transitions between settings, amongst

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the most important of which were entrances and exits. Before entering the stage, lead actors announced themselves from offstage, then strode through the stage entrance door to a flourish of drums and gongs. After positioning themselves properly, they delivered a poem introducing their role. Curtains now provided players with new means of punctuating plotlines and scenes, but these methods did not always conform to the Western realist models. Many wenmingxi continued to employ conventions of character entrance and self-description and resisted the rigid separation of audience and stage spaces. Ouyang Yuqian noted two techniques that he felt were peculiar to wenmingxi: staging scenes in front of the closed curtain—typically either brief dialogue exchanges narrating (as opposed to enacting) plot developments, or random comic antics unrelated to the story—to relieve the monotony during set changes; and the delivery of long, typically patriotic speeches directly to the audience, often interrupting the flow of the plot.50 Ouyang describes these two techniques as primitive deviations that point to wenmingxi as a transitional form that had yet to fully digest Western dramatic principles. A less reductive interpretation would be that the twin illusions of plot continuity and the hermetic separation of the stage space from the audience were not yet taken as cardinal aesthetic principles—that interrupting or ignoring such illusions was part of the creative grammar of wenmingxi performance.51 The new playhouse architecture and curtain, which when used in the orthodox manner were designed to enforce a separation between audience and stage, were indeed producing ideological and aesthetic effects, just not ones that conformed to such expectations. Though the stage curtain had profound implications for dramatic structure, far more exciting for audiences were the sets revealed when the curtains were raised. New dramas were often spectacular, bursting with electric lights, colorful sets, and fabulous props. The range of imagery was enormous: a contemporary street corner, complete with storefronts and electric trolleys; a cozy parlor furnished with bookcases, divans, and a piano; an ethereal cloudscape through which goddesses danced in a rainbow mist of lights; a mountainside on which a fight might be staged with real swords and spears; a fabulous otherworldly seascape. Certainly there were plays in which glitter and gizmos outweighed plot or message, but arresting visual effects could just as easily contribute to a drama’s story, aesthetics, and message as detract from them. In an era remembered for its props, sets and lights, one might imagine that a plain and empty stage might begin to seem dull or even traditional;

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but even that empty space could prove to be quite novel: “Hao Shouchen was abundantly creative. He would start with the plot and character and design his own costumes, makeup, jewelry, lyrics, and even movements. For instance, in opening a door [a standard mime in Chinese drama], it might become a ‘foreign door.’ He had to grasp the handle, push the door open, and after stepping out, he did not turn back but just smoothly swung his hand back—the door was shut!”52 How is one to locate Hao’s miming of a new kind of latch door in relation to categories like old and new, East and West, musical and spoken? Indeed, how can any of the myriad experiments described here be categorized as decisively “inside” or “outside” the realm of Peking opera representational practices? The representational system of Peking opera was clearly far more elastic, far more capable of appropriating new ideas and technologies than the post–May Fourth traditionalistic image of it would suggest. Though I refer to dramas produced in this period as “hybrids” to distinguish them from “traditional” Peking opera as defined after the May Fourth era, hybrid is still something of an anachronism or misnomer. Hybridity implies the existence of earlier, distinct, original forms. The plays described above appear as perverse hybrids only in retrospect, when, for instance, historians of spoken drama begin to argue that they mark a transitional period on the way to the development of a more orthodox spoken drama in the 1920s. This description is teleological. It would be more accurate to say that the universe of representational techniques in which actors like Feng Zihe, Wang Xiaonong, Mei Lanfang, and countless others participated was still capable of universality in their eyes. Peking opera’s horizon of representation was much more elastic, enfolding but not limited to China’s “traditional” past, as capable of representing Han dynasty history as contemporary foreign events. Actors may have seen bringing Polish emperors and French piano tunes onto the Chinese stage as boldly experimental but not as destructive to the coherence or “purity” of their art. Certainly complex problems were arising between form and content, but that they would be resolved through the strict formal separation of “modern Western” from “traditional Chinese” regimes of representation (or where these lines of separation would fall) was not yet determined. Creative experimentation in the drama world in this era was not confined to onstage aesthetics. The social context in which drama was being produced and consumed was going through revolutionary and dynamic transformations as well.

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A Revolution for the Pear Garden From Jianye to Citizen In January 1912 the founding of the Republic of China (Zhonghua minguo) was declared. After a decade of smoldering elite dissension and numerous small revolts, the Wuchang uprising of 10 October 1911 was the spark that finally caught, setting off a string of rebellions and provincial secessions that eventually toppled the Manchu court. Yet the smoke had hardly cleared before some of the most concerned nationalists began to question whether the revolution had been revolutionary at all. In 1912 the hopes of women suffragists, many of whom had fought bravely for the Qing’s overthrow, were dashed when the activist Tang Qunying was brusquely evicted from the Nanjing National Council and the suffragists’ male political allies reneged on their promises to support women’s voting rights.53 By 1915, Yuan Shikai, the republic’s autocratic president, was on his way to proclaiming himself emperor, inciting yet another round of civil war. In his True Story of Ah Q (Ah Q zhen zhuan), Lu Xun satirized the 1911 revolution as an ideologically hollow shakedown of one regime of corrupt officials by another, with no positive effect on the mass of China’s rural population; this assessment was echoed by Joseph Esherick in his monograph on the Hunan-Hubei revolts, which claimed that 1911 was merely a political revolution, not a social one.54 Recently cultural historians have produced a somewhat different assessment, noting that, particularly in China’s major cities, 1911 marked a turning point in urban culture and consciousness. Actors, possibly more than any other group, found the 1911 revolution a truly liberating event, for it meant the end of the state-sanctioned system of status discrimination. Actors participated actively in the Qing’s overthrow, most notably in the raid on the Jiangnan arsenal in Shanghai. With the dynasty’s fall, the theater became a veritable laboratory of social experimentation: women dressed in the latest fashions emerged both onstage and off, mixing with men in spaces that had formerly been exclusively male; male actors, embracing their newfound status as citizens, pushed the formal limits of their art, making the stage a platform for their political opinions, seeking more respectful treatment from their audiences, and demanding an end to male prostitution. Ironically, at the same moment that male actors were achieving a new political equality, actresses, almost overnight, were coming to dominate the drama world. Bursting onto the scene, they quickly surpassed male actors in popularity in a

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range of popular genres, including Bangzi, Lotus Flower Falling, bengbeng opera, and briefly even Peking opera. Many said that Dashalar, the theatrical center of Beijing, was being taken over by female performers.55 But the male actors maintained an advantage, for what the republic refused to do for women, namely give them political rights as equal citizens, it did for male actors, conferring upon them, at least in theory, equal status with all other men. Actors had gained ground incrementally over the previous decade. In 1905 the civil service examination, which actors were prohibited from taking, was scrapped, and thus a major institution directly discriminating against them was removed. But in 1908, when Beijing actors, led by Tian Jiyun, Tan Xinpei, and Wang Yaoqing, sent a memorial attempting to ban the xianggong system, their petition met with resistance from officials who were patrons of the boy courtesans. Tian Jiyun was sentenced to one hundred days in prison as punishment for his hubris. Of course, the growing economic independence and prestige of star performers during the late Qing did contribute in many ways to a rise in social status, at least for the most famous actors. In Shanghai’s tabloid culture, courtesan-actor pairs had become among the most fashionable and envied couples. Shanghai’s public parks and thoroughfares provided new spaces in which they could flaunt their celebrity and temporarily shrug off their ranking as “mean people” in the imperial polity. Whereas in the late Qing, actors’ glamorous escapades had been largely confined to the treaty ports, with the advent of the republic, actors were free to flaunt their prestige wherever they chose, and they mobilized with enthusiasm to raise their social status, educational level, and public image. As a result of their efforts, in 1912 the Beijing government announced a regulation forbidding the training of xianggong: To expressly ban this practice, we have notified the offices of Hanjiatan, Wailangying, and all the areas known for teaching drama and seducing the sons of good families. . . . This practice is a stain on our nation, making us the laughingstock of our friends. . . . Drama has much merit for advocating social reform, and the profession of actors can be of great use and does not damage the quality of our nation’s people. But if one seduces people for a living and behaves in the manner of siyu [boy courtesans], then the lowliness of one’s character has reached an extreme. Now the Republic has been established, renewal should be brought, especially by eliminating the stains of old polluting customs. This office has the responsibility to rectify customs and protect peoples’ rights and will not tolerate this kind of decadent custom.56

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In the same spirit, Beijing’s keban all changed their official names from ban, a term associated with brothels, to the more respectable she (loosely translated as “society”).57 The Beijing Actors’ Guild changed its name from the Jingzhongmiao (Pure Loyalty Temple) to the Zhengyue Yuhua Hui (Music Rectification and Educational Society), replacing a Qing-era title linked to “superstitious” observance with a title resolutely proclaiming their progressive and propagandistic aspirations.58 Guild dues were still used to supply financial assistance to impoverished actors, but a portion was now channeled to funding an elementary school for the children of guild members. In 1912, Tianjin actors created a guild under the same name as their Beijing brothers, and in Shanghai Pan Yueqiao and Xia Yueshan founded the Shanghai Actors’ Association, dedicated to “reforming old music, performing new plays, exalting the true inscriptions of revolution, declaiming upon the founding ideas of the Republic, causing our withering and extravagant society to daily progress, and educating and providing charitably towards these enterprises.”59 The 1911 revolution thus bestowed government and ideological sanction on both popular drama as respectable culture and its male practitioners as respectable citizens. Neither could rise to a level of public respectability without the other. As Chen Duxiu wrote in 1905, “The theater is the great lecture hall for all people under heaven; actors are the great educators for all the people”; so it was imperative that the Chinese stop looking at acting as a mean profession. At the same time, actors needed to raise their cultural level and reform the content of their dramas, ridding them of superstitious ghost stories, lewd pornography, and the blind worship of prestige.60 Achieving this change involved more than just a blending of ya and su; it entailed the dismantling of the political and cultural assumptions of a status-divided society on which these terms turned. With the establishment of the republic and the elimination of the Qing’s discriminatory codes, Peking opera could now be recoded to fit into a new nationalist modernity. When Sun Yatsen delivered the opening address at the Shanghai Actors’ Association, he praised its founders: “[They] have great reputations in the acting world, for years performing new plays which moved society, effecting everyone and promoting the Republic in the people’s hearts. . . . [You must] consolidate the basis for the future of our nation’s people. . . . If some in the acting world sing lewd plays, you must find a way to stop it, make them change into those benefiting society.”61 To advance their social position, actors would need to reform, organize, and present themselves as model citizens. Compared to actors

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of other genres, Peking opera actors—with their economic power, their urban networks and audiences, their tight guild organizations, and their legacy of elite sponsorship and political connections—had by far the most resources to use in the long struggle for cultural legitimacy, social respectability, and economic stability. Part of this struggle involved competing with a new juggernaut in the theater world: the actress. From the Domestic to the Public Realm The Qing’s fall not only rattled the political structure but also upset the division between inner (nei) and outer (wai) domains, according to which gender identity had been organized. In the name of the new republic, women were permitted, even encouraged, to emerge from the inner quarters—increasingly devalued as a confining and unproductive realm of ignorance and petty, selfish concerns—into “public society.” What ensued cannot be summed up as a simple gain in freedom or power for women; indeed, the struggle to redefine and expand women’s social spheres in some ways intensified the tensions between nei and wai, or, in the new sociological terminology, the domestic and the public. As Susan Mann has argued, the authority and power of women in the high Qing “derived precisely from [their] cloistered position in the home.”62 On the one hand, this power of identification through nei was challenged by constructions of modern Republican womanhood; on the other, the relative costs and benefits for women asserting their agency in these new “outer” terrains were far from clear. The tension was particularly acute for actresses, who starkly confronted what Faye Dudden has called “the body problem”: “The continuing problem of a woman in public . . . is the same as the problem of a woman on the stage: she must be there in the body. To be present in the body brings with it the inherent risk of being taken as a sexual object against one’s will.”63 In the broadest sense, the body problem can affect subjects of either sex; actors sell embodied performances, commodifying their bodies as vehicles for the pleasure of audiences. Actors’ power over their objectification involves negotiation with audiences and other business interests and is very much shaped by who has the greater leverage over the processes and terms of exchange. In the exclusively male milieu of the late Qing theater, in which actors were greatly disadvantaged in that exchange, actors, especially dan, confronted the body problem. The Republic granted male actors new sociopolitical leverage to clarify the process of their commodification, which they mobilized to explicitly ban the selling of their bodies for

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private sexual services. But if the “body problem” lessened markedly for male actors, actresses had little respite from it. In many ways the pressures of objectification intensified for Republican-era actresses as femininity became increasingly defined by biological sex, and the objectifying and commodifying function of visuality became increasingly pivotal in the entertainment market. The first female Peking opera troupes had been formed in Shanghai by the actor Li Maoer. Realizing that Shanghai prostitutes did a good business singing for their clients, Li organized a company of teenaged actresses in the 1870s. The troupe was popular and very profitable, being extremely cheap to run: the girls received little more than room and board for their work. Similar ventures, popularly dubbed maoerxi (kitten shows) soon sprang up, their quality and scale gradually increasing.64 By the 1890s maoerxi had given way to fully trained female troupes, and in 1894 Shanghai had its first Beijing-style teahouse dedicated to women’s Peking opera, the Meixin Teahouse. But though women’s Peking opera troupes were popular in Shanghai, the city’s lack of acting schools, as well as the competitive tension with the male acting community, stymied their growth. In 1900 only one of Shanghai’s five major theaters, the Qunxian, featured female troupes, and its raging success during its opening weeks was deemed so threatening by Shanghai’s male actors that their guild banned from performing in the city any male actor who taught a Qunxian actress.65 By way of contrast, the Tianjin acting community seemed more willing to train women, and several women’s Peking opera troupes formed there around the turn of the century. Still, for actresses the 1911 revolution was momentous, for it finally acknowledged in principle what was already widespread in practice: that they could perform in public. This was especially important in Beijing, for though the city had lifted the ban on women’s attending public theaters with the opening of the Wenming (Civilized) Teahouse in 1908,66 the prohibition against public performances by actresses remained in force until 1912. Immediately upon the ban being lifted, the theater manager Yu Zhenting brought in a female troupe from Tianjin, initiating a steady flow of Tianjin actresses into the capital.67 At first women and men were allowed to perform on the same bill together, but within a year it was decided that such mixed performances were “injurious to morality.” Beijing authorities demanded separate acting troupes and sexsegregated seating, with female ushers in the women’s sections.68 Beijing was not unique in this regard: in Shanghai’s International Settlement, mixed-sex performance was not permitted until the late 1920s.69 In Bei-

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jing, notably, the move to enforce segregated acting came at the request of men. Apparently the male actors Wang Yaoqing (dan) and Wang Fengqing (laosheng) were acting in a mixed company, and, as the undisputed leads of the troupe, performed the climactic plays in the day’s program. Before they could get on stage, however, “upon [actresses] Ms. Jin and Sun finishing their performance, a lot of the audience left the theater. This greatly angered Yaoqing and his friends, who urged the police to rigorously enforce the division of male and female troupes.”70 Perhaps Wang and his friends should have been more careful about what they wished for, because over the next several years the all-female troupes that were organized in response to these regulations continued to draw crushing crowds. In 1914 Liu Xifen arrived from Tianjin and for a time was more popular than either Tan Xinpei or Mei Lanfang. Admiring male students swarmed the theater districts, forming fan clubs around their favorite actresses. In what some critics denounced as “a great waste of otherwise useful energy,” these future leaders of the young Republic filled student magazines with exultant poems and spilled untold gallons of ink in the local newspapers battling over which actress was the greatest.71 Newspaper theater columnists were known to purchase tables at their favorite actress’s theaters for months at a stretch.72 In the long run, however, sex segregation probably hampered the rise of women’s Peking opera. Trained female actresses being relatively few in number, female troupes found it difficult to perform plays that demanded large casts. Male actors thus managed to push many of their women competitors into smaller, less secure venues.73 Actresses continued to rule Beijing’s Dashalar district through the 1920s, but their reign was not all it was cracked up to be; they generally received lower salaries than men, and, though Dashalar had become their turf, the big male stars had shifted into more lucrative and prestigious new-style venues like the New Light, Lucky, Number One, and True Light theaters. By 1920 many female troupes had moved out of the independent theaters and into amusement centers where ticket prices, performances, and pay were all on a much smaller scale.74 Throughout the Republican era, male actors as a group persistently marginalized actresses by exclusion, and, with a few notable exceptions, it was not until the 1930s that male master actors began accepting female disciples. This rivalry between male actors and kunjuer (female performers) is merely a fragment of a much larger social mosaic; the shaping of a republic out of a crumbled empire would entail transforming the relations between the sexes throughout society. The impetus for reform was cap-

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tured in calls for free marriage (hunyin ziyou), the nuclear family (xiao jiating), equality of the sexes (nannu pingdeng), and the new woman (xin nuxing). Many of these issues were taken up immediately in the theater world. A number of the most influential plays of the 1910s—from Mei Lanfang’s A Thread of Hemp (Yi lu ma) and Miss Deng Xia to Hu Shi’s The Greatest Event in Life (Zhong sheng da shi)—advocated free marriage and the extirpation of patriarchal absolutism. Offstage, the demise of the xianggong, the rise of the actress, and the integration of women into theaters around 1912 were all aspects of this pervasive refiguring of the relationships between gender identity and the emerging republican polity. A dialectical thread runs through this refiguring: on the one hand, reimagining the public to include both men and women inspired a flourishing of transgendering activities; on the other, it involved a concomitant effort to reorder and discipline this rapidly changing public through a binary logic of sex difference. As John Yu Zou perceptively describes it, the idea of “free marriage” heralded sexual liberation while delimiting and suppressing homosexuality, liberating the heterosexual desires of both young women and young men from patriarchal suppression while in turn enforcing a heterosexual norm on a sexually integrated public. Moreover, “whereas hunyin ziyou facilitates the necessity and intensification of heterosexual desire to serve the ideology that mystifies the nation state as a spontaneous and organic unity, nannu pingdeng indeed articulates a moment of profound discontent with nationalism’s own compulsory heterosexuality. To the extent that the doctrine of equality mobilizes a process to eliminate difference between men and women, it confronts the discourse of heterosexuality, which fundamentally consists in the elaboration and intensification of such differences, as its ultimate counterweight.”75 By threatening the erasure of sexual difference, the concept of sexual equality potentially licenses transgendered subjectivities, both homo- and heterosexual, while the attempt to fix normative gender identities according to a reductive understanding of biological sex enforces a logic of compulsory heterosexuality (free marriage). The “threat” of the erasure and confusion of codes of sexual difference was far from idle: women’s fashions—the qipao (or cheongsam), bobbed hair, the propensity of activist women for cross-dressing (all trends that at some point were legally banned)—and the rage for transgendered performance throughout the Republican era, in genres from Peking to yue opera, confirm, if such confirmation were needed, that homoeroticism and transgendered

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performance were powerful forces in the Republic. Nevertheless, the attempt to replace gender performance with allegedly “modern” norms of biological sex—a process legitimated by discourses of law and evolution and by the social, biological, and psychological sciences of the time—would become increasingly dominant in Republican society. The dismantling of the xianggong system provides one example of an assertion of biological sex over gender.76 The xianggong was now viewed as evidence of how the Qing’s oppressive patriarchal polity distorted the ideal of male equality and perverted male desire, a perversion the Republic should expunge. The suppression of the dan’s function as courtesan rehabilitated him into a respectable artist and citizen. It also meant a drastic change in practices of patronage: because the exhibiting of homosexual desire was no longer acceptable, it was replaced by homosocial endeavors of publicized artistic collaboration. One of the first examples of this change in patronage practices was the 1913 rivalry between the dan actors Jia Biyun and Feng Zihe, or, more precisely, between the literati factions supporting them. The contest began with a special issue of the Fiction Times dedicated to the Beijing actor Jia Biyun, which included several snipes at his Shanghai rival Feng Zihe; this was followed a few weeks later by Liu Yazi’s 240-page collection of poetry and criticism praising Feng’s artistry. This rivalry shifted the celebration of the dan’s artistic stature from the relative privacy of limited-circulation diaries to the pages of literary magazines, a kind of publicity that was only feasible once the dan’s tainted status as sex worker had been formally renounced. While this shift—from a sociopolitical epistemology that discriminated according to gender performance to one that discriminated according to biological sex—worked to the advantage of male actors in terms of increasing their sociopolitical status, actresses generally found that this shift had repressive repercussions. Certainly the Republican-era actress was herself a powerful and complex representative and representation of social change, presenting, as some saw it, an “iconoclastic rejection of the Confucian notion of the ‘good woman’ [liangjia funu]” bravely facing down a dominant ideology that posited women’s independent public activity as fundamentally incompatible with proper morality.77 But Confucian values were not the only obstacle: regarding women, the municipal governments of the Republic took with one hand what they gave with the other, granting women the freedom to sell their embodied performances on stage at the same time that they permitted, even encouraged, them to do so offstage as courtesans and prostitutes.

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Beijing, Shanghai, Tianjin, and dozens of other cities not only legalized female prostitution but soon came to rely on brothel taxes as a crucial fiscal resource.78 Actresses could sell their talents as performers, and some earned quite a fortune doing so, but the Republican state gave them (unlike their male counterparts) little protection from “the body problem.” Many of the same forces that gave actresses economic power—the purchasing power of male audiences, for example—also contributed to their commodification and exploitation as sex objects. The vast majority of actresses came from backgrounds of dire poverty, many were sold into the trade, and most had little choice but to moonlight as prostitutes or slip in and out of contracts with brothels in hopes of securing economic independence. Local governments made several attempts to prevent such activities. In 1914 the Jiangsu Ministry of Education banned female performances of new drama: Shanghai’s two most popular new drama actresses, the “Number One Tragic Dan” Lin Ruxin and the “natural sex kitten” Li Chifo, were both raised in brothels, and even the new drama boosters at Jubu congkan (Chrysanthemum Magazine) owned that “one need not investigate what work [new drama actresses] take up in the dark.”79 Similarly, Beijing’s police in 1917 threatened to punish actresses who invited customers home.80 But in a context where male brothels were banned and female ones legalized, efforts to limit actresses from engaging in sex work were inevitably futile, not to mention disingenuous. That the shifts in gender and power relations between men and women, actors and patrons in the early 1910s were highly complex, exciting, and unsettling all at once is apparent from several of the anecdotes recounted by Ouyang Yuqian in his autobiography, My Life Performing Drama. Ouyang discusses in some depth how performing as a female impersonator onstage shaped his social experiences offstage. Ouyang Yuqian himself “most enjoyed imitating the movements of those long-skirted upper-class girls” and found his greatest creative inspiration in imagining romances from the perspective of peasant women.81 Some of his fondest memories are of spending hours backstage, in costume, chatting with female fans: “At that time most dan actors let their hair grow long, so it was hard to tell the women visitors from the [actors] dressed up as women. We sat together, chatting and laughing, carefree and unrestrained, it was extremely interesting. They especially liked to exchange their embroidered handkerchiefs with us, and we would often smile, ‘We are now bound as handkerchief sisters.’”82 Ouyang seemed less comfortable, however, with attempts by women audience members to assert

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themselves as patrons. While Ouyang found such treatment by male patrons intolerable, he felt more sympathy and fascination for women: “When I entered the room, Ms. S, leaning on her bed, asked me what kind of powder I used, what kind of flowers I wore, what lipstick I wore, whether my hairdresser was a man or woman. Just as we were enjoying ourselves, a youth suddenly entered the room, . . . and as soon as he entered familiarly sat next to Ms. S. . . . After a while, Ms. T talked to me about Ms. S’s situation, told me how much she admired me, and pointed to the door: ‘That boy just now, he’s not bad, but she isn’t interested. She only wants you. And she’s brought along a good twenty or thirty thousand with her.’ I listened to her talk as if I had no objections.”83 Other actors responded to such situations with greater indignation. While performing at the New Stage, Feng Zihe was met backstage by a woman who thrust an expensive diamond ring upon him. He immediately complained of the incident to Xia Yueshan, who squelched any such future encounters by abruptly interrupting the performance: “The artists of our New Stage theater are of the highest moral caliber and absolutely do not accept the enticements of the beautiful and wealthy. We will now auction this diamond ring to raise money for poverty relief.”84 Apparently, however, not all new drama actors were as averse to the prospects of a female patron: They were [initially] called New Dramatists because their level of knowledge was to supplement our country’s inadequate education, and their moral qualities to make them leaders of our countrymen . . . [But many now] use the stage as a forum to seek carnal pleasures and look at drama as a medium for seduction. Their bodies are on the stage, but their eyes are in the box seats. The better of them seduce the cheap prostitutes from the brothels; the worse among them bewitch the women of respectable families. They are performing not civilized new dramas, but a live flirting show!85

Trying to hook a wealthy patroness was worse than seducing a prostitute, and certainly no actor with a promising career would invite such withering attacks. Hence, female patronage of male actors seems to have had little success, and incidents like the above seem to have ceased quite early in the Republican era.86 In sum, while the early Republic was an era of exciting social experimentation in the theater world, the assertion of sexual difference as the basis for ordering and disciplining public agency generally fell much more restrictively on women than on men. And there is perhaps no better example of how male dan actors’ careers were facilitated by the changes in this era than the meteoric rise of the young Mei Lanfang.

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The Dan Who Would Be King Actor and Scholar In 1913, the nineteen-year old Mei Lanfang visited Shanghai for the first time. There he met Feng Zihe, the Xia brothers, and several other practitioners of the reformed Peking opera. Mei was inspired and challenged by the symbiosis of commercialism and social critique in the Shanghai drama world. He was especially taken by the new-style stage and its ability to enhance the visuality of performance: The theater managers at that time were the same as today, thinking of every trick to attract the audience’s attention to a newly arrived actor. There was a row of lights installed in front of the stage, and upon my entrance they all suddenly lit up. As soon as I stepped upon this strange theater’s carpeted stage and saw this new semicircular dance stage, I compared it with the typical old rectangular dance stage, with its two columns that block the audience’s view; the new [style] was brighter, more spacious. There were so many pluses, where could the old style come close? This made me infinitely happy and excited.87

On returning to Beijing, Mei, seemingly limitless in ambition and energy, embarked on a decade of unremitting performance schedules and astute formal innovations, aided by his equally self-confident adviser, the playwright and drama theorist Qi Rushan (1876–1962). As a youth, Qi had been educated for the civil service exam and then had entered the Tongwenguan, the imperial academy for foreign-language study, where he trained as a translator of German and French. Qi then made several trips to Europe during which his interest in the theater flowered into a passion; he thus embarked on an intellectual journey that would make him a trailblazer in the field of comparative drama and Chinese drama history. In 1912 Qi returned to Beijing and began attending meetings of the Music Rectification and Education Society. At the society’s first-year anniversary celebration, Qi delivered a three-hour speech on drama reform. Before Beijing’s entire Peking opera community, Qi reproached old-style drama and praised Western methods. In these times of radical experimentation and social change in the drama world, his insights won his audience’s approval.88 Mei and Qi first brushed by each other at one of these lectures, but their collaboration had a more fanciful start. Mei started receiving notes backstage with deft suggestions on how to improve his art, and he began incorporating the author’s recommendations into his work. After more than a year and hundreds of such letters, Mei’s

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aloof adviser eventually agreed to visit him in person. Qi quickly became a central figure in a group of intellectuals, patrons, actors, and musicians who clustered around Mei; soon he was editing and writing most of Mei’s signature plays and handling much of his public-relations work. This sort of partnership of actors and intellectuals was part and parcel of the new cultural legitimation that Peking opera could now more readily accrue under the Republic. All of the Four Famous Dan who dominated Peking opera in the 1920s and 1930s worked closely with one or more such writer-advisers: Cheng Yanqiu had Luo Yinggong, Xun Huisheng had Chen Moxiang, and Shang Xiaoyun had Qing Yiju. These actors could not have kept abreast of the competition without their highly literate, well-connected partners, who helped them to produce a total of more than six dozen newly scripted plays from 1915 to 1935.89 These partnerships bore no sexual overtones (certainly not publicly); indeed, Qi’s reluctance to meet Mei backstage arose from his fear that people might mistake their relationship as some form of flirtatious liaison. Previously, a great actor’s career had depended upon two social networks. One was the patrons, who often indirectly sought to refine an actor’s cultural sensibility but whose primary contributions were economic support and social capital, generally given in exchange for sexual companionship. An actor’s performance style and repertoire were shaped primarily by a second network, the master actors and musicians with whom he trained and collaborated. In the Republican period, Peking opera was facing new demands, both commercially and ideologically, in an environment where culture was being radically redefined, beyond the terms of ya and su, as national. On the economic front, the increasingly competitive commercial environment intensified pressures to produce new plays and develop unique styles; and an expanding urban elite sought in Peking opera a leisure culture that would confirm their perceptions of themselves as sensitive and sophisticated. The demands of this more wealthy and literate audience were congruent with the actors’ own interests in raising their profession to the level of a respected art. Thus Peking opera actors and writers had a number of related incentives to collaborate to develop plays that were new, and culturally and linguistically more urbane. Qi termed this process of scholarly refinement xijuhua. Meaning literally “to dramatify,” these interventions involved the more stringent scripting and staging of plot developments and an increasing literary refinement of lyrics and dialogue.90 The object of “dramatifying” was to raise Peking opera beyond the realm of merely popular or

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folk-dramatic forms, to make Peking opera dramas into literary, artistic products. The implications of “dramatification” are hinted at by a brief controversy in 1918, when a critic suggested that Mei Lanfang should sue the actor Huang Runqing for performing Mei’s new ancient-costume drama, The Goddess Scatters Flowers (Tiannu sanhua). The critics in the Drama Studies Forum (Juxue luntan) who weighed in on the matter all pointed out that there were no Chinese laws specifying creative rights (xingxingquan) or performance rights (yanchangquan), with one critic adding that it was not clear, even had such rights existed, whose rights were being violated: the author’s (Qi Rushan) or the actor’s (Mei Lanfang).91 Another critic drew a comparison to Tan Xinpei: “Particularly if one desires to found a school or style (pai), this depends on one’s followers. Wang, Tan and Sun established the three bearded male styles, but today only Tan’s is prominent, and those who emulate Tan are numerous. . . . [Of actors] who perform Empty City Ruse, Selling a Horse, and such plays, do any not absolutely imitate Tan? Yet connoisseurs do not out of spite deny [that these actors] are of the Tan school or demand that they stop performing Tan’s plays. Such proposals would be ridiculous.”92 Cheng Changgeng and Tan Xinpei had not worked from written scripts; their signature plays carried the imprint of their unique styles and innovations, and their in(ter)ventions were folded into an accumulated treasury of acting practices passed on orally from teachers to students, thereby establishing their style. The idea of taking a fellow actor to court for imitating one’s style would have been considered absurd in their day; but, in a context where plays increasingly functioned as discrete commodities, increasingly produced in scripted form, and explicitly advertised and staged as “new” and hence distinctly original creations, such imitation began to look unseemly. Of course, the application of creative copyright law to Peking opera was untenable, but the underlying idea of dramatification—overseeing productions through detailed scripting, explanatory playbills, tightly rehearsed and transcribed signature arias, and so on—lent greater cultural authority and artistic pedigree to the Peking opera stars who could afford such elaborate productions. Something Old, Something New In the 1910s Qi assisted Mei in scripting over a dozen plays, including contemporary-costume and ancient-costume Peking operas and reedited kunqu dramas. Indeed, during the same years that Mei became famous

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for performing new-style plays, he also began a minor revival of kunqu plays, again reiterating the fact that in these years old opera and new trends were not yet treated like mutually destructive forces. Following Mei, the Four Famous Dan added several kunqu plays to their repertoire, to the satisfaction of many republican elites who wished to reaffirm their mastery of erudite Chinese culture. In the 1950s Qi Rushan wrote volumes on Peking opera history and theory as well as memoirs recounting his personal experience in the drama world. In one of his memoirs Qi, never afraid of exaggerating his aesthetic insight, recalls: Around 1915, one or two Shanghai actors came to Beijing to perform. They performed contemporary-costume plays [shizhuang xi], or one could say new plays [xin xi] or new civilized plays [wenming xin xi], and even though the plays were no good, they were fresh, and a lot of people went to see them. At this point, the power of Mei Lanfang’s draw began to be affected, and he started to beg me to write plays. I told him not to get excited, that those kinds of plays would not stand up, in a few days no one will want to see them. But because his sales were being affected, he was always agitated, and he not only begged me to write, but wanted me to write contemporary-costume plays.93

Despite his objection that Mei was lowering himself, Qi eventually agreed, and over the next few years he helped write five of the most successful contemporary-costume plays of the decade. Formally, these plays combined Peking opera movements, singing, and speaking styles with contemporary story lines, elaborate sets and backdrops, modern props like sewing machines and divans, and, of course, fashionable clothing. The content was usually boldly reformist. For instance, Waves on the Sea of Sin (Nie hai bolan), a protest against the sex trade, was based on an event reported in the Talk of the Capital Daily (Jinghua ribao), the arrest of a local godfather for kidnapping young women and forcing them into prostitution. Miss Deng Xia told a convoluted story of family tragedy and intrigue, all brought to a just conclusion by the eponymous heroine who bravely unmasks her murderous uncle and then marries, in modern fashion, a handsome young man. A Thread of Hemp (Yi lu ma) told of an innocent girl’s arranged marriage to the sickly and mentally retarded son of a rich family, ending in her tragic suicide. Mei played the courageous, victimized young heroines; his supporting cast was studded with some of the most famous Peking opera actors of the day, such as Sun Juxian, Cheng Jixian, and Lu Sanbao. Of course, as the term contemporarycostume drama indicates, appropriate costumes were crucial. According

Figure 7. Mei Lanfang dressed in contemporary costume as the title character in the play Deng Xiagu (Miss Deng Xia), with the actor Yao Yufu as her groom, ca. 1918. From Mei Shaowu, ed., Mei Lanfang (Beijing: Beijing chubanshe), 1997.

Figure 8. Mei Lanfang in contemporary costume as Li Renfen in A Thread of Hemp (Yi lu ma), ca. 1918. From Mei Shaowu, ed., Mei Lanfang (Beijing: Beijing chubanshe), 1997.

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to Mei’s second wife, Fu Zhifang: “When my respected husband [daye] performed contemporary-costume plays in the early years, besides looking for his own materials and dressmakers, he also wore the clothing of his first wife, Mrs. Wang, and later he often simply wore mine in order to cut down on expenses. One performed contemporary-costume plays with less frequency than other plays, and the clothing styles, . . . hairstyles, ornaments, and trimming all needed to suit the current audience’s taste. After a while you had to redo them, and he felt this uneconomical, so he often tried on my clothes.”94 Mei’s conscientious attention to fashion reflects his sensitivity, not merely to authenticity, but to the discerning eye of a new and rapidly growing audience of women. Mei often claimed that his rise to fame, and the rise of dan roles in Peking opera generally during the 1910s and 1920s, was a direct result of the expansion of the female audience. He also stated that the need to cater to this novice audience, inexpert in discerning musical subtleties, resulted in a bent toward visual splendor and ornate costuming.95 While Mei was performing contemporary-costume plays critical of the old society, he and Qi were also creating guzhuang xin xi (ancientcostume new dramas). These plays, generally based on folktales, were aimed at resuscitating ancient models of Chinese beauty. Unlike the contemporary-costume plays, which Mei abruptly stopped performing in 1919, several of these ancient-costume plays survived to become standard plays of the “Mei style”; indeed, though almost all of the hybridstyle plays described in this chapter vanished from the stage in the 1920s, ancient-costume plays became part of the Peking opera canon in the post–May Fourth codification of the genre because they conformed so nicely to the parameters of an invented tradition. Mei probably got his initial ideas for costume, eye makeup, and hairstyles from Feng Zihe’s ancient-costume plays, but he further developed these styles to emulate images found in Tang dynasty Buddhist paintings. The hair was long and flowing with a bun in the back, the skirt and “water sleeves” (shui xiu) extravagantly long and diaphanous. The lower skirt was worn outside the upper dress (which previously had come down to the knees), accentuating the previously indistinguishable waist and outlining a more feminine figure. Stage sets for many of the plays were whimsical; when Chang E levitated to the moon in the play Chang E Escapes to the Moon (Chang E ben yue), Mei danced amid colored lights on a platform whose sides were painted with clouds. The plots for these plays were usually extremely simple and included long, dreamlike dance sequences.

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Mei’s ancient-costume plays were explicitly packaged as authentic revivals of ancient Chinese aesthetic traditions. Many of the stories were adapted from folktales linked to specific Chinese festivals during which they were to be performed. Yet these plays were also the ones Mei chose to perform for foreign audiences. Only months after staging his first ancientcostume drama in 1915, Mei performed it at a convention of the Association of American Teachers in Northern China, his first performance for a foreign audience.96 One-third of the repertoire for his first tour of Japan in 1919 was ancient-costume dramas (Mei never performed contemporarycostume plays abroad), and he performed them on his 1930 United States tour as well. In other words, from their inception, the mythic idealizations of feminine purity and beauty captured in ancient-costume operas were imaged as both supremely Chinese and consummately exportable. The Huashan The main characters in Mei’s ancient-style costume plays all belonged to a new role type called the huashan (lit. flower gown).97 To understand its significance, we must begin with a cursory sketch of the established female role types in turn-of-the-century Peking opera. The dan category included five subtypes: laodan (old woman), wudan (martial woman), and daomadan (lit. sword- and horsewoman, also a martial character), qingyi, and huadan. Qingyi and huadan were both wen (civil) roles that rarely entailed performing acrobatics. Qingyi were virtuous, chaste, married or widowed characters, often from elite or scholarly families; they dressed blandly and moved with unobtrusive grace. “The qingyi represents the serious, obedient character. . . . In their sedate and steady walk, no swaying is allowed.”98 A qingyi’s artistry greatly emphasized virtuoso singing, and many argued that it was best savored with one’s eyes closed, a visual indifference all the more appropriate because a virtuous woman was supposed to avoid the gaze of strangers. The huadan, on the other hand, was a vivacious, often unmarried (or, if married, then unchaste and evil), and flirtatious girl who had not yet adopted the self-effacing behavior proper to mature elite women. Colorfully dressed, with shorter, open sleeves to facilitate lively gesturing, and moving with a dancelike, alluring sway, a huadan was meant to compel visual attention and seduce the audience, speaking as much with her eyes and hands as through her song.99 Plays that featured qingyi as protagonists were often about chaste marital love, while those with huadan leads were bawdy, toying with, if

Figure 9. Mei Lanfang in (new) ancient costume as the goddess in The Goddess Scatters Flowers (Tiannu san hua), ca. 1917. From Mei Lanfang and Xu Jichuan, Wutai shenghuo sishi nian (Beijing: Zhongguo xiju chubanshe, 1987), 498.

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Figure 10. Mei Lanfang in (new) ancient costume in A Thousand Pieces of Gold for a Smile (Qian jin yi xiao), ca. 1916. From Mei Lanfang and Xu Jichuan, Wutai shenghuo sishi nian (Beijing: Zhongguo xiju chubanshe, 1987), 290.

not outright breaking, elite rules of propriety. The lines differentiating the qingyi and huadan were clearly drawn: it was rare that a dan actor could specialize in both subtypes, as their artistic demands were quite different. Still, throughout the history of Peking opera (and its predecessor genres), actors had modified dan subtypes in a variety of ways. Around 1900 a wave of such alterations was on the rise. Wang Yaoqing began performing several qingyi roles in “Manchu princess dress,” heavily layered gowns hardly conducive to flirtatious movement but splendidly embroidered. Then, under Wang’s tutoring in the 1910s, Mei Lanfang elaborated these modifications into what became a new subtype, the huashan. This was an amalgam of the qingyi and huadan roles. Almost all of Mei’s newly scripted plays feature the huashan, including all of his ancient-costume plays as well as the two plays for which he is perhaps most famous, Farewell My Concubine (Bawang bieji) and The Favorite Concubine Intoxicated (Guifei zuijiu). The core scenes of these signature plays all contain dances (the silk-sash dance, the sword dance, the intoxicated dance) marking their emotional pinnacles. Dance, movement, and visual allure had not been expected or acceptable from qingyi characters

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before, but the characters Mei portrayed in these plays (the first concubines of emperors and elegant goddesses) were far too mature and dignified to move, dress, or behave as huadan. Mei’s huashan sport sumptuous, flowing costumes, and their dances are clearly meant to amuse and seduce; yet they always maintain the qingyi’s elegant bearing, composure, and lofty air. Mei insisted that the character Yang Guifei, while flirtatious and tipsy, was to remain unquestionably elegant: “The artist must keep in mind that here is a noble lady of the court getting drunk and forgetting herself in her loneliness and grief, not a woman of loose conduct.”100 These huashan exhibit none of the huadan’s lower-class pluck but have all her tantalizing charm. In sum, Mei’s huashan are qingyi of a new stripe—they are qingyi to behold. Soon every famous dan actor felt obliged to don dazzling costumes and dance about the stage in order to please the crowd. The representation of chaste and elite women on stage was changing from selfconsciously staid and almost antivisual to vibrantly, elegantly, alluringly visible. This shift could not have been contemplated outside a changing social context: real-life elite women were also moving into much more visible public roles. The significance of social context here might perhaps be clarified by comparing Mei’s innovations in hairstyles, costumes, and dance with those of the only other dan of equal renown in Chinese opera history, Wei Changsheng, the great Qinqiang performer of the mid-Qing period. When Wei hit the scene in Beijing in 1779, he was an immediate sensation, but by “autumn of 1782, Wei Changsheng was forbidden to act because his performances were considered to be exercising a harmful influence on the people.”101 Wei’s performances were known for being bawdy and obscene, while he himself was known for being on intimate terms with Heshen, a favorite of the Qianlong emperor. In 1785, for ostensibly moral as well as political reasons, the Qinqiang style itself was banned from the capital, along with Wei. Wei Changsheng’s greatest innovations in many ways resembled those of Mei Lanfang. Both accentuated the feminine physical attributes of their characters. Wei replaced the netted hairstyle (baotou) with a flowing “water” hairstyle, and he always wore qiao to make his feet appear bound and to better imitate the swaying gait of women with bound feet. Though Wei was not allowed to perform in Beijing for long, his innovations eventually became standard aspects of huadan costume.102 While these costume innovations slowly lost their coloring as blatantly obscene, they remained bawdy enough that qingyi characters never incorporated

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any of these attributes. With the exception of the qiao, Republican-era qingyi were now adopting all of them and more. Mei Lanfang, more than any other dan of the Republic, was legendary for his beauty and sexiness. How could Mei focus attention on the physical beauty of high-status female characters and, instead of being denounced, win the approval of elites, critics, politicians, and the general public to become the most famous actor of his era, and eventually a symbol of Chinese culture? Even more remarkable, Mei succeeded despite the fact that the disparaging association of dan actors with homosexuality was far from expunged in the Republican period—indeed, the dan as homoerotic object was under intense criticism. Though the xianggong system was dismantled and homosexual activity in the drama world was being kept out of the public eye, there was little doubt that homosexual practices and homoerotic passions were still common in theater circles. In part, the expansion of the female audience helped mask the prevalent forms of homoerotic spectatorship. With the inclusion of women, the admiring erotic gaze of the audience became more polyvalent. Miriam Hansen’s description of Mei’s contemporary, Rudolph Valentino, as “an emblem of the simultaneous liberalization and commodification of sexuality that crucially defined the development of American consumer culture” would be an apt description of Mei Lanfang as well, with the crucial difference that a barely subterranean homoeroticism is in play: “When Mei performed Yang Guifei, the audience of hundreds unconsciously held their breath. Hundreds of playbills were unwittingly crumpled into paper balls. The anxious gentlemen rued that they could not leap to the stage and push aside [Guifei’s] brawny attendant; the women of the audience felt similarly ill at ease because they knew that performing this impassioned scene was not a female Yang Yuhuan, but a male Mei Lanfang!”103 Qi Song, author of a long series of articles on Mei’s career, discussed Mei’s “attractive power” and admitted to being smitten with Mei du (a pun on an addiction to seeing Mei perform and the word for syphilis). In recounting his first encounter with Mei’s performance, he describes experiencing an inversion of sensory priorities: “When he stepped through the Door of Nine Dragons, his hands pressed together [as in prayer] and his gaze level, he recited a poem. [Before] this body of beauty approaching the sublime in human form, I at that moment only paid attention to the spirit in his eyes, his hand movements, and at the same time his face and lips as he recited. Suddenly I

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asked myself what kind of tune was he singing? It took me quite a few seconds to finally realize that he was singing a xipi manban.”104 Qi Song’s description points to a trend implied in countless examples throughout this chapter, namely the growing dominance of visuality in the theater world, here to the point where it overpowers musicality. Republican-era drama critics were quite aware of this inversion. In Beijing dialect, people going to the theater said they were going to ting xi, literally listen to a play. The emphasis on aurality and musicality was paralleled in phrases like chang nian zuo da (singing, elocution, gesturing, and acrobatics), a shorthand list ranking the key skills for actors. As Peking opera thrived in Shanghai, kan xi, literally to see a play, became common parlance there. The trend towards visual splendor, however, was not confined to the south but was clearly linked to artistic trends and architectural technologies that thrived in urban areas throughout China. And at the heart of how these trends were articulated on the Peking opera stage was the onstage representation of female characters from elite and respectable families. Once performed by the visually monotonous qingyi, these roles were becoming visions of opulence and graceful sexuality, capturing a new feminine ideal and a new fantasy of the young Republic. The enormous popularity of this fantasy was confirmed when the Shuntian News held a popular election for the title of King of Actors (Lingjie Dawang), and Mei won with a stunning 232,865 votes.105 In response to the election, a debate quickly arose in Drama Studies Forum (Juxue luntan) about the concept of the title. The first and only recognized King of Actors prior to 1918 had been Tan Xinpei, who had died in 1915. Some felt there was no need for a successor; in any case, the term King of Actors was of undistinguished origin, coined on the fly by the owner of Shanghai’s New-New Theater a decade earlier for an ad campaign.106 Still, the sobriquet had stuck because it was so apt: Tan had by all accounts been the Empress Dowager’s chosen favorite, the most magnificent, most honored, most highly paid and most high-handed performer of his day. Moreover, he had been a laosheng, the role type of kings on the Peking opera stage. In the Republic, things were more complicated. There was no imperial court to exert paramount authority in the realm of culture, and advertisers would make up any slogan they could think of to sell a performer. How, then, should a king be chosen? Some supported the Shuntian News’s implementation of a popular election; others supported the idea of popular balloting but objected that the Shuntian News was Japaneseowned, and hence its actions constituted foreign interference into China’s

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cultural affairs; others objected to the categories along which the vote was organized (child performers, actresses, and male actors); and still others called for elections within the Pear Garden alone, for they were best suited to judge an actor’s greatness.107 One critic quipped that, as the method used was popular election, the winner should perhaps be dubbed president or prime minister rather than king.108 Though the critics generally agreed that this election of a “King of Actors” was of no real consequence, their amusing debate served as a platform for them to voice their opinions on dan performers and their dominance in the acting world. Most critics noted that the term king seemed ill-suited to a performer of female roles. And several aficionados remarked that, while Mei Lanfang was unquestionably China’s most popular dan, the superiority of his talent was much more debatable: Wang Yaoqing was a better dancer; Chen Delin a more talented singer. While Mei was excellent in both areas, he eclipsed Wang and Chen only in his physical beauty.109 But if this election was simply a popular beauty contest, what did that say about Chinese culture? “The title of King should be held by the virtuous, it should not be assigned strictly according to age but according to the two qualities of moral integrity and artistic talent. Mr. Mei and Mr. Shang [Xiaoyun], what sort of integrity do they have? This journalist has no patience to go into detail, and he has no need to go into detail. If these two men can be called Kings, then has not the Acting World become a nation of rabbits [homosexuals]? Is this not a tremendous disgrace for the Acting World?”110 Despite his economic power, commercial popularity, artistic innovation, and increasing literary refinement, Mei was still not able to distance his offstage identity entirely from the taint of the dan’s lowly and feminized social status. It would require another decade, and, perhaps more important, a more clearly articulated break between the actor’s on- and off-stage identities, before Mei could carry the mantle of the King of Actors with general critical approval, and indeed carry it with him abroad as well.

The Curtain Falls on Experimental Peking Opera Many of the social and artistic changes that swept through the Peking opera world in the first decades of the twentieth century were of momentous significance and would shape it well into the 1930s. Pay scales for star performers continued to soar to breathtaking heights and showed no sign of slowing; Mei Lanfang, for example, saw his pay for a month in

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Shanghai rise from 1,800 yuan in 1913 to 9,000 by 1918.111 This rise was in turn linked to the flourishing of the commercial print media (newspapers, periodicals, and pictorials) that greatly increased the visibility and name recognition of stars by publishing theater ads, program schedules, reviews, and illustrations of performers. The number of newspapers in China leapt from about one hundred in the late 1890s to more than seven hundred by 1911, so by the 1910s the major Peking opera troupes in every city had come to depend on the print media for commercial success. In addition, about a dozen periodicals in the 1910s devoted extensive space to drama criticism; most featured the Peking opera news from several cities in each issue.112 Combine the effects of these new print media and advertising networks with the changes in stage design, sets, and lighting, and it is clear that Peking opera’s visual aspect was being accentuated in ways never before possible. The coming decades would add still photography and film. There were momentous and sustained changes in the sociopolitical realm, too. Theaters were no longer exclusively male spaces; women gained legal sanction to enter them as both actresses and audience members. But this public agency came at a price. Shifting from an imperial polity to a republic meant that actresses as public women became entangled in the “body problem,” regarded as objects as much as subjects. Whereas male actors could start distancing themselves from the demeaning role of commodified sexual companion, actresses faced relentless exposure to sexual exploitation and moral denunciation. In this era of experimentation with public spaces and behavior, the rise of the huashan role type manifests the contradictory trends of gender formation, the simultaneously liberating and restricting effects of the rising regime of binary sexual difference. It is very likely that the ascendance of sex over gender inspired changes in staged representations of female characters, liberating these representations by blurring the strict lines separating female role types (qingyi, huadan, and daomadan) and opening up a more unifying and arguably more fluid and complex notion of female personality and character with the creation of the huashan. But the rich stream of creative expression this shift unleashed was possible only on the stage. Women in society found the huashan’s mix of moral virtue and public visibility all but unattainable; for them, economic power and access to new public spaces were accompanied by commodification, surveillance, and moral opprobrium. While these transformations took historical root and were of decisive importance for the whole of the Republican era, one of the major trends

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of this period—the vibrant popularity of experimental Peking operas and hybrid dramas—turned out to be a much more fleeting phenomenon. These plays certainly partook of, even pioneered the way for, many of the more lasting trends just described above. Many were highly commercial, designed to attract audiences with novelties, dazzle them with colored lights, thrill them with dangerous stunts using real weapons, and titillate them with suggestive performances. New dramas often blazed with a nationalist fervor to rouse, educate, and unite the people of China toward political goals like overthrowing the Qing, combating Western imperialism, and reforming decadent and oppressive patriarchal customs. Certainly these hybrid plays were of uneven quality, but their hodgepodge of formal eclecticism, exotic shenanigans, and political diatribe appeared to be both popular and propagandistic. Yet by 1920 these hybrid forms had been abandoned by almost every self-respecting intellectual, patriotic dramaturge, and Peking opera star. In the hindsight of mainstream Chinese drama history, these plays are described as examples of immature Westernization, gawky products of an adolescent cultural miscegenation that at best were a necessary transitional phenomenon doomed to rapid extinction. May 1921 might serve as the date of hybrid new drama’s unofficial death, for in that month several of the leading scholar-actor practitioners of these plays, including Ouyang Yuqian, Xu Banmei, Chen Dabei, and Wang Zhongxian, founded the People’s Theater Society (Minzhong Xiju She). The society’s members abandoned new dramas, and their periodical Drama (Xiju) condemned them. Members of the society have been commemorated in orthodox modern Chinese drama history (a narrative which they themselves cowrote) as pioneers who progressed beyond new drama (xinju) to spoken drama (huaju) and film. This narrative depicts new drama as essentially born in 1907 with the Spring Willow Society, briefly flourishing between 1910 and 1914, but quickly declining into pornography, slapstick, and trite polemic when exposed to the corrosive stresses of commercialism and the tasteless demands of China’s uneducated public: “In front of the curtain, without a bit of scenery, they would still perform an entire play. Some half-crazed person would run on stage and recite a long speech. Day after day the ‘extremist faction’ contorted themselves, head in hands, wiping their tears. Whenever someone doing a serious character opened their mouth it was always ‘My four hundred million countrymen,’ ‘pistols,’ ‘grenades,’ ‘revolution,’ ‘bleeding’; a few sentences of shallow and fashionable patriotic words were guaranteed to win a unanimous ‘Bravo!’ ”113 According to such accounts, new drama

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never cohered as a form, and its disintegration was the inevitable outcome of its intrinsic flaws. Indeed, this view was a self-fulfilling prophecy, for the production of new dramas diminished significantly when the scholar-actors who came to this conclusion withdrew their support from these plays. Xu Banmei, summing up the demise of new dramas, listed five key problems. (1) Money: Most new drama troupes had to borrow money to stage a play. If a play did not sell well they were saddled with debts and soon found it all but impossible to make ends meet. (2) Theaters: Getting temporary use of a theater in Shanghai, especially in the city’s theater district around Fujian Road, was extremely difficult. When a theater was available, it was usually very expensive. The shortage of suitable venues and the expense were prohibitive. (3) Dramatic content: Attacks against the Qing and warlords were popular, but the focus on such themes often came at the expense of writing a good story and providing good musical accompaniment, and when political fervor waned, such plays lost their appeal. (4) Talent and training: Except for a handful of dramatic geniuses who could succeed on the basis of raw talent, most new drama actors had little or no theatrical training. (5) Audience: It was not clear whether new dramas should seek to attract Peking opera fans or try to cultivate a thoroughly new audience, so the movement lacked a clear direction and target audience.114 Insightful though they are, Xu’s observations assume that new dramas were exclusively creations of actor-intellectuals, but such was hardly the case. Though many new dramas eschewed music and singing and would on those grounds never qualify as pihuang, the line where xinju ended and Peking opera began was, as Xu himself stated, far from distinct, and these terms were applied simultaneously and interchangeably to countless plays. In other words, though Xu’s points have merit, his explanation neglects key components of the new drama phenomenon, not the least of which was the involvement of hundreds of Peking opera actors and dramatists. Of the problems Xu lists, financing was doubtless the biggest, but economic failure should not be taken as proof that these plays were unpopular or aesthetic failures. The lives of most theaters and troupes during these thriving decades of urban drama were tumultuous and brief, so financial instability does not prove the failure of the hybrid aesthetic. Ouyang Yuqian’s adaptations from Dream of the Red Chamber, Zheng Zhengqiu’s musically highlighted family melodramas, Mei Lanfang’s contemporary-costume dramas, and the dozens of successful plays per-

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formed at the New Stage by Feng Zihe and other Peking opera actors were clearly both commercial and critical successes. Hybrid dramas, when closely scripted and rehearsed, were consistently popular and remained so right up to the time of the new drama’s death. According to Fu Sinian, even as late as 1918 few spectacles could compete with Beijing’s reigning King of Actors performing a contemporary-style-clothing opera: “One day I went to the Three Celebrations Theater (San Qing Yuan) to hear Mei Lanfang’s A Thread of Hemp and was almost crushed to death. When I came out, I saw that the whole Dashalar area was a sea of people, traffic was stopped dead.”115 On his tour of Hankou in the winter of 1919, Mei was still packing the house with these plays.116 Why, then, did Mei permanently forswear performing contemporary-costume operas in 1921?117 Why did the wide variety of hybrid dramas and experimental Peking operas abruptly disappear during the May Fourth era?118 Disenchantment with the aesthetic form of new dramas might explain why the members of the People’s Theater Society abandoned them, but it does not explain why Peking opera actors did so as well. One answer is that hybrid plays did not really vanish at all: especially among less refined theatrical forms, like bengbeng plays, ping opera, and Cantonese opera, hybrid forms continued to thrive. Still, in the Peking opera world, as well as in the scholarly echelons of drama theory, forms that were seen as hybrid were generally abandoned and became the target of ridicule. By the 1920s wenmingxi was a derogatory term reviewers used to pan a play. Yet this turn against hybridity seems in many respects at odds with the espoused goals of the literary movements and social trends of the day. Wenmingxi, contemporary-costume Peking operas, and the like all generally used a great deal of vernacular and appeared to be expanding urban theater audiences by mixing novel performing methods and messages with established forms. Moreover, if the contemporary writings of critics and reformers are any indication, many of these performances could be emotionally moving even while communicating strong reformist messages. Experimental Peking operas seemed as good a vehicle as any for building that resistive and dynamic cultural community which seemed the more desperately needed as the country was increasingly splintered by civil wars and pressured by foreign powers. Then what historical forces necessitated that, with the May Fourth era, dramatic forms seen as hybrids be discarded and that genres be strictly divided between Western spoken drama (huaju) and Chinese opera (xiqu)? A search for answers to this question yields insight into how Peking opera became the genre we recognize today.

Chapter 4

May Fourth Realism and Qi Rushan’s Theory of National Drama

The turn against wenmingxi, shizhuangxi, and the other “hybrid” versions of Peking opera that occurred in the May Fourth era (1915–25) seems at odds with the espoused goals of many of the reformist literary movements and social trends of the day. These “reformed” and “hybrid” dramas used predominantly vernacular language and stimulated an expansion of the urban audience through blending novel performing methods, new scripts, and social critiques with already popular and established dramatic forms. In 1913, when Ouyang Yuqian and the Social Education Troupe performed the new play Diary of a Family’s Grievances (Jiating enyuan ji) in Changsha, the crowd, including a great many women, overflowed the theater; dozens had to watch the play from outside, huddled under umbrellas in the pouring rain.1 Mei Lanfang’s contemporarycostume drama challenging superstition, Maiden Slays the Dragon (Tongnu zhan long), packed Beijing’s Lucky Theater in 1918, drawing a 30 percent bigger box office than programs that featured Mei performing more conventional classics.2 Yet in that same year, young cultural radicals were vociferously denouncing “reformed dramas” in the pages of New Youth, the era’s banner journal of radical thought: “When I hear someone mention the need for drama reform, they always end up mouthing [lit. gumming] objections like ‘Totally eliminating singing and relying only on speech would be out of the question;’ or ‘Face-painting imparts a character’s essence; it is an appraisal of their inner nature.’ These ideas are of one and the same psychology with the man who insists on acting like a slave 134

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and protecting old customs by maintaining a queue, or the despicable husband who refuses to see women as human beings and supports foot binding.”3 If New Youth’s cultural iconoclasts were united in condemning dramatic hybrids as incurably poisoned by tradition, traditionalists similarly increasingly voiced their distaste for diluting the purity of old drama with new-style trappings. By the 1920s Peking opera experts were generally cursing such “neither-horse-nor-donkey” plays as bastardizations: “Each nation has its guoju, or so-called National Drama in English, and it should not be mixed together with those of other nations. Our country’s old drama has our country’s four-thousand-year-old culture, and possesses its special spirit, and we absolutely must not permit it to be extinguished.”4 Why, by the 1920s, were hybrid dramas being renounced by all sides? After decades of debate and experimentation with old and new styles, why was drama suddenly strictly divided between Western spoken drama (huaju) and Chinese opera (xiqu), thereby fixing Peking opera as a traditional and specifically Chinese genre? This question is crucial to understanding Republican-era Peking opera, for only by understanding the hegemonic dominance of this split between huaju and xiqu (and the coincident disappearance of hybrid Peking operas) can we understand Peking opera’s constitution as a modern genre and its construction as an invented tradition. More important, an analysis of this historical moment of genre polarization affords us new insight into the cultural realignments that were among the May Fourth era’s most significant legacies. The 1919 May Fourth demonstrations against the Versailles Treaty are usually heralded as the moment when student and labor protest first emerged in China on a national scale. However, perhaps of greater consequence historiographically, the May Fourth movement has been canonized by cultural historians as the moment when Chinese intellectuals broke decisively with tradition, asserting that the polarity between the old culture and the new was irreconcilable.5 In orthodox Chinese Marxist historiography, the young May Fourth intellectuals are trumpeted as the first great vanguard in modern China. The canonization of May Fourth literary thought—which denounced all other cultural phenomena of the era as feudalistic expressions, bourgeois diversions, elitist fantasies, or conservative reactions against modern progress—has been largely debunked and revised by scholars over the past decade, and from a variety of angles. Rey Chow and Wendy Larson have argued that May

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Fourth “radicals” were not nearly as radical as they have been portrayed and that they were wedded to an elite male scholar identity rooted in Chinese imperial traditions, an elitism that they vented through a violent rejection of mass and popular cultures.6 David Der-wei Wang and many others have shown that May Fourth literary innovations were not nearly as original as has been advertised, and that Chinese modernity, as manifested in phenomena such as the popular press, emerging public spheres, and related literary and artistic innovations, had already surfaced in the late Qing, decades before the self-righteous iconoclasm of the May Fourth movement.7 Still others, such as Kirk Denton, have reminded us that May Fourth thinkers actually held a range of changing and contesting opinions and argue that to homogenize these into a single discourse imposes a distorting and simplistic stereotype on their works.8 My analysis of Peking opera is profoundly informed by and indebted to the insights of these scholars; but there is one aspect of the earlier May Fourth historiography that I wish to reconsider, an aspect that is not necessarily at odds with any of these insights. This is the idea that May Fourth marks a moment of decisive change in urban Chinese culture. By the “May Fourth moment” I reference not a strict chronology—indeed, many late Qing thinkers participated in shaping this moment, and the process of its consolidation continued well into the 1920s and 1930s— but rather a major discursive shift, a change in the way representation was conceived and produced. Like all such historic shifts, this change was not precipitated by a single distinct group of actors or causes but was historically overdetermined by a prolonged concatenation of trends and events. Timothy Mitchell describes a similar transformation, which he asserts is an integral aspect of colonial modernity, as a process of “enframing:” an imposed, naturalized ordering that enables discipline and representation to function as modes of power. I have already referred to Mitchell and this powerful linkage between discipline and representation in describing the social space of the playhouse (chapter 2); but the logic of enframing, which is grounded in the relentless assertion of a fundamental split between representation and the real, is operative in many other institutions of colonial modernity as well. If I argue most extensively about how this shift in representation is conceived in a chapter dealing with May Fourth literary thought, it is not because I see these thinkers as paving the way for this shift; rather, the May Fourth debates on drama are only one instance of the increasingly powerful hold of enframing in Republican urban life, an instance that has the unique explanatory advantage of being explicitly articulated in terms of representation itself.

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This chapter discusses literary and drama criticism dating from around 1900 (Wang Guowei, Liang Qichao) through the early 1930s (Yu Shangyuan, Qi Rushan). I use the term May Fourth moment to refer roughly to the years 1915–25; I designate contributors to the journal New Youth such as Hu Shi and Fu Sinian as May Fourth intellectuals. I do not wish to reinforce the image that these May Fourth intellectuals were significantly ahead of their traditionalist contemporaries in their reconceptualization of representation; rather, I want to stress that all the figures discussed in this chapter were equally caught up and actively participating in the May Fourth moment, in experiencing and producing the shift in representational regimes described here. The disappearance of hybrid Peking operas from the national stage around 1920 is an instance of the May Fourth moment, and Peking opera actors and their scholarcollaborators had at least as much agency in this trend as did May Fourth intellectuals. In sum, the May Fourth moment marks a representational shift, a break that was crucial to constituting the very dichotomy between the old and the new which became so exaggerated at this time, a split which conservatives and radicals experienced together and which united them in framing traditional Chinese and modern Western representational regimes as incompatible, even as it located them on opposing sides of a political and cultural divide. Only after understanding this representational shift can we put later theories arguing for Peking opera’s status as the national drama (guoju) of China into proper historical context.

Expressiveness as the Basis for a Community of Qing When Wang Guowei drowned himself in the lake at the Summer Palace in 1927, he personified a morbid extreme of despairing Republican-era neoconservatism. Still sporting a queue as a symbol of his steadfast loyalty to a vestigial Qing court, Wang Guowei had spent the last decade of his life immersed in guoxue (national learning) and deciphering ancient oracle bone writings. Yet Wang was a complex personality, who earlier in the century (between 1904 and 1912) had penned pioneering literary studies inspired by Western aesthetic philosophy, especially the work of Arthur Schopenhauer. In his innovative research into the history of Chinese literature and drama, Wang’s central questions and motivations derived from studies of and comparisons with Western literature and aesthetics. Initially Wang had hoped to compose dramas himself, because “drama is the most underdeveloped branch of Chinese literature. . . .

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Even though writers of the present dynasty [Qing] have on the whole made some progress, their works are immeasurably inferior to famous Western plays.”9 However, as he researched Chinese drama, his project shifted from the writing of new works to rediscovering the old. Wang’s effort to rescue the reputation of Chinese drama became a historical mission to bring to light its truly estimable historical precedents. For Wang Guowei, great Chinese drama began and ended with Yuan dynasty (1234–1368) zaju.10 This view may seem bookishly removed from China’s circumstances in the early 1900s, but if we look at the reasons behind Wang Guowei’s admiration of Yuan drama, his theories take on a different cast: All literature is superior because of its naturalness (ziran), and nowhere is this more evident than in the case of Yuan drama, particularly its dramatic songs. None of the Yuan dramatists were of high social standing or even greatly learned. . . . They merely wrote down the emotions they felt inside and recorded the circumstances of the age, with the result that frequently genuine truths and an elegant style can be found in their works. Yuan songs may thus be called China’s most natural literature. . . . The most sublime feature of Yuan drama, after all, is neither its ideas nor its structure but its language. Where does its distinction lie? It lies, in a word, in its yi jing [frame of mind]. What is yi jing? It is the ability of the Yuan plays [to communicate ideas, desires, emotions, situations vividly, movingly and with great verisimilitude.] In describing emotions (qing) they pierce one to the heart, in describing scenes they bring them before one’s eyes and ears, and in narrating events they make one think the actual personages themselves are speaking. . . . [A]s regards Yuan drama, truly a new language was freely employed in a new genre. . . . Because it is so natural, it could address the political and social situations of the time. . . . Also, because of the frequent use of vernacular language, colloquial expressions from the Song, Jing, and Yuan dynasties are abundantly well preserved in the plays.11

Wang Guowei’s key arguments in this passage—the premium placed on naturalness, the use of vernacular language, and the importance of emotional resonance—closely resemble the aesthetic goals and values upheld by the May Fourth literary revolution. Foremost is the importance of emotion in literature, the tremendous value placed on moving an audience. The centrality of qing (emotion, sentiment, interpersonal relations) not only circulates widely in Ming-Qing literary criticism; it remains central in twentieth-century criticism as well, from the most conservative and arcane studies of Chinese musical forms to the most radical advocacy for agitprop “newspaper plays.” In particular, these twentieth-

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century evocations of qing overwhelmingly see it as a catalyst for helping inspire the coalescence of a nation—or what I, along with other recent scholars, refer to as a “community of qing”—through art. I have chosen the designation “community of qing” over “nation” because the organizational form through which resistance to imperialism was imagined during the period under discussion in this chapter did not always take the form of the nation-state. The community that Wang Guowei sought to (re)instate, right up to his suicide in 1927, was definitively not a republican nation-state but a rejuvenated (or at least preserved) Qing imperial court. When Liang Qichao proclaimed the necessity for a new literature or drama in his famous 1902 essay “On the Relationship between Fiction and the Government of the People,” he was also imagining a community organized on a revised imperial model— probably a constitutional monarchy—and only later came to embrace the idea of a republic as the proper embodiment of a “people made new.” For the vast majority of critics writing from the May Fourth era onward—traditionalists (like Qi Rushan) and May Fourth radicals (like Fu Sinian, Hu Shi) alike—the desired organizational form of this community was without question a republican nation-state. Thus the idea of a “community of qing” enables us to mark certain continuities and complexities that the term nation effaces. Wang Guowei’s aesthetics provides one such instance. Politically, as a Qing loyalist, Wang Guowei could not have been more opposed to the May Fourth intellectuals’ nationalism; but his admiration of the accessibility, frankness and emotional force of vernacular writing shares many aesthetic premises with the vernacular language movement (baihua yundong) launched in 1915 by Hu Shi and his comrades. Hu Shi railed against the abstruse formalism of classical writing and the vapid ornamentation of contemporary serial novels, those “volumes and volumes of long and stinky words . . . that do not deserve to occupy a place in the New Literature.”12 But while the vernacular language movement did introduce several formal innovations—such as systematic punctuation and grammatical rules—the movement’s self-proclaimed revolutionary call to make literature more accessible to common folk was hardly unique. Chinese dramaturges over the centuries had advocated similar positions, including the Ming critic Wang Jide (d. 1623), who declared that plays “should be understood by old ladies first, then they will be understood by all audience members.”13 As much as May Fourth intellectuals insisted that their radical ideas had no precursors in Chinese cultural history, they were actually drawing on a wealth of highly relevant historical precedents, and the idea of a “community of qing” helps bring to light

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these aspects of potential continuity that the May Fourth intellectuals’ version of literary history worked so hard to bury. An accomplished contemporary of Wang Guowei’s was Wu Mei. He too reserved his highest praise for those playwrights whom he judged to have achieved the finest evocation of qing. Though Wu Mei also appreciated the poetic ease of Yuan writing, he had even greater fondness for Ming drama, or chuanqi, and was himself an accomplished performer and author of kunqu plays. According to Wu Mei, “A play is good when it is characterized by the word zhen [real, or true]. To be zhen is to be realistic and not superficial and to touch and move people truly.”14 If Wu Mei’s “real” closely resembles Wang Guowei’s “natural,” both being valued as a means for moving people emotionally, we can glimpse the point where the two scholars diverge by understanding how Wu Mei distinguishes Ming chuanqi as superior to Yuan zaju: Yuan dramas are mostly four scenes long, but Ming dramas are not constrained in length. . . . In Yuan dramas, each scene is sung by only one character, but Ming dramas do not maintain this rule. . . . Yuan drama mostly uses northern musical forms, but the people of the Ming primarily use southern tunes, . . . [and some] blend both northern and southern forms together. Regarding language, most Yuan lyrics are simple and sturdy, while Ming lyrics are refined and elegant. Yuan staging is quite poor, but that of the Ming is orderly. In brashness and wildness of spirit, the people of the Ming were far the lesser of the Yuan. On the level of literature this is a natural evolution.15

Like Wang Guowei, Wu Mei values naturalness of expression, but he finds it realized in Ming drama’s greater freedom from formal constraints. While Wang Guowei’s historical narrative lacks a powerful evolutionary momentum, Wu Mei sees drama as evolving toward the goal of aesthetic freedom, a freedom realized in the refinement, variation, and beauty of the dramatic form. Another way of stating the contrast: while both scholars see naturalness as an artistic ideal, Wang Guowei locates this ideal in the realm of language, whereas Wu Mei locates it in the realm of musical form, in the blending of lyrical and musical invention unconstrained by rules limiting narrative and melodic structure. For Wu Mei, Yuan zaju’s formalistic rules resulted in a cruder art form, whereas Ming chuanqi’s more complex and unfettered form allowed for a diverse and subtler range of expression. If Wu Mei’s valorization of emotional sensitivity seems less clearly populist than Wang Guowei’s championing of vernacular expression, such nuance was not to be won at the expense of accessibility. We can get a sense of this aesthetic from the reflections of one of

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Wu Mei’s favorite playwrights, the popular and incorrigible writer of the Ming-Qing transition, Li Yu: “The composing of lyrics cannot but differ from the composing of poetry, and indeed can be judged its opposite. How so? Poetic composition is distinguished, strictly ruled, elegant and eschews all that is crude and vernacular. It should be profound and avoid plainness. Lyrics are not like this, their root is in the speech and thought of the streets and alleys, they should say directly what they mean. . . . Profound in meaning, simple in wording, they should not have a trace of bookishness.”16 Li Yu believed that drama should aspire to speak to all of society: “Drama is written for the educated and the uneducated, including uneducated women and children; therefore easy language, not abstruse language, should be prized. . . . [T]he only thing one should worry about is whether or not [the play] appeals to human feelings.”17 Indeed, for Li Yu, the link between naturalness of language and qing was immanent: “To speak without inhibition is not as easy as it sounds. Language is the expression of the feelings of the heart. If you are to speak for a character, you must first explore the feelings of the character you are going to portray. . . . In short, all subtleties of human emotion and thought should be evident in the kind of language a character uses.”18 Similarly, Wu Mei prized above all the way the lyrical naturalness of Ming plays achieved an irresistible evocation of human feeling. In praising the drama Peony Pavilion, for example, he admiringly recounts several stories of late Ming-era female readers who were so deeply affected by the romantic death of Du Liniang that they too wasted away and died. Of course, inspiring women to commit acts of poetic suicide was not exactly what May Fourth intellectuals had in mind when they sought evocations of qing. What Wang Guowei’s Yuan dynasty authors and Wu Mei’s Ming dynasty dramatists achieved in their day, however—the powerful expression of contemporary issues and emotions through highly affecting and accessible language and performance—was a primary goal of May Fourth authors as well. The New Culture idea of a literary revolution had many precedents, the most famous of which was Liang Qichao’s 1902 essay on fiction, which proclaimed that it was the mission of fiction to inspire social and political action through its emotional power. The scholar and historian Wang Zhongqi echoed Liang’s sentiment: “What our people lack most is public spirit; only fiction can instill patriotic, communal, and caring feelings in people who completely lack such a spirit.”19 Writing a decade before he founded the journal New Youth—the very publication that led the charge against Chinese opera—Chen Duxiu wrote in 1905 that pop-

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ular opera’s emotional power made it the ideal tool for the people’s enlightenment: “Opera (xiqu) is what the people under heaven most delight to see, most delight to hear, it glides into their minds and easily touches their emotions. . . . Those who watch it cannot control themselves, becoming suddenly delighted, suddenly mournful, one moment happy, the next moment compassionate. . . . [T]he infinite transformations of thought it can yield are unimaginable.”20 These early proclamations of the revolutionary emotive power of drama and fiction continued to resound well into the 1920s, nowhere more loudly than among the young writers of the vernacular movement. Lee Ou-fan Lee has described this moment in Chinese literary history as an “emotional outburst”: “The May Fourth movement broke the dam, and a torrent of individual emotions poured out in profusion. . . . Under the lead of Yu Ta-fu, Kuo Mo-jo, and Hsu Chih-mo, the vogue of selfexposé—laying bare the author’s innermost secrets, emotional and sexual—all but carried the day. Yu Ta-fu summed up the whole trend by asserting that ‘the greatest success of the May Fourth movement lay, first of all, in the discovery of the individual personality.’ ”21 Lee’s study focuses on writers of the “romantic school,” but he points out that while squalls constantly brewed between the romantic and realist factions, these battles mostly involved personal rivalries; philosophical differences between these schools were hard to pin down.22 Hu Shi, who prescribed Ibsenism as the best medicine for an ailing Chinese society, also believed that realism’s curative powers lay in its emotional force: “Ibsen described actual social and familial conditions in order to move readers, to make us feel how dark and corrupt our families and society are and to make us understand that our families and society must be reformed.”23 Mao Dun generally agreed; the problem, as he saw it in 1920, was how to use realism yet still strike the proper emotional tone: “Critical spirit is an advantage of realism, but it is also its imperfection. Realism analyzes thoroughly all social problems and endeavors with all its force to lay open their darker aspects. To use intelligible language in this way to awaken the masses is not bad, but merely to criticize without interpreting can cause melancholy and deep sorrow, and these can lead to despondency.”24 To borrow Hu Shi’s metaphor, realism was a social medicine, but it was not a panacea. While it could awaken its audience to the individual’s repression by society, its pessimism could also overwhelm them, leading to alienation and a despondent isolation that was quite the opposite of their goal of building a sociopolitically active community of qing.25 Many histories of May Fourth thinkers confuse their trenchant rejec-

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tion of “tradition” with an uncritical adoption of the “modern” or “Western.” As Mao Dun’s words evidence, however, May Fourth intellectuals did not naively embrace Western philosophies only to be disabused of their purported magical efficacy in the decades that followed; they did not embrace the critical spirit of the Enlightenment uncritically. Their skepticism extended to the vernacular movement as well. Qu Qiubai—the League of Left Wing Writers’ most influential theorist—was perhaps the most emphatic when he wrote in 1932 that the vernacular movement had become “simply the new classical language of the May Fourth period” that like a “Great Wall surrounds the working people, forming a barricade that completely cuts them off from cultural life,” but he was certainly not the first of the movement’s skeptics.26 It was hard to maintain any illusions about the movement’s popular influence when plays like a vernacular translation of Bernard Shaw’s Mrs. Warren’s Profession, after being advertised at great expense, debuted at Shanghai’s New Stage in autumn 1920 “before an audience forty percent smaller than on the worst typical day. . . . And by the final curtain only three out of four viewers remained in the theater, with several seated in the front rows cursing as they went out.”27 Even the most ardent supporters of vernacular literature and realist drama in the 1920s could not help but be aware that the “masses” had little interest in their writings and found their spoken dramas boring, if not outright incomprehensible.28 Why, then, if they retained a skepticism toward the forms they promoted, did May Fourth thinkers assert that traditional genres were completely incompatible with their project, especially given that the masses they wished to effect emotionally were much more engaged in these genres? Were not Wang Guowei and Wu Mei culling examples from late dynastic history that demonstrated that both the project of liberating a wide range of emotions and that of expressing them through accessible vernacular were guiding concerns of Chinese drama? If both Western and Chinese precedents valorized drama’s ability to create a community of shared sentiment, then why were dramas that blended Chinese and Western influences—“contemporary” and “reformed” new Peking operas that were both popular and ablaze with reformist fervor—so definitively denounced in the 1920s? Moreover, why were they rejected both by old drama’s dedicated adherents and by new drama’s ambitious pioneers, in essence forcing their generation to choose between either old Chinese or new Western forms, when the very concept of new Peking opera quite obviously defied these categories? If we look forward to the 1930s, the May Fourth leftists’ passionate

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rejection of hybrids appears all the more ironic. When, in 1932, Qu Qiubai pronounced the vernacular movement bankrupt, he blamed its failure on the Left’s wholesale adoption of European-style literary and dramatic forms that were unfamiliar to the masses. Qu encouraged leftist artists to use traditional and local Chinese art forms to impart contemporary political messages. Under Qu’s influence, reformed traditional drama suddenly leapt from the feudal mire into the cultural vanguard, where it later became firmly ensconced through Mao Zedong’s 1942 speeches on art and literature at Yan’an. Mao dubbed these hybrid forms revolutionary precisely because they had popular appeal, and many historians analyzing the Chinese Communist Party’s rise to power credit the party’s drama brigades with playing a key role in spreading its political messages. Before we proceed further into these debates over what constituted the essence of great Chinese drama, it is important to note that such nationalistic projects to demonstrate cultural parity (such as a debate over whether Chinese drama was as great as Shakespeare) arose in countless instances in which non-Western societies confronted colonial modernity. The terms through which parity is sought are quite arbitrary; or, to put it another way, the terms are almost invariably Western cultural categories clothed in universalistic garb. Why, for example, should Chinese performance be equated with Western drama? Music obviously figures centrally in many forms of Chinese performance, so would it not be equally valid (or equally absurd) to label Peking opera as music and compare it to Western orchestral production? Or to label it dance and compare it to ballet? Forms of cultural production and organization are in some respects fundamentally noncomparable. The idea that categories like painting, music, drama, dance, and literature—the categories by which nineteenth-century European culture was parceled out and institutionalized—could be inflated into universals was one of the primary ways in which colonial modernity was imposed on non-Western societies. Peking opera clearly did not fit neatly into these institutional categories and disciplines. Andrew Jones, in his work on Chinese popular music in this period, raises a similar point: that the insistence on equivalence between what Chinese and Europeans termed music necessarily obscured fundamental differences. Chinese music, in general, was pentatonic, stressed tonal color and timbre, and included microtones that were considered anathema in Western orchestral music, whereas Western music was chromatic and stressed harmonic complexity and polyphony.29 In music, this comparison led to conversions of Chinese music into Western notation, a practice that resulted in passable but clumsy renditions that could not accurately record factors like

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timbre or microtones. The shoehorning of Chinese performance into the European-derived category of drama was, if anything, an even less comfortable fit. Institutionalization also played a role in this process. Forms of culture are produced and reproduced through institutions, including drama and music schools, university departments, and commercial and patronage networks. Into which university department would Peking opera fit? How could it be taught, studied, and funded? These questions were fundamental to the context of the debates here, affected the careers of many of the scholars mentioned below (including Ouyang Yuqian, Yu Shangyuan, and Qi Rushan), and are taken up directly in later chapters. Clearly, the inflation of arbitrary European cultural categories into universals and the forced recoding of non-Western cultural forms into these categories underwrote the search for cultural parity being described here and were a central mechanism through which colonial power was imposed.

Evolutionary Histories of Drama Despite their contrasting opinions of Chinese drama’s aesthetic value, by the 1910s radical and traditionalist critics alike were writing evolutionary histories that assumed a decidedly progressive, linear timeline. For Hu Shi, Fu Sinian, Ouyang Yuqian, and other New Youth writers this is not surprising; but traditionalists—like Wu Mei, and, as we will see below, Qi Rushan—were equally invested in constructing evolutionary historical narratives. A sketch of these critics’ histories of drama reveals the assumptions and definitions they shared and the crucial points at which their opinions diverged. The October 1918 issue of New Youth magazine was dubbed the “Drama Issue.” Some of the magazine’s most vociferous attacks against old drama come in two articles by Fu Sinian. In the first, “The Many Sides of Drama Reform,” Fu contends that Chinese drama is mere acrobatic vaudeville and does not even qualify as drama: “Pure drama cannot but evoke human feeling (jin renqing). The crazy-quilt substance of vaudeville shows (ba xi) could not evoke human feeling even if it wanted to. Pure drama is made up of elements of movement and language. Movements are the typical actions of human beings, and language is people’s typical speech. Of the hundred antics of vaudeville shows, not one does not have the flavor of acrobatics—acrobatic actions and language, but absolutely never typical human action and speech—so it never evokes human feeling and can never do so.”30 Such diatribes, which deny Chinese drama any status as legitimate

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drama at all, are quite common in May Fourth criticism, but what is interesting is that many of Fu’s definitions are taken directly from Wang Guowei. According to Wang, all theater prior to the Yuan was burlesque and farce which had not yet abandoned the essence of acrobatics and games: “Its structure was vastly different from the later generations of drama, hence the so-called ancient dramas were not genuine dramas.”31 Unlike these ancient vaudeville shows, Yuan drama was the first genuine Chinese drama because it “used songs and dance to tell a story.” The drama historian Kang Baocheng rightly notes that Wang Guowei’s “definition of Chinese drama only arises through reference to Western forms of drama” and in a sense universalizes the Western form.32 Although Fu Sinian and Wang Guowei disagree on when and if Chinese drama ever evolved beyond the stage of mere song-and-dance antics, they agree that genuine drama is defined by the centrality of narrative: true drama tells a story. Fu Sinian and his colleagues then take this notion a step further, asserting that Western realist drama epitomizes this definition because, supposedly, every aspect of the performance is devoted to this narrative mission, to the exclusion of all “extraneous” modes of performance (such as dance, song, mime, or lecture). Hu Shi’s contribution to New Youth’s “Drama Issue,” “The Concept of Literary Progress and Drama Reform,” actually cites Wang Guowei’s History of Song and Yuan Drama to demonstrate how Yuan drama progressed beyond all previous dramatic forms. Though Hu Shi does not cite Wu Mei, he recapitulates Wu Mei’s thesis that Ming drama is even more advanced than Yuan drama because it shakes off that form’s structural constraints. Ming revisions of Yuan plays can, therefore, “record with limitless emotional excitement [stories of] rises and falls, triumphs and vicissitudes, and create deeply moving scripts.” Continuing his evolutionary narrative, Hu Shi then claims that Qing-dynasty Peking opera marks yet another progressive step beyond Ming kunqu: “The great defect of chuanqi [Ming dramas] is that they overvalued the musical aspect. . . . Ming dramas in the elegant drama form [ya ju, or kunqu] could not spread to commoners, so a multitude of local operas in each region started to rise in popularity. . . . Finally, among these “common dramas” (su ju), Peking opera received support from people with great power like the former Qing Empress Dowager Cixi and became China’s most popular drama.”33 Hu Shi judges “common dramas” superior to kunqu because they draw on dialects and vernacular and are more simple and direct in language. In other words, of all Chinese drama, Hu Shi holds Qing common dramas, and especially Peking opera, in the highest

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esteem because they most closely resemble his ideal of a vernacular, story-centered drama. At this point in Hu Shi’s history of Chinese drama, he seems to come closer to advocating contemporary Peking opera as a model of great art than does Wang Guowei or Wu Mei, both of whom extol past genres but disparage Peking opera and other contemporary styles as manifestations of Chinese drama’s evolutionary decline. But for Hu Shi, despite their freedom of form and vernacular roots, “common dramas” are still not evolved enough: The majority of their authors and performers are people of no education, so su ju retain the largest number of the theater’s evil customs. . . . [E]very form of old drama has been imprisoned by these evil customs, so that at present they have been transformed into a type of inaccessible (bu tongsu) and meaningless, depraved drama. The lesson of the above short progressive history of Chinese drama is: Over the past thousand years, Chinese drama did its best to break away from the countless constraints imposed by its musical aspect, but, because its nature of adhering to old practices was too great, it could never arrive at a completely free and natural status.34

The future of Chinese drama thus depends on the intervention of educated people who understand the rules of historical evolution and can help free Chinese drama from its formal constraints. Consistent with Hu Shi’s biological metaphor, he likens these constraints to “vestiges or rudiments “ (yixing wu—his choice of the “male nipple” as the metaphor for such a “form without function” is telling). In its own historical evolution, European theater also spawned several “immature” techniques— the Greek chorus and the Elizabethan proclivity for the aside are examples—but modern realist drama had evolved to rid itself of these more primitive elements. Chinese drama, on the other hand, perhaps because of its historical isolation from other cultures, holds fast to its vestiges. Hu Shi goes on to list the “vestiges” that must be eliminated from Chinese drama to make it a truly free expressive form, namely all music, singing, dancing, ornate costuming, face painting, and acrobatics. In addition, Chinese drama must adopt the concept of tragedy and implement a rational, realist economy of time and space that Hu summarizes as each scene containing “one location, one period of time, and one event.”35 Finally, then, Hu Shi leaves us with an image of Chinese drama fully realizing its own internal evolutionary imperatives by becoming indistinguishable from Western realism: any generic or cultural distinctions wither into decaying vestiges doomed to extinction.

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Fu Sinian’s argument unfolds a bit differently. Chinese drama, and Peking opera in particular, has “no aesthetic value whatsoever,” for it never evolved into drama in the first place. Its characters are “inhuman in spirit” and lack emotional proportion; the music is wretched and simplistic; the lyrics and plot are crude and unreasonable; it is merely a vaudeville show pandering to indecent emotions, distorted feudal values and “materialist egoism” (wuzhi weiwozhuyi).36 While many of these shows might be advertised as new drama, they are actually hopelessly old and primitive. Yet Fu Sinian admits that society is not ready for his ideal of the new drama. Actors are too attached to their old methods; audiences are too enamored of music and dancing; and great new plays are difficult to compose and take time to develop. He therefore reluctantly supports the phenomenon of “transitional dramas” (guodu ju), hybrid forms. For instance, he takes several of the older women in his family to see Mei Lanfang’s blockbuster new contemporary-costume Peking opera on the evils of arranged marriage, A Thread of Hemp (Yi lu ma, written by Qi Rushan). Afterward he asks them how they liked it, and they reply, “ ‘This type of arranged marriage really is inhumane [or unreasonable, meiyou daoli].’ Ah! This phrase meiyou daoli, I hope to hear that everyone’s heart has this type of enlightenment, for this little enlightenment is iron proof that our society can abide a new consciousness.”37 Fu Sinian closes his article, however, with a reiteration of his original point, that both old dramas and transitional dramas must be scrapped: “I hereby advocate, seeing that we are in a transitional era, that we cannot but use the method of transitional dramas until that time when preparations for the new dramas are complete, at which point I will advocate disposing of transitional dramas too, just as I currently call for disposing of old dramas.”38 In sum, both Fu Sinian and Hu Shi founded their arguments on an evolutionary teleology, one in which Chinese drama should evolve as quickly as possible into a form indistinguishable from Western realism. Peking opera and hybrid dramas are at best transitional. In New Youth’s drama issue, the final nail in old drama’s coffin is driven in by a short essay by the eminent reformist playwright and professional Peking opera actor, Ouyang Yuqian: “China has never had a literature of play scripts from which its drama could be born. One can pluck a few examples from Yuan and Ming scripts, but certainly not enough to represent a literature of drama. The scripts for Peking opera are even less sufficient . . . and human emotions and realistic principles are universally disregarded. . . . Chinese drama is merely a kind of burlesque, it cannot be rectified to accord with reason. . . . Today’s drama

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world is extremely corrupt and actors’ minds are extremely simple. They cherish the broken and decayed.”39 Ouyang Yuqian agrees that Peking opera is basically unsalvageable and calls for the training of an entirely new generation of actors, a generation literate and progressive in outlook who will perform new scripts modeled on Western realist plays. In this evolutionary teleology of drama history, Western realism marked the apex, not merely because it was Western but because it was regarded as drama in its most pure, evolved, and hence universal form.40 The specific terms of the debate—old drama(jiu ju) and new drama (xin ju)—play a notable role. New, that ubiquitous and malleable label, could signify everything from sincere revolutionary intent to the nemesis of such intent, the unabashed commercialization of frivolous novelty. For the New Youth critics, so earnestly invested in the new as a political identity, the nomenclature of the drama debate nicely suited their evolutionary proclivities. But the nomenclature of new and old was too vague, and the word new too addictively marketable to work, in the long run, as a rigorous term of criticism. By the mid-1920s, particularly with the influence of the playwright Hong Shen, the term huaju, or “spoken drama,” came to predominate in the drama debates; this shift also jibed with the artistic context of the mid-twenties, for by then the multifarious “new” hybrids that mixed lecture, vernacular dialogue, song, and dance—defying a clear distinction between speech and song—were already generally extinct.41 In everyday parlance the neologism huaju merely denoted a category of dramas that featured speech and no music; but for huaju advocates the term connoted, as had xinju, an ideal—an aspiration to realize what Ayako Kano in her study of Japanese shingeki (New Theater) terms the “theater of logos.” This term, borrowed from Jacques Derrida’s description of late nineteenth-century European realist drama, refers to a technology by which an author-creator’s text is transmitted directly to the audience without extraneous mediation. Huaju aspires to precisely such pre-scripted control of the dramatic encounter. In Peking opera, scripts rarely existed, and actors generously ad-libbed, gaining attention for their creative skills of mime and song; in huaju, by contrast, “the authorcreator’s thoughts, intentions, and ideas are represented by ‘interpretive slaves who faithfully execute the providential designs of the “master.” ’ ” Such an interpretive slave “only transcribes and makes available for reading . . . a text that imitates and reproduces the real,” while a “passive, seated public of spectators, of consumers” scrutinize the textlike production.42 Huaju’s principle of vernacular usage also parallels the shingeki tenet of genbun itchi (“the unification of speech and writing”),

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which Kano describes as “adopting a colloquial style of dialogue that was perceived to be a natural representation of everyday speech.”43 In the Chinese context, through an elegant mimetic spiral, huaju, the drama of natural speech, licensed an authorial control over actors that was unprecedented in Chinese drama; the drama whose very name implied the use of free everyday speech was actually as prescriptively written as possible. In this way, mimetic realism was well tailored to the desires of the intellectuals who championed it, providing a means by which they could portray their ideas as everyday reality to audiences with a minimum of mediating interference. Thus, despite the shifting emphasis from newness to everyday speech denoted by the shift from xinju to huaju in the 1920s, the May Fourth intellectuals’ conceptual model of pure drama remained essentially the same: realism was the essence of drama, and realism, of course, was spoken drama and eschewed the ornamentation of song, music, or mime. This definition ceded no ground to Chinese dramatic conventions: China’s drama must become realism or be forever backward. In his theoretical defense of Peking opera, Qi Rushan claimed that Chinese drama was in fact realism’s Other—its exact opposite—which he terms “aestheticism.” Certainly Qi’s theory of aestheticism is deeply indebted to the May Fourth theories of realism which it polemically inverts; but I read Qi’s inversion not merely as a conservative reaction to the May Fourth radicals’ originality but as a parallel approach to the same issues that the May Fourth thinkers were confronting—the flip side of the same problematic. What the polarization between realism and aestheticism illustrates is that the representational ground on which hybrid forms stood was quickly turning into a chasm. Taken collectively, these scholars did have some direct effect on the drama world (several of them were important playwrights, after all, who had written some hybrid plays of their own in the 1910s), but their theories of drama are more informative if taken as symptoms, not primary causes, of a representational crisis.

Shifting the Essence of Chinese Drama: Qi Rushan’s Theory of Aestheticism While May Fourth radicals mocked old and hybrid dramas, their contempt hardly had the social influence to torpedo such popular forms. Yet even the advocates of old drama were rather feeble at defending it. Perhaps their inarticulateness registers the crisis of definition that arose in the translingual confrontation with imperialism that had made defining

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and justifying a category called Chinese drama a necessity for every critic from Wang Guowei’s generation onward. Wang Guowei, for one, had no interest in defending Peking opera. Like the May Fourth thinkers, his standard for great drama derived from Western models, but Wang Guowei celebrated not realism but tragedy, with its evocation of the sublime, as the model of dramatic achievement. Only tragedy was capable of touching people deeply enough to bring true enlightenment, and only the Yuan dynasty had produced tragic dramas: From Ming times onward all plays have been comedies, but the Yuan dynasty produced some tragedies. As regards those plays still extant, plays such as Autumn in the Han Palace (Han gong qiu), Rain on the Wu-Tong Trees (Wutong yu), [etc.,] . . . are not written according [to the banal rule of] beginning with separation but ending with reunion, beginning with hardship but ending with good fortune. Those plays most imbued with the tragic spirit are Guan Hanqing’s Injustice to Dou E (Dou E yuan) and Ji Zhunxiang’s The Zhao Family Orphan (Zhao shi guer). . . . They can be ranked among the world’s great tragedies.44

Wang Guowei’s defense of Chinese drama thus completely neglects the role of contemporary genres like Peking opera, which he so despised that he refused even to attend the theater in his own day. Wu Mei’s theory was equally unaccommodating of contemporary forms, though his definition of the essence of Chinese drama was a bit more in sync with popular terminology. With the neologism huaju and the division between speech and song entering common usage, Wu Mei’s theory that the essence of Chinese drama was its musicality began to seem commonsensical. By his logic, Chinese opera (xiqu) and huaju were fundamentally incomparable. Huaju could in no way be viewed as the evolutionary objective for a form like Chinese opera that was rooted in musicality. This line of argument might seem a promising ground from which to launch a defense for contemporary old drama, but it did not make advocacy for twentieth-century Chinese operas any easier for Wu Mei; for, according to his narrative, Chinese drama had reached its evolutionary pinnacle centuries ago with Ming kunqu. The Qing dynasty, according to Wu Mei, saw Chinese drama devolve and decay into a derivative formalism that stifled the creative coalescence of poetry and music that had made Ming chuanqi so moving: “The drama of the Qing is inferior to that of the Ming. There are many reasons for this. (1) At the beginning of the Qing, they excessively followed Ming habits, and their writing became too elegant. The scholars of this time overemphasized poetry and ignored the musical aspect. (2) In the Qianlong-Jiaqing

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period, evidential scholarship prospered. Scholars delved deeply into analysis, producing famous products of exegesis. Musicians came to have no skill.”45 Wu Mei accused Qing scholars of distancing themselves from drama and retreating into dry evidential scholarship. Qing literati abandoned the custom of training their own private drama troupes, a custom that had allowed them to interact with musicians and actors, and thereby to create that special chemistry that blended elite and common tastes, literature and music.46 By the twentieth century, kunqu had become a rarefied genre appreciated exclusively by elites, and Peking opera, devoid of any scholarly refinement whatsoever, was vulgar and unmoving both musically and lyrically. Hybrid forms that diluted musical lyricism with crude spoken verbiage were out of the question. For Wu Mei, if China was to have a national drama in the twentieth century, it had to be the final evolutionary form of a genre that was exclusively Chinese, and this could only mean reviving Ming kunqu.47 Neither Wu Mei’s nor the May Fourth intellectuals’ evolutionary histories accorded much value to Peking opera’s contemporary forms. There were, however, a few scholars who attempted to defend Peking opera and its hybrid offshoots. Zhang Houzai’s “My View on China’s Old Drama” was the main defense of these forms in New Youth’s drama issue. Zhang contended that all of the qualities that Hu Shi saw as Chinese drama’s defects could just as easily be seen as its strengths, and he elaborated on three of these qualities. First, it was true that Chinese drama lacked realism, but this was because it was abstract and “absolutely did not admit the concrete. . . . Its entire aesthetic value,” Zhang argued, “resides in the word jia [imaginary, artifice, pretense].” Second, Chinese drama was certainly full of conventions, but conventions existed not to restrict but to facilitate expression. “Sorrow must hang its head, anger must huff into its beard, prosperity must strut with hands on its chest, poverty must have disheveled hair.” If properly performed, these conventions are expressive and liberating: xiguan cheng ziran (habit/ convention becomes natural/free). Third, “singing is the most important part of old Chinese drama . . . . The greatness of plays is entirely in music bringing joy to people” and “moving people.”48 Zhang’s line of argument here is similar to Wu Mei’s, positing that the essence of old Chinese drama is fundamentally different from that of Western forms. Yet Zhang had not worked his points into a seamless argument, and the ultimate goal of Chinese drama’s evolution remained unclear. His conclusion reveals a crack at precisely the point where an impregnable teleological polemic was most needed: “[The above three points] are Chinese ancient

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drama’s good points. Some people say that because these phenomena exist in Chinese ancient drama, it is no good. I really cannot dare assent to that. It is my opinion that if you wish to say Chinese ancient drama is no good, you can only say that these aspects are used to too great an extreme, but you cannot say these aspects are just no good. So we can only say that artifice [jia xiang] in Chinese ancient drama is overused, but cannot say that to use artifice is bad.”49 In his rebuttal of Zhang, Fu Sinian jibes, “We can see that even the distinguished Mr. Zhang feels that using symbolism everywhere, conventional rules everywhere, and music everywhere is no good. To act as the defender for old drama is really not easy.”50 Zhang’s equivocation doomed his argument. If artifice, music, and convention were the essence of Chinese drama, then was it not a contradiction to say that they needed to be toned down? Such ambiguity pointed reformers in no clear direction, nor could it resolve the debate over what drama ultimately was or should be. It was Qi Rushan who, throughout the 1920s and 1930s, eventually elaborated an evolutionary narrative capable of defending old drama and mapping its reform. Shifting the terms of the debate, Qi asserted that the crucial difference between Chinese and Western drama was not that Chinese was musical and Western spoken, but that the latter was “realistic” while the former was “aesthetic” (meishuhua, lit. astheticized). In terminology and argument, Qi’s theory closely resembles Zhang Houzai’s point that Chinese drama is symbolic and not realistic; but Qi pushed his argument further than Zhang, making the purity of form an absolute necessity.51 To him the history of Chinese theater was ultimately a progressive one of refining the beauty of movements and gestures to capture their emotional or conceptual essence. “Ancient drama is derived from ancient dance, each movement must be choreographed [lit. dancified, wudaohua]. . . . In dance the posture must be beautiful in every way; for ancient, modern, Chinese and foreign dance this is always true, examples are not needed. Because every bit must be beautiful, every bit of realism must be removed from every movement, it must be aestheticized. The only important aim of old Chinese drama is summed up in the word mei [beauty]. No matter if it is speaking, emitting a sound, movement, costume, and so on, nothing can depart from the word mei.”52 Qi distilled his theory of Chinese drama into a slogan: “No movement that is not dance, no sound that is not music.”53 Chinese drama’s innumerable conventions for movement, singing, speech, dress, and other elements all flowed from this iron rule. Many of Qi’s writings are laborious

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catalogs, “incomplete” lists of twenty-seven different ways to perform laughter, five different stage coughs, hundreds of hand gestures. Qi’s point was to demonstrate that not one moment of Chinese drama (and Peking opera in particular, for Peking opera was always the exemplar) escaped the scope of aestheticization. There was simply no crack through which the realistic could enter. Qi constructed a binary opposition that essentialized Western drama as purely mimetic and Peking opera as wholly nonmimetic. The signifiers on the stage in Peking opera were always, according to Qi, foregrounded as signifiers; they were never meant to be transparent or confused with an unmediated signified, as was always the case with realism. Qi’s proposed reforms to rationalize and strengthen the inner logic of Peking opera invariably grounded themselves in reference to an ancient originary tradition whose proper revival could guide artists in achieving this aesthetic (not realistic) essence. An example is his short diatribe on yinchang, the performance of tea drinking onstage, which, as chapter 2 shows, was coming under fairly general attack in the Peking opera world by the May Fourth era. Qi expresses distress at contemporary actors’ indulgence in drinking during performances, interrupting scenes to sip tea or wine. He alleges that according to the admonitions of “old actors” and “old rules, “one is absolutely not permitted to drink one mouthful” on stage, even when the script calls for the action of drinking.54 The habit of drinking during a performance to soothe the throat that had become so pretentiously stylized since the days of Tan Xinpei was a violation of these rules. But it was also a violation to actually swallow tea even when tea drinking was part of the play’s plot, for, “according to the rules of Chinese theater, there should not be allowed any realistic movement.” The barely discernible act of really swallowing tea was thus at odds with the properly aesthetic execution of yinchang.55 However, Cheng Changgeng and Tan Xinpei had both been known to drink tea during their performances without ever attracting criticism. Qi’s rigorous standards in this regard were clearly of more recent vintage, a necessary consequence of his Manichean logic of aestheticism. To really drink was realistic and hence impermissible. By formulating a theory that in this way banished any value or possibility of hybridity, by insisting that the essence of Chinese drama was thoroughly coherent, self-contained, and the polar opposite of realism, Qi left the May Fourth thinkers with no ground from which to claim that Chinese drama was intrinsically inferior to huaju realism. Their difference was absolute, their evolutionary paths wholly distinct, and thus their merits could not be compared. Qi’s concept of “aestheticization” was highly abstract, locating Peking

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opera’s essence on the level of representational form in a way that could justify all its particularities (dancing, singing, stylized speech, formal conventions, face painting, and character typing) while being specifically anchored to none. Aestheticization was not fossilized but a living principle, supple enough to assimilate and negotiate all sorts of modern developments. For instance, new lighting techniques and acoustic design could be introduced to heighten the beauty of forms, because such measures merely employed technology in the service of distinctly aesthetic ends. Modern content, from plots involving contemporary figures to representations of modern warfare, could all be worked into Peking opera as long as these elements were aesthetically refined and not merely mimetically reproduced on stage. To those who objected that the form of Peking opera was suited only to plays set in China’s historical past, Qi replied that historical realism had never been part of the representational rules of Chinese drama and that Peking opera was just as inaccurate in representing history as in representing the present. Take costumes for instance. National drama’s costumes are a carefully considered combination of Tang, Song, Yuan, and Ming clothes. . . . Which dynasty is this specially stipulated costuming appropriate to? Which region’s stories? If it is not proper for performing contemporary events, it is just as unfit for performing the deeds of the Qing dynasty. . . . And certainly it is miles away from the Tang and even further off for Han and Three Kingdoms stories. . . . In addition, even though the rules for costumes were from the beginning very strict, there is nothing long lasting in the world which does not change. The costumes of opera troupes up to today have already added numerous changes. What is vital is that they do not stray outside the principle of making the acting fluid and not causing aesthetic discord. At times additions can be made, but they must be really necessary, otherwise they are not permitted. Every aspect must first be minutely and carefully examined.56

Qi’s objection to hybrid forms like contemporary-costume dramas was not that they attempted to bring new content onto the stage but that they were merely realistic or mimetic additions and hence violated the essence of Peking opera. As one of the co-creators of ancient-costume dramas, Qi was in fact a leading proponent of costume reform. Many of the plays Qi authored combined the use of modern, multicolored lighting with diaphanous, flowing gowns styled after images of angels in Tang Buddhist painting. The goal here, according to Qi, was not historical accuracy (which was realism in another guise) but rather aesthetic inspiration. By shifting the definition of Chinese drama’s essence, Qi managed to construct an evolutionary history of Chinese drama which, rather than

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coming to a crashing halt in the Ming or Qing dynasty, continued to advance and thrive into the present. With Wu Mei having already extended Chinese drama’s evolutionary narrative into the Ming, Qi now managed to extend a narrative into the Qing and beyond. Where Wu Mei had bemoaned Qing drama’s paucity of emotional content and tendency toward dry standardization, Qi asserted that the work of Qing evidential scholars to catalogue melodies and compile rhyming dictionaries had laid an indispensable foundation for creating a truly national form of theater. Ming kunqu’s popularity had been limited and stunted because it was based on southern dialect and was not comprehensible to all Chinese. In contrast, the pronunciation of Peking opera blended the dialects of several different regions. Although this conglomeration of pronunciations was full of quirks, Qi argued that Qing scholars had taken pains to minutely catalogue and order all these anomalies, thus succeeding in making Peking opera the first genre to transcend the realm of mere dialect. For the first time in China’s history, “northern local tones and rhymes could be used in every province, and none would find it unpleasant to the ear, and none would find fault.”57 Of all Chinese genres, Peking opera was therefore the best suited for the task of uniting the entire nation in a community of qing. Qi’s theory of aestheticization also involved a subtle but crucial shift in sensory priorities, from the musical to the visual.58 “Most people in the Chinese scholarly world who study drama concentrate on singing ability and melody; actually national drama’s particular strength doesn’t lie here. Regarding the element of singing, every country has its own art of singing. . . . Then in what lies the clearest difference between Chinese and foreign theater? Only in the various forms and movements.”59 Qi emphasized form and movement—in other words, the visual aspect of Peking opera performance—where the vast majority of Chinese drama aficionados, like Wu Mei, had privileged music. By privileging the visual and dance over the aural and music, Qi was in fact participating in a shift that was fundamentally transforming popular cultural production and spectatorship, a shift that was particularly controversial in the Peking opera world. Musical accomplishment had typically been the most valued element in Peking opera.60 When opera fans in Beijing went to the theater, they said they were going to ting xi (listen to a drama), not kan xi (watch a show), and a privileging of the aural over the visual pervaded elite taste and criticism. Jingpai (Pekingstyle) critics sneered that haipai (Shanghai-style) Peking opera actors aimed to dazzle naïve audiences with spectacles to cover up for their

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musical bumbling. Timbre, tone, proper enunciation, and exciting and emotionally resonant musical innovations were what most Peking opera critics scrutinized and savored. Each of the great patriarch actors of Peking opera (both the First Three and the Later Three Outstanding Laosheng) had engendered separate schools that perpetuated their styles, and the key distinctions between these schools were based on styles of singing and declamation. The most respected male and female character types in Peking opera—the laosheng for male roles and the qingyi for female—were honored precisely for their musical finesse. Indeed, the qingyi role was noted for being extraordinarily nonvisual, for, as model chaste women, qingyi were in every way meant to avert the male gaze. Qi Rushan’s privileging of visuality paralleled other important contemporary changes in representation discussed in previous chapters. Among these were the new theater technologies—the stage lights and spotlights, the more colorful sets and shoujiu backdrops, the removal of stage pillars and clearing of audience sight lines, and the reorientation of seating to point directly toward the stage; the proliferation of pictorial magazines, illustrated advertisements, films, and newsreels that made Peking opera actors into icons of popular culture; the explosion of new dramatic genres labeled not according to melody type, but according to visual elements like costume (for example, ancient-costume and contemporary-costume dramas); and the emergence of the huashan role that wedded the physical playfulness and visual allure of the flirtatious huadan with the respectability of the qingyi in ways never before possible in Peking opera. The tremendous popularity of Mei Lanfang and the other Four Famous Dan in the 1920s and 1930s would have been unthinkable without these changes, which coalesced to transform Peking opera into a spectacularly visual popular form. Qi’s emphasis on visual and dance elements over music and song jibed with these crucial changes. Indeed, it is almost ironic that even as the May Fourth intellectuals came to see Chinese drama as essentially musical, Qi, supposedly harking back to tradition, developed an understanding of Peking opera that was persuasive precisely because it registered—even without acknowledging them—the modern changes that were sweeping the Chinese popular cultural world. Having claimed that dance and movement constituted the aesthetic essence of Chinese drama, Qi necessarily had to argue that, as such, it was truly national and consistent across regions. Hence he claimed, rather distortedly, “National drama emphasizes dance over song. . . . There are more than seventy or eighty different melody systems throughout China . . . but the system of movements is wholly unified.”61

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For Qi, the goal of Peking opera’s aesthetic refinement was to create the most moving performance possible: “If we say we wish over the long term to permanently raise the awareness of our nation’s people and reform social customs, to do so before school textbooks can truly be disseminated to all, the best method is to use drama, and best of all “old” drama. . . . With the extended and accented meaning that vocalization [music] contributes strengthening its mood, and the added shaping and shading that posture [dance] lends to stage-presence, [old drama’s] power to move people is tremendously increased.”62 Qi dedicated his career to this conviction that national drama was the most powerful medium through which the community of qing could be realized. All Qi’s activities—his script and essay writing, his patriotic promotions of performances of Peking opera abroad, his work establishing the National Drama School and several national drama journals and study societies, his work in Taiwan promoting Peking opera as a key tool for Nationalist propaganda and military morale boosting—manifest his commitment to the use of Peking opera as a means for fostering a sense of national community. In sum, Qi’s theoretical and historical interpretation refashioned Peking opera as wholly compatible with, if not indispensable to, the enterprise of building a modern Chinese nation. Though Qi often uses the term guoju (national drama) to encompass all forms of old drama, he repeatedly asserts that Peking opera is the genre most deserving of the title. In addition to having been standardized under the Qing and thus being comprehensible throughout all of China (at least theoretically), Peking opera could also be deemed the most truly national genre for aesthetic reasons. Benefiting from its history as a synthesis of a wide range of regional forms, it was the most advanced aesthetically: “Every regional form of drama, though they all do their best to [imitate jingju], still cannot sufficiently copy its good points, there always remains a strong flavor of realism. As soon as drama has realistic movements, when compared with aestheticized movements, it is not enchanting enough.”63 Qi’s assertion that Peking opera was the highest form of Chinese theater led him to use the terms jingju and guoju almost interchangeably in his writings. He was not alone in doing so, for “in the wake of the spread of jingju to Tianjin, Shandong, Shanghai, and also Hebei, Dongbei, Wuhan, and so on, it became steadily more popular. In this way jingju’s audience broadened severalfold. So the term jingju by the twentieth century gradually became recognizable to everyone, and by the 1930s progressed to the point of being esteemed as China’s national drama [guoju].”64

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Qi was of course not the only force behind this transformation of Peking opera into national drama; also at work were diverse economic, political and social forces. Nor was Qi Rushan the only one laboring to assert its great potential for building a community of qing in the form of a modern nation; hundreds of writers, actors and critics were working in a similar vein. Still, Qi’s conceptualization of Peking opera has been one of the most influential theories in Chinese drama from the Republican era to the present. I have tried to sketch its theoretical scaffolding not merely to praise Qi’s ingenuity but, more important, because aesthetic theories become influential and accepted at specific historical moments for specific historical reasons. Understanding the architecture of Qi’s theoretical propositions may allow us to better understand the discursive logic, the cultural imperatives and instabilities, of his day. For, clearly, the categories of drama that unfold from Qi’s theory sever Peking opera from the hybrid forms with which it was entangled. Those hybrids, according to both Qi’s logic and the logic of May Fourth scholars, were unnatural mixtures, products of an immature cultural miscegenation and hence aesthetically defective and incapable of weathering the acute critical judgment of literary history.

The May Fourth Moment as a Historical Break Qi’s theory of aestheticization is constructed in opposition to what seems like a gross oversimplification of the aporias of realism. He seems to accept at face value a central fallacy of mimetic realism, namely its illusionism, its pretension to render representational media transparent and thereby escape the distortions of aesthetic conventions. But of course realistic literature and drama are always representations, compositions of signifiers and symbolic actions governed by aesthetic conventions. While onstage, actors in realist dramas do not really die, sleep, or necessarily feel the emotions they perform. No matter how realistic the milieu, backdrops, props, lighting, and stage movements may appear, all are still artificial and choreographed to accommodate the audience’s perspective; actors wear makeup and project their voices in unnatural ways. Clearly, the relationship of realism to a perceived reality is contingent on specific cultural and historically changing conventions of representation: as one Peking opera scholar remarked, “If you want to see real things everywhere, there is no need to look at the stage.”65 If realism is so undeniably aestheticized, then how can Qi pose aestheticization and realism as polar opposites? And perhaps we should first ask: How or why could May

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Fourth intellectuals have imagined that realism offered an escape from representational convention and aestheticization in the first place? Realism’s vitality in many ways derives from its internal paradoxes and fraught social aspirations. Realism aspires to treat representation as a transparent window into sociopolitical reality in order to reveal that reality anew to its audience and—emphatically in the Chinese case—to inspire its audience to take action to change that reality. This effect of revelation is achieved by the self-conscious dismantling of previous literary and dramatic conventions that are attacked as outmoded, decorative and distorting. “Realist ‘fiction approximates truth, not by concealing art but by exposing artifice,’ and in an important sense realism’s truth claim is dependent on this denunciation of other, more artificial genres. . . . [T]he text refers its authority to the external world by this means, thereby appearing not to be applying its structures of meaning to the world, but to have discovered them there.”66 Realism, to paraphrase Victor Shklovsky, is the relentless defamiliarization of the familiar.67 With such a formal paradox at its core—defamiliarizing the signifier in order to render it transparent—realism founds itself on a representational impossibility, binding the subject into an endless ideological quest after a receding horizon—the real. How do advocates of realism disavow the futility of their own paradoxical relationship to representation? Its utopian aspiration is underwritten by the conviction that the current system of representation has irredeemably failed to convey reality and that the greatest barrier to revealing reality is their generation’s imprisonment in a fossilized cultural system. The origin of the rupture between representation and the real that realism posits is displaced onto the old culture, the decrepit artificial genres that engulf the present in signifiers with no significance and forms without content—a decadent burlesque of songs, dance, and face paint. This logic of displacement easily snowballs into totalizing gestures: if the signifier’s materiality ever seems to intervene in transmitting reality (which of course is inevitable), then this only proves that a more thorough purging is needed; a utopian destruction of the entire previously existing signifying system itself seems necessary to mend the rupture between word and world. This logical momentum, grounded as it is on impossibility, helps explain the peculiar mingling of passionate conviction and critical skepticism found in May Fourth writings. The May Fourth writers could displace but not escape these contradictions. They confronted them in the form of a riddle: How can we craft art that reveals the hollowness and corruption of our society and culture and at the same time forge a “community of qing” motivated to sociopo-

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litical action? Training an audience to appreciate these new dramatic forms—forms that abandoned both familiar plots and the pleasures of song and dance—was challenging enough; but after coaxing such an audience into existence only to make them shockingly aware of the emptiness of their sociopolitical and cultural world, how could such a profoundly alienating experience be turned into a community-building one? This question was especially troubling given that this experience of alienation is arguably intrinsic to the realist form itself, as Marston Anderson observes: The Western mimetic project, of which realism is just one expression, assumes a fundamental schism between word and reality, and the exploration of this divide is realism’s hidden agenda. As Tzvetan Todorov has observed, perfect imitation is no longer imitation, but substitution. And since a linguistic construct can never truly replace reality, the mimetic undertaking is destined to fail. Just as in linguistic theory words are both alienated from and bound to the objects they signify, so realist works are at once distinct from and dependent on the world they describe. So too is the critical mind of the author, as postulated by realism, both free of the social order and bound to it, both a part of the represented world and detached from it. Practitioners of realism appear to desire above all to bridge the gap that they complainingly assume between the critical intellect and the social order, but to do so would bring the immersion of critique and the extinction of the mode.68

Not only did May Fourth intellectuals reinforce and reproduce the very dilemma they alleged was external to themselves, but their subject position depended on the alienation this schism induced. Like his leftist contemporaries, Qi also projects the dichotomy between representation and the real as an existential given and builds his theory of aestheticism on this assumption. Pure aestheticism, like its realist Other, was impossible and led to the clearly fallacious claim that no representation in Peking opera bore any relationship to reality—a claim that mirrored the equally fallacious realist claim to have somehow eschewed all extraneous ornamentation in their work. Moreover, in order to argue that aestheticism is Chinese drama’s essence, Qi was compelled to assert that capturing a sense of reality had never been a central concern in Chinese drama. It is this second claim, the historical one, which helps underscore the significant conceptual shift marked by Qi Rushan’s work. Qi’s claim that Chinese drama has all along been about excluding any flavor of the real assumes that the schism between representation and the real had always been a central issue in Chinese aesthetics. Indeed, the relationship between the two—between true and false (zhen/jia), imaginary

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and factual (xu/shi)—are key themes in Ming and Qing literary criticism, but their relationship is hardly ever expressed as one of clear opposition. Far more often it is one of mutual infusion, balance, or transposition. Of course, a literary history of the changing relationship between word and world, real and representation in Chinese aesthetics would fill volumes, and it is quite likely that in that history one would find literary ideas akin to the mimetic divide. All I argue is that a rigid schism between reality and representation was not a dominant framework in the history of Chinese literature and that the relationship of language/culture (wen) with the world was usually posed in rather different terms. We could point to novels of the Ming and Qing for examples of a form that thrives on blending the realistic and the aesthetic, mixing highly realistic descriptions and plot elements with extended passages of poetry and heavenly interventions. An important couplet from Dream of the Red Chamber describes the relationship of reality and nonreality as inextricably linked: Truth becomes fiction when the fiction’s true; Real becomes not-real where the unreal’s real.

We have already seen that Wu Mei used the term zhen (true, real) to characterize the essence of good Chinese drama. In doing so he was referencing the work of Yuan Yuling (1592–1670), who claimed that in the greatest dramas, make-believe stories attained an unmatched realness.69 We could also go back to the sixth-century classic The Literary Mind and the Carving of Dragons (Wen xin diao long), by Liu Xie, for a highly influential delineation of the relationship between wen and the world. Liu Xie writes that wen is “born together with Heaven and Earth” and is “the mind of the universe.” Stephen Owen contrasts this view with mimesis, noting that for Liu Xie “the writer, instead of ‘re-presenting’ the outer world, is in fact only the medium for this last phase of the world’s coming-to-be.”70 For Liu Xie, wen was a crucial part of the world and could not be separated from it; wen completed the world by ordering it. A comparison of a passage from Liu Xie with one of Qi Rushan’s discussions on aestheticism might help clarify this distinction. Discussing actions that must be eliminated or modified for the stage, Qi writes: Such actions are numerous. There are many unavoidable matters in human life, like imbibing, dining, urinating, and defecating, in vulgar terms eating, drinking, shitting, and pissing, etc., activities that no one can escape but which are impossible to make beautiful. . . . Take, for instance, the performing of illness. . . . No matter what kind of illness, regardless of time or place, lying down is not permitted because lying down cannot be aestheti-

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cally pleasing. Moreover, it approaches realism. So in plays, even though someone is sick on the verge of death, they cannot lie down and must die sitting up.71

Qi often presents the real as unaesthetic, in contrast to Liu Xie: Just as when nature expresses itself in physical bodies there is plastic pattern, so also when it expresses itself in sound there is musical pattern. Now if things which are devoid of consciousness express themselves so extremely decoratively, can that which is endowed with mind lack a pattern proper to itself?72

For Qi Rushan, the real and the aesthetic are split, and aestheticization involves eliminating the realistic, whereas for Liu Xie the aesthetic is an expression and completion of the real: the real is always already patterned and aesthetic, and human beings merely elaborate upon and perfect these patterns through wen. In the writings of both Liu Xie and prominent literati of the Ming and Qing, conceptualizations of representation’s relationship to the real fails to match the strict dichotomy that Qi argues is essential to Chinese drama. In sum, Qi’s conceptualization of the relationship between representation and the real has far more in common with those of his May Fourth intellectual contemporaries than it does with those of the literati and aestheticians of previous dynasties. Nevertheless, Qi’s theorization of aestheticism as the essence of Peking opera caught on quickly, indicating not merely that it was persuasively constructed but, far more important, that it resonated with contemporary assumptions and experiences. In 1928 Ouyang Yuqian arrived in Guangzhou at the invitation of the municipal government in order to establish an institute for the study, training, performance, and reform of yueju, Guangzhou’s regional drama. In the institute’s magazine Drama (Xiju), Ouyang wrote a brief article addressing whether yueju should adopt practices from Peking opera. That this question could even be raised indicates Peking opera’s national prominence, and many of Ouyang’s statements reiterate Qi Rushan’s arguments: Northern drama [of which Peking opera is the prime example] was already a mature art form, relatively firmly rooted, so that even when it was affected by the influence of spoken drama, it was able from beginning to end to preserve its position. Yueju had not completely matured when the winds of realism began to thrash, . . . and gradually its original rules were broken to a precarious extreme, . . . the result being that it was made into an indistinct, inharmonious mess. Whether costumes or movements, every-

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thing is neither old nor new, too immature to be a new art, not refined enough to be an old art.73

Peking opera was safe from the “winds of realism,” recalcitrant and resistant to modern transformations. Some Peking opera critics followed this logic a step further: in addition to arguing that the essence of Chinese aestheticism was radically different from Western realism, they proclaimed Chinese drama as the more advanced model. “When drama was first born, it was always about performing like the real things. Because the artistic level was immature, all energy was put into imitating to be identical with reality.”74 Such drama remains shallow, skimming merely the surface of life, “the way a child looks upon a toy.”75 In contrast, Chinese drama uses imaginary methods [xuni fa] that rely upon the effectiveness of jingshen [spirit, essence], stimulating the appearance of objects in the viewer’s mind by way of subtle hints. This is using the fictitious to communicate the cause. Our senses of all objects, great or small, and of all moments, long or fleeting, are based in jingshen. Appearances communicate impressions: there are no objects without appearances, no matters that cannot be expressed. Escaping the constraints of the material, not depending upon absolute imitation, this is really Chinese drama’s special characteristic. Chinese aesthetics is concerned with jingshen and discards materiality, values the evanescent spirit, and abandons mere material traces.76

The writings of these Peking opera boosters are often penned in playfully arcane semiclassical Chinese. Appearing in opera fanzines like Shanghai’s Drama Monthly (Xiju yuekan),which thrived from 1928 to 1931, these writings typically begin, “Back in the old days, . . .” and are brimming with a nostalgia for the present, in which yesterday is already ancient history. Many of these critics express a foreboding that the aesthetic essence of Peking opera is swiftly waning.77 Clearly Peking opera had been disentangled from the historical present, and its ability to represent the contemporary world was relinquished, indeed denied. The genre was now locked firmly in the realm of the ancient, the traditional, the quintessentially—and exclusively—Chinese. The hybrid realm, rejected by modernists and traditionalists alike, was, in word if not in deed, abandoned and relegated to lesser, immature, local forms.

Enclosing the Empire, Enframing the Real This delimitation of Peking opera to Chinese tradition is most obvious in the radical constriction of its content that began abruptly around 1920.

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By the 1920s face paint, role types, and Chinese musical accompaniment were all established as exclusively Chinese forms of representation, incompatible with non-Chinese content. Peking opera was no longer fit for the enactment of world historical dramas such as the invasion and collapse of Poland, the U.S. enslavement of Africans, the French colonization of Vietnam, or Napoleon’s great wars and reforms. Peking opera had lost its power to appropriate and represent the world; it was relegated to representing China’s imperial past. Peking opera’s most famed performers renounced representing both the Western world and China’s twentieth-century present. The next chapter looks in more depth at how this delimitation on Peking opera’s representational range was articulated as a positive affirmation of its fundamentally national essence; this chapter is more concerned with how this grafting of Peking opera as a genre onto the space and history of the empire/nation was grounded on an even more general and diversely articulated shift in how representation itself was conceived. What, then, are we to make of the 1929 debut of Shang Xiaoyun’s blockbuster play Modengjia Girl, set in historic India and performed entirely in Western-style costumes? One thumbs-up review opened with this qualification: “Aside from the songs and speeches, all the movements and costumes are entirely in Western style. Does this meet with standards for the true meaning of drama? There are various opinions on this issue.”78 Modengjia Girl would seem to have broken all the post–May Fourth rules, mixing Peking opera arias and declamation with Western costumes and narrative content. The play tells of a good-hearted girl of the Modengjia family, a pagan family that practices occult magic in a village dominated by Buddhists who discriminate against them. The girl falls in love with Annan, an envoy of the Buddha sent to earth on a heavenly mission in a beggar’s disguise. The girl asks her mother to use magic to capture Annan’s soul so that he will return her love. After a love scene and a battle or two, the girl and her mother are brought before the Buddha, and the girl, who has the transient nature of life revealed to her when the Buddha suddenly transforms her into an old woman, renounces her errant ways and converts to Buddhism. The tale resolved and the play over, the cast then dances “The London Girl, a Barn Dance” and, according to reviews, the audience had a great time clapping along. How did Indian Buddhists and English folk music squeeze onto the Peking opera stage in 1929, and why was the introduction of “Indian” costumes and a curtain-closing barn dance countenanced as an acceptable bending of Peking opera conventions? Modengjia Girl fudged with

Figure 11. The actor Shang Xiaoyun as the Indian maiden Bojidi in the play Modengjia Girls (Modengjia nu), ca. 1927. From XJYK 1, no. 8 (1929).

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the geographical notions of east and west, or more specifically with the notion of the West, a geographical concept suspended between two Chinese words, xi and yang. The title itself invoked a certain doubleness: on first sight, any reader would assume the four characters mo deng jia nu to mean “a daughter of a modern (modeng) family”—hardly apt subject matter for a 1929 Peking opera; but modengjia was unexpectedly to be read as the transliterated name of a Indian clan. The title seemed to indicate the Euro-American, modern West (yang), but it actually referred to the Buddhist, Indian, inner-Asian West (xi) of the old Chinese empire. This second West (xi), the West of the Monkey King’s Journey West (Xiyou ji) and of Buddhist empires and Chinese imperial trade and pilgrimages, had a long and fantastical literary history quite distinct from that of the Euro-American West. Shang Xiaoyun uses the xi of the ancient empire as a back door through which to sneak yang elements. Shang’s ostensibly Indian costume seems more suited to an eccentric American flapper; and the “London Girl” was obviously not a Indian tune. Modengjia nu nudged at the borders of Peking opera’s post–May Fourth representational territory, but, by locating itself in the imagined geography of ancient Asian empires, managed to remain within the genre’s domain. Modengjia nu was an exception that reinforced the rule and pointed to that rule’s novel historical constructedness and contingency. “Chinese” aesthetic forms could no longer represent the “real”; a new epistemological regime had displaced those forms, and only the representational regime known as realism was qualified to represent the contemporary real world in its enormous diversity; but representations of the imagined empire of the Asian past offered glimpses of alternatives to the modern colonial world order which authorized realism. The change in representation that I am claiming occurs in early twentieth-century urban China shares much in common with Earle Ernst’s concepts of presentational and representational theater: In the presentational theater, the actor does not lose his identity as an actor. The audience does not regard him as a “real” person but as an actor acting. His make-up, costume, movement, and speech emphasize the difference between an actor and the concept of a “real” person that exists in the mind of the audience. . . . The stage is distinguished from the rest of the theater building, but it is not conceived to be spatially discontinuous from it. The actor, the audience, and the performance exist within the same psychologically undifferentiated world. . . . At the opposite pole . . . [i]n representational theater every effort is made to convince the audience that the stage is not a stage and that the actor is not an actor. . . . In essence the stage becomes an area of illusion, while the auditorium remains a part of actuality.79

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I believe these categories are apt, though I strongly disagree that the world of presentational theater is “psychologically undifferentiated.” If anything, that world is quite subtly differentiated, participating in, but not intransigently committing to, the illusionism that is so insistently enforced in realist representational theater. But, with this proviso, Ernst’s distinction can be useful. The Qing empire was a qualitatively more performative society grounded in a presentational epistemology: officials and commoners were carefully distinguished by dress, habit, and social space; the state was created and daily recreated through the conscientious performance of ritual; the political and the cultural, nature and society, were seen, at least according to the elite ideal, as intrinsically linked, ordered, and enabled through wen. By the early twentieth century, under the economic and military pressures of European imperialism, an array of technologies organized around a representationalist system of signification were coming to dominate urban China, from the renunciation of government through ritual to the vernacular-language movement that aspired to transform written language into a mimetic technology of representation. My assertion that a different regime of representation came to dominate daily urban life may seem an overly simplistic, reductive theorization of modernity that has been undermined by decades of excellent historical and literary criticism; but the assertion that colonial modernity ushered in a new representational regime that came to dominate experiences of representation in urban China more or less by the 1920s is not incompatible with the excellent work on alternative Chinese modernities and similar deconstructive critiques. I am not arguing for a totalizing break; indeed, the internal contradictions of the dichotomy between representation and reality guarantees that this regime is always unstable, incomplete, and inflected with vibrant and potentially explosive pockets of alternative representational modes and critiques. Nonetheless, categories of daily life—such as the human body’s relation to subjectivity, the subject or citizens’ relationship to society and the state, written language’s relation to spoken language, and the relationships between place and space and between image and reality, to give just a few examples—were shifting to materially enforce a new dominant representational regime. Urban Chinese bodies, both male and female, were texts undergoing transformation in the early twentieth century, with the cutting of men’s queues and the decline of foot binding for women providing two key instances. The queue did more than politically mark the Han male’s body: it was a physical embodiment of a man’s political subjectivity. In 1911 a man

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without a queue was still an instantly legible embodied political text, both the signifier and signified of a rebel. But within a few years Chinese male bodies were no longer legible in this way; indeed, there was no longer any generally authorized bodily practice through which the male body could manifest its political subjectivity; the male’s body and his subjectivity, his appearance and his “reality” as political subject, were split. Urban women’s renunciation of foot binding enacted a similar splitting of body and identity. As Dorothy Ko has argued, the freeing of the bound foot— the public revelation through photos, exhibits, and X-rays of the “crippled” flesh inside the embroidered shoe—had a great influence on public attitudes toward the practice, for these displays involved a radical shift in the way foot binding itself created meaning. It is far from accidental that “liberating” feet involved a process of visualizing the physiological “reality” that lay beneath the embroidered surface of the shoe, and that the liberation of the “natural” foot from the “cultural” (or rather “barbaric”) shoe came to symbolize modern Chinese women’s renunciation of slavery and the liberating and modernizing of female subjectivity itself. Like the cutting of the queue, the logic of ending foot binding contained a profound epistemological subtext: reality was being liberated from the tyranny of appearance; human subjectivity was being freed from the prison of bodily practice. The demise of court dress, exemplified in Yuan Shikai’s bestowal of his emperor’s robes on the actor Liu Shengyu to use in his stage performances, similarly marks this change in the everyday conception of the human body and attire and subjectivity: if the emperor’s robes were now insufficient to validate Yuan as a real emperor, then they could at least be used in that realm where appearance still ruled, the theatrical stage. The vernacular-language movement exemplifies a similar logic: the idea that a real, authentic Chinese language existed underlying all written and spoken versions. Forms of writing and speech, whether literati essays or regional dialects, all came to be interpreted as distorted versions of an authentic Chinese language; all were feudal and outmoded linguistic forms wedded to discernible subject positions, and by some accounts even serving to imprison individuals in such feudal positions. These imprisoning distortions had to be stripped away so that the real Chinese language could be discovered and Chinese subjectivity and national unity could flourish. The transformation of the Forbidden City and imperial temples into public spaces like Sun Yatsen Park and the Palace Museum provides the clearest examples of similar changes enacted on physical spaces. The public opening of such spaces spoke of the sense that space was homo-

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geneous and open to unlimited purposeful transformation; it demonstrated that all spaces, even imperial ones, were equal and could be molded into specific places at will, that there were no unalterably sacred or hierarchical spaces. The transformation of the teahouse into the playhouse reiterated this logic as well. And of course the proliferation of technologies like photography, radio, and film further spurred the adoption of an understanding of representation that was devoted to distinguishing appearance, image, and representation from reality. As I argue in chapter 2, urban theaters were a microcosm concretizing this bifurcation of reality and representation. The Qing teahouse theater had been a performative space: dan actors had been feminized both on and off the stage; the stage and audience space had been relatively continuous; audience members’ social status and ascriptive tastes were clearly demarcated by where they sat. In the twentieth century, modern visual technologies were introduced into urban theaters, reinforcing a very different representational regime: new forms of lighting and seating arrangements—the silencing, darkening and disciplining of the audience space—all served to separate the audience from the stage, drawing a clear line between representation and reality and replacing the complex social differentiations of the audience space with a notion of socially homogeneous public space. Peking opera was a presentational art form, but in the twentieth century it was being performed in an urban world organized more and more through technologies grounded in a representational regime. In the late Qing, few people had objected to a great actor like Tan Xinpei interrupting the flow of a story to drink a cup of tea; by the 1920s, yinchang was seen as unprofessional, not only, as Qi Rushan had argued, because it was too realistic, but because it shattered the separation between stage and audience, between play time and real time. The entire movement to clean up the stage (eliminating yinchang and the prop man, and removing the orchestra from the stage), of which Qi was a leading proponent, strove to eliminate any element that broke the line separating the stage and the audience.80 For Qi, any bit of realism in Peking opera constituted precisely such a violation, breaking the spell of aestheticism; for the May Fourth realists, the extraneous song, dance, and mime of Peking opera constituted a similar violation of the mimetic realism in the new drama. Both traditionalists and radicals were adamant about disciplining and enforcing this separation. Most important, the urban public were, in their daily lives, coming to view this separation of representation and reality as a natural and crucial aspect of how the world was organized and rationalized.

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I return now to the initial question: Why were the hybrid Peking operas which thrived in the first two decades of the twentieth century so vehemently rejected in the May Fourth era? Certainly economic and professional considerations were involved in the demise of many new drama troupes; but so was the increasing hegemony of this representational regime. Hybrid forms of Peking opera had been both popular and emotionally moving, appealing to both reformist literati critics and the urban public, because hybridity had not been seen as a problem; indeed, it had not been seen as hybridity at all. Bringing novel objects onto the stage had been perfectly welcome because crossing the line between the stage and the world had been perceived as aesthetically exciting, not primitive. At the same historical moment, however, many thinkers were already experiencing a defamiliarization, a distancing from Chinese genres, compelled in large part by a threatening cultural imperialism that provoked late Qing intellectuals to ask, “What is (Chinese) drama? What defines it?” But the idea that Chinese aesthetics was allergic to realism, that Peking opera could not incorporate new clothing fashions and mechanical props, movies and patriotic lectures, was not yet ensconced. The May Fourth era marks the historical moment when a mimetic model of representation became dominant, not merely among radicals but among urban writers and critics as a whole, and more generally, in certain key spaces of everyday urban life. While the May Fourth intellectuals’ imposition of a strict dichotomy between tradition and modernity led many important dramatists and critics to reject Peking opera as a means of representing the contemporary world, equally important was the fact that writers and critics who promoted Peking opera came to share this outlook as well; and, even more important, so did the audiences. Chinese dramatic modes and codes of representation were no longer universal codes, capable of appropriating and representing all phenomena; they were increasingly seen as aesthetic conventions, nonmimetic, ornamental distortions of reality. At the same time, realist conventions of mimeticism were rising to the status of a universal and supposedly transparent code of representation. By the mid-1920s Peking opera’s status as traditional had become naturalized, and the word that Hu Shi had meant as an epithet, lao xing (old-fashioned), was taken as merely a statement of fact. If critics really wanted to pan a Peking opera play in the 1930s, the slur they used was wenmingxi;and critics of a modern spoken drama could heckle bad performances with the very same slur.

Pa r t T w o

Peking Opera to National Drama, 1920–1937

Chapter 5

Landscape and Figure, Nation and Character Jingju. It propagates our nation’s ancient moral values. It uses the remnants of history to rectify the hearts of people in this modern era. It can startle them; it is truly a lofty educational tool. Its melodies are enchanting, its music a perfect accompaniment, its rhythms crisp, its rhymes regulated . . . to an extent with which no other drama of our land can compare. Mei Lanfang, Cheng Yanqiu, and their kindred actors have carried it across the ocean. Foreigners admire it. Jingju certainly can be called national drama. So say supporters of national essence and promoters of jingju. Sun Danhan, “Jingju? Pingju? Jiuju? Guoju?” Xiju xunkan (Drama Biweekly), 1936

Peking opera was not the only genre in the race for the title of guoju, national drama. In 1925, the halls of the drama department at the Beijing Arts Academy and the pages of Beijing’s Morning News echoed with the declaration that a National Drama Movement (Guoju Yundong) had begun. Including Yu Shangyuan, Zhao Taimou, Wen Yiduo, and several other promising young writers, the movement sought to build a new Chinese national drama, which they described as “drama by Chinese, of Chinese, and for Chinese.” Inspired by folk and national culture movements like the Irish literary renaissance, the National Drama Movement substituted cultural nationalism for the May’s Fourth dogmatic internationalism, its goal being to create a spoken drama that was truly Chinese. In terms of content, it would draw on Chinese folk legends, literary classics, and cultural heroes. In terms of form, it sought to build “a new form of drama that bridges the chasm between the two peaks of ‘realism’ and ‘symbolism.’ ”1 Though movement members vocally admired Peking 175

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opera and objected to the May Fourth intellectuals’ condemnation of it, nevertheless these young authors embraced the binary terminology of the May Fourth moment, equating the Chinese with symbolism and xiqu, and the Western with realism and huaju. They also generally rejected the wenmingxi of the previous decade as an ineffective slurring of these “isms.”2 But how was one to bridge these opposing forms without blurring them? Despite producing several essays on the subject, the group produced few works that were formally experimental in this regard: their plays all fell clearly into the category of spoken dramas. The only possible exception was Ouyang Yuqian’s Pan Jinlian, of which he wrote two completely self-sufficient versions, one a spoken drama, the other a Peking opera. Articulating the concept of bridging was clearly easier than realizing it. After about a year, the National Drama Movement disbanded. Yu Shangyuan announced that it had failed not because it did not produce literary insights but because it failed to awaken, or even get noticed by, the larger public: “This society is as towering and unmovable as the Himalayas; when did it ever give us even half a bit of sympathy?”3 Peking opera’s bid for the mantle of national drama faced a very different dilemma from that confronting the National Drama Movement scholars. Peking opera already had an avid popular following; what it lacked was cultural and political credibility. Many cosmopolitan intellectuals adamantly rejected Chinese opera and argued that cultural forms rooted in China’s imperial past were maladaptive in a modern world of nations and individual citizens.4 Moreover—and on this point even its advocates concurred in the wake of the May Fourth moment—Peking opera, by virtue of its very form, was confined to representing the Chinese past and incapable of directly representing the contemporary world. But that limitation did not render the genre irrelevant to a modernizing Chinese republic. True, Peking opera now squarely occupied the territory of tradition, but this was by no means narrow or infertile ground for cultivating national culture. The retrofitting of Peking opera into a national genre involved various forms of revision, however, in both the ways it was scripted and performed and in the ways it was interpreted and marketed, in order to traverse more smoothly a political landscape shaped by concepts like the nation and the individual.

The Burdens and Benefits of Being National Peking opera boosters very much concurred with their spoken-drama counterparts that “the theater is a place of public education” (xuanquan

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zhuyi, lit. propagandism).5 Drama deserved primacy over other literary genres in the nation-building process because, unlike other forms of literature, it could reach the illiterate. “Women, children, and the little people make up most of the audience, their brains full of straw . . . but educators only exert efforts with the upper and middle classes and ignore the lower classes of society. If we want not old, not young, not rich, not poor, but everyone to have national consciousness and receive its motivating force, we cannot do without drama. Theaters are the supplement to the schools.”6 Peking opera’s strongest asset as a vehicle for nationalism was its popular appeal, its accessibility to Chinese audiences of every ilk. Peking opera was the most viable candidate for the title of national drama because it had a broader interurban network and fan base than any other genre. This fact has led many drama historians to represent Peking opera’s recoding as national culture as a natural, almost inevitable, process. They propose that Peking opera, radiating outward from Beijing, managed to represent the nation by a simple accumulation of territory. The authoritative four-volume History of Chinese Peking Opera lists four main factors underlying the spread of Peking opera: (1) the recovery and improvement of north–south travel after the defeat of the Taipings in the 1860s; (2) the increasing demand for cultural entertainment among the growing urban laboring and merchant classes; (3) the ability of Peking opera, as a form which combined song styles from several different regions, to strike a chord of familiarity with diverse audiences; and (4) the fact that Peking opera, being a refined composite of various regional forms, was of higher quality and more exquisite, moving, and contagious than other regional or local styles (difang xi), with the added advantage that it was performed predominantly in official Beijing dialect.7 Actually, such geographical arguments for Peking opera’s national stature first arose in the Republican era. Qi Rushan justified Peking opera’s prominence by portraying it as a synthesis of local and regional genres into a rigorously standardized form that transcended locality, even venturing that the zhongzhou pronunciation system that dominated Peking opera might be the closest thing to Esperanto for the dialect-riven Chinese nation.8 And Ouyang Yuqian claimed that, as a composite genre, Peking opera was uniquely mature and varied, and thus best suited to represent China’s rich culture. It occupied an auspicious middle ground, not pedantic (suanqi) like kunqu, but more serious than genres like bangzi.9 These arguments are simultaneously indisputable and unconvincing: the same could be said of almost all regional opera styles in

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China, all of which have multifaceted histories tied to waves of migration and integration. Such explanations present Peking opera as corresponding to an organic national-popular culture, downplaying the importance of its association with state power (both the late Qing court and the Republican-era governments), commercial interests, and the efforts of self-conscious reformers. In sum, they skirt the issue that Peking opera was an “invented tradition” that had to be revised, reinterpreted, and marketed to resonate as a national symbol. Peking opera’s recoding to symbolize and mobilize nationalism involved a host of interventions, which for heuristic purposes might be categorized as emphasizing either form or content. First, the form of the genre itself was presented as embodying the nation’s cultural legacy, an aesthetic unique to China and its history. In this sense the medium itself became the nationalistic message. Peking opera artists and fans exchanged observations, pondering and debating the spiritual qualities and technical details, the aesthetic essence of the medium. Which elements needed to be preserved, which altered, and which discarded in order to strengthen the genre’s aesthetic core—these were compelling questions within opera circles, and Qi Rushan’s theory of aestheticism was among the most influential formulations by which the genre itself became a force of nationalism. The opera aficionado Chen Moxiang, who penned scripts for Xun Huisheng, was another champion in this vein, who aimed above all to preserve and refine the form’s traditional essence and advertised his scripts as restorations of lost or fragmented originals which he had painstakingly collated into authentic “complete versions” (quanben).10 In terms of content, a national genre was expected to convey nationalistic messages, raising the question: What did Peking opera dramatists believe the nation was or should be, and how could this vision be conveyed through plays? Peking opera was now limited to the sphere of tradition, but for its advocates this was an affirming, valorizing restriction. More Peking opera scripts were being penned and published than ever. In the Qing, a set of shared formal principles and oral traditions had structured popular drama, making literacy, specialized playwrights, and directors generally unnecessary. Talented actors were usually responsible for developing their own plays, and “scripts were often regarded more as guidelines than as texts.”11 But drama’s rise to respectability and intellectuals’ quest for a medium through which to disseminate their ideas combined to bring writers, and eventually directors, into the production process. Writer and actor collaborations produced “new,” closely scripted versions of popular classics and adaptations from Chinese literature and

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folk legends. Audiences were attuned to the variations within these new renditions of familiar narratives, and countless articles emerged parsing the specific renderings of dialogues and arias and identifying sloppy or anachronistic passages. Stars even began engaging in adaptation showdowns. For example, on the opening night of Shang Xiaoyun’s version of the complete story of Yu Tangchun, Xun Huisheng and Chen Moxiang were in the audience noting down every line; not long afterward it was possible to see three different, newly scripted versions of Yu Tangchun in the same week in Beiping, including one starring Xun Huisheng.12 Under the rubric of preserving tradition, there was ample room for authors and actors to mold their plays both stylistically and ideologically. Peking opera could convey divergent and even conflicting modes of nationalism. Qi Rushan believed that Confucian values like filial piety, loyalty, and chastity were the lifeblood of Chinese society, on which the strength and unity of the modern nation depended, and that Peking opera was the ideal tool for inculcating these values.13 By writing plays that eulogized these values, revising old stories with an eye to preserving them for posterity, and collecting artifacts of traditional opera, Qi saw his scripts and scholarship as contributing to the nation-building project. Ouyang Yuqian perceived nationalism quite differently. To Ouyang, Confucian values, especially when used to deprive women or the poor of their liberty, were anathema to forming a stronger nation. Certainly sexist and feudal messages were rife in Peking opera, but the genre also had its roots firmly planted in folk culture, and Ouyang found plenty of dramas that imparted antiestablishment messages. Plays like Fisherman’s Revenge (Da yu sha jia) and Selling a Horse, which tell of chivalrous heroes outsmarting or avenging themselves on exploitative officials, were full of “revolutionary spirit.” These plays, and others which praised patriotism or criticized corruption, fit Ouyang’s version of a nationalistic agenda with little or no tailoring at all.14 Other themes, such as the oppression of women, were not so readily culled from the folk tradition; for these Ouyang adapted the content of familiar narratives, and, by adding a critical twist, was able to convey his new moral message. His most successful endeavor in this regard was the play Pan Jinlian, named after the character from the novel Water Margin (Shui hu zhuan). In the novel Pan Jinlian is presented as a beautiful, unfortunate, and decidedly evil woman. A local tyrant, furious at her refusal to submit to him, forces her into a marriage to a deformed, pathetic, but kindly man. This man’s brother happens to be the handsome and valiant Wu Song, with whom Pan Jinlian falls passionately in love. Wu Song rebuffs her advances, but

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Pan Jinlian plots to solve her dilemma by poisoning her husband and then eliciting Wu Song’s sympathy and affection as a widow. Wu Song discovers the truth of the murder and avenges his brother, killing Pan Jinlian. The original story vilifies Pan Jinlian and praises Wu Song as a hero, but in Ouyang’s view the events beg for a different interpretation: “A woman, forced to serve as a slave, with no means of resisting her master’s violent rape, unable to refuse her master’s forcing her into marriage, even if it is her nature to be charming, intelligent, and ambitious, must conceal all these [talents] and take pains to let men trample on her. She has no choice but to swallow her cries and throw away her precious youth. Is there any difference between this situation and being buried alive?”15 Ouyang’s twist was to provide Pan Jinlian with the opportunity, before being killed, to tell her side of the story. She does so through an eloquent speech condemning feudal society’s oppression of women, reminiscent in some ways of Nora’s speech at the end of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House. Ouyang was not the only, or even most influential, writer to use Peking opera to criticize traditional and contemporary society. Jin Zhongsun wrote several hit plays for Cheng Yanqiu in the late 1920s, including Spring Chamber Dream (Chun gui meng) and Tears of Huang Mountain (Huangshan lei), both tragic portraits of common women of ages past which included stirring appeals for humanism and pacifism. Moreover, a host of plays from the traditional repertoire were potently multivalent. Plays about folk heroines like Hua Mulan and Mu Guiying, who don armor and take to the battlefield, portrayed martial women whose simultaneous rebellion against and upholding of basic Confucian values had broad appeal across the political spectrum. Similarly, many romantic caizi jiaren (talent and beauty) love stories rebuked the callous enforcement of arranged marriage, though they almost always ended by striking a harmonious resolution between romantic love and Confucian filial virtue. In sum, Peking opera writers and actors had many options by which they could impart nationalistic themes, from resurrecting lost narratives and promoting China’s old moral values to fundamentally reinterpreting and rewriting familiar narratives to impart reformist messages. Post-1920s Peking operas, though almost without exception set before the eighteenth century, in an imperial Chinese past, were apt at conveying patriotic, class-conscious, feminist, and pro- or anti-Confucian messages that clearly confronted contemporary social issues. But the mantle of national culture was a heavy one, and the expectations and responsibilities that came with it were almost impossible to ful-

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fill. It seemed that nearly every aspect of the Peking opera needed to be scrapped and rebuilt, starting with the repertoire. The critical consensus held that good opera scripts were hard to come by, while truly great ones simply did not exist. Ouyang Yuqian despised “the type of folksy superstitious and pretentiously romantic scripts popular in theaters today, which are just a kind of infectious insect-chirping not worth consideration.”16 His opinion of the scripts Qi Rushan penned for Mei Lanfang was little higher. As Ouyang saw it, Peking opera faced dangers on both sides: if it continued to cater to crude tastes, it would remain culturally backward, but if it followed the path of Mei Lanfang and his well-heeled bodyguards, who whisked him into a luxury fairyland utterly detached from normal society, it risked becoming too aristocratic.17 Others complained that fashionable writers were slavishly translating Ibsen and Shakespeare and not writing plays set in Chinese society. An article titled “The Script Wasteland and the Heart of the Drama Movement” claimed that not one Chinese play was a true masterpiece that could resonate with contemporary concerns and appeal to Chinese audiences.18 The dearth of high-quality scripts was only the tip of the iceberg. Reforming Peking opera was almost a microcosm of reforming society itself. Every aspect of the Peking opera world needed elevation to a more cultured and dignified level. Audiences, generally felt to have bad taste and worse manners, needed to undergo a thorough metamorphosis. Theaters—which ideally were to serve as the chrysalis for that transformation, training the people in both public demeanor and aesthetics— were cheaply built and dishonestly managed, and produced shoddy plays. Actors, the spokespeople and charismatic focus of the new national culture, were themselves uncultured, illiterate, and superstitious. Acting schools, therefore, needed reforming as well. (These institutional reforms are the subject of chapter 6.) If playing the role of national culture had entailed merely meeting these elitist standards, the task would have been relatively easy. But the burden of nationalism pressed equally from the other side. Peking opera had to be disseminated ever more broadly, become ever more popular and accessible. Aria lyrics must not become too abstruse or ticket prices too high. Plays that were too pedantic squelched the spirit of the genre. Actors who became too arrogant and wealthy served as poor models of citizenship. Finally, all these developments had to survive the test of the market. Theaters, troupes, schools, and drama magazines all had to turn a profit, or at least manage to sustain the thousands of artists, musicians, and technicians without whom Peking opera would cease to exist—and

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this at a time of civil wars (in the 1920s) and global economic depression (in the 1930s). By the 1930s, stars were demanding contracts paying over fifty thousand yuan a month, sending ticket prices soaring as high as five or six yuan. Even in Shanghai, China’s most active entertainment market, no other form of popular entertainment fetched close to the price of a top-rung Peking opera performance. First-run foreign films, costing around one yuan, were the second most expensive entertainment in town. After these came yue opera, which was patronized in Shanghai by sojourners from the relatively prosperous Zhejiang region and cost between forty and sixty cents a show. Other regional opera shows cost ten or twelve cents, while a day at an amusement center like the Great World cost twenty-two cents. Considering that only a handful of Shanghai’s highest-paid industrial workers made eighty to ninety cents a day (most white-collar clerks earned approximately the same) and that the average worker’s wage ranged from forty to sixty cents, the shows of Peking opera stars were far beyond the capacity of most people’s pocketbooks.19 The average Shanghai salary earner could, however, attend a more typical Peking opera show, such as Shanghai’s popular serial Peking opera dramas (liantaixi), for around fifty cents. Peking opera’s recoding to fit the demands placed on a national art form also reached into the realm of performance techniques. This is not to say that actors throughout China suddenly and radically changed how they performed a given scene; indeed, in the Republican era the actors’ techniques were in most respects styled after those of preceding generations. But although acting itself continued in a recognizable vein, the conceptualization of that acting changed radically. Performance was shifting from an aesthetic centered on technique to one centered on the idea of a character’s interiority. This shift, yet another transformation embedded within the new representational space of the theater, involved a subtle surgery that attempted to clearly separate the actor and the character the actor performed. But before trying to trace this shift and its implications, we must first look at the importance of technique in Peking opera performance.

Technique as the Essence of Performance Like snails, Peking opera actors carry the world of the play on their backs. They do not walk onto a built set; rather, the way they walk builds the setting in which they tread. The opera actor’s body, through footsteps, posture, and hand movements, evokes the imaginary surroundings. There

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is almost no set, no painted backdrop or partitioning walls. The actor enacts a journey over huge distances by walking in a stylized circle; houses are entered through miming the opening and closing of doors and by stepping over invisible raised thresholds; wobbly boats are timidly boarded and rowed by two actors swaying in perfect synchronization; invisible clothes are painstakingly mended by an almost visible needle and thread; phantom chickens are fed by a silent scattering of seeds bunched in an actor’s skirts. The set is bare of all but a table or two and some chairs, which can serve as anything from kitchen furniture to throne room to mountain pass. Props are few and stylized: as a conductor’s baton seems to conjure music out of thin air, the actor’s graceful manipulation of a braided stick conjures horses that are mounted, spurred, reined, and tied to trees; a sacklike bundle of red cloth is the severed head of an enemy. Actors’ bodies are thus integral to the construction of the space in which they act, and there is no simple, clear line separating figure and landscape. In such a space costume can metamorphose, playing myriad roles. Flowing sleeves can speak a subtle language of emotional expression; they can swirl with abandon to express joy; they can serve as handkerchiefs to mop up tears or droop to the floor like a physical manifestation of an inner despair; hanging like a curtain besides a woman’s cheek, they can convey her flirtatious modesty or allow her to furtively declare her inner thoughts in an aside unbeknownst to other characters on stage; or, by rhythmically gathering his sleeves in folds, the actor can signal the musicians that he is ready to sing. Some elements of costume are more limited in meaning: the flags on the backs of bit-part actors signal that each one symbolizes an army; a long, antennalike feather headpiece indicates that a character is from a barbarian tribe. In his essay “Aesthetics of the Stage in Chinese Drama,” Zhou Yibai begins by remarking that, the almost nonexistent set might suggest that there hardly was any stage aesthetic in Chinese drama. But this view would be quite mistaken, for when the actors enter this space they use all their various skills to transform the emptiness into a vivid environment. Zhou cites the famous epigram “In the heart of the poem is a painting; in the heart of a painting is a poem” to describe how, through singing and words, the actor conjures the visible out of the invisible. Even the choice of color and cut of the actor’s costume can impart information about the environment. Mime and expressive movements add yet another layer to the setting. Finally, the imagination of the observer completes the picture.20 In her book on Chinese theater, Jo Riley undertakes a close reading of

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the play The Favorite Concubine Becomes Intoxicated (Guifei zui jiu). In it, the concubine Yang Yuhuan sings a poem describing the lovely evening scenery. The landscape includes a string of flying geese, and while she sings “Geese in the vast sky, the geese are flying, ah, the geese, ah!” she also dances, as Riley describes: “The right hand opens the fan level at eyebrow height, the left hand throws the water sleeve over the wrist in a downward movement; she turns, pauses, then continues the cloud step. . . . [T]he upper body must not shake. . . . [A]t the same time, the fan in her hand must make wave-like movements which symbolize the movements of the geese.” Performing the cloud step, the actor becomes the sky, and the fan becomes the geese. At the same time “the performer plays both the role [of] Yang Yuhuan observing the geese as well as the object, the geese, being observed.”21 The figure on stage is simultaneously the character Yang Yuhuan, the actor (in this case Mei Lanfang), and the scenery itself (the geese and clouds); a superb performance effortlessly intertwines these elements through meticulous technique. Technique is crucial. It is the solvent through which these disparate elements (character, landscape, costume, lyric, music, geese, props) are united, the stream in which these associations blend. It would be absurd to argue that nineteenth-century Chinese did not distinguish between the actor as a performer, the character performed, and the space that the actor shaped through movements and song. But no strict lines quarantining figure from landscape, and actor from character, dominated. Such rigid delineations might even be seen as incompatible with the aesthetic principle that art should exceed the constraints of its material form, that “every poem has a painting within it, and every painting a poem.” An actor’s seemingly effortless technique creates an effect like synesthesia, the lyrics painting a scene, the actor’s movements making the music visible. These aesthetic effects in turn were forged in an epistemology in which the oppositions between reality and representation, space and figure, were not dominant. This aesthetic did not disappear in the twentieth century simply because of the emergence of a set of technologies and political structures which imposed these oppositions; but it did change, both in the ways it was performed and the ways that this performance was perceived. In his work on Meiji Japanese culture, Karatani Kojin theorizes that the rapid imposition of modernity during the Meiji period induced a traumatic forgetting, almost an erasing from memory, of an epistemology centered on Chinese-derived textual practices, and substituted for them the dichotomies of representation and reality with which we are so familiar.

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Why in fact was it that for so many centuries Japanese recognized as landscapes only the famous places celebrated in literature and could be satisfied with “stringing together poems and lyrical essays?”. . . . [B]ecause for them literary landscapes were more “real” than actual landscapes. I have already noted that to depict a pine grove meant to depict the signified “pine grove,” not an existing pine grove, and that this vision of transcendental space had to be overturned before painters could see existing pine groves as their subjects. From such a topos, the concept “pine grove” was not something dull and empty but rather sensuous and vibrant.22

The substitution of this concept-landscape with the empirically observed landscape—the landscape of specific existing pine groves—involves a shift in the very perception of space itself and of our place within it. “Pascal’s query, ‘Why am I here, and not there?’ was a modern one, for such a question could not have arisen in the stratified world of medieval cosmology where ‘here’ and ‘there’ were qualitatively different spaces. Medieval theology could account for why one was where one was, in the same way that members of Edo society did not question their membership in the samurai or farmer class.”23 Karatani asserts that the conceptual structures of modernity—in which, for example, spaces are no longer qualitatively different but rather as interchangeable and empirically specific as “here” and “there”—come to be grasped in the form of discoveries, above all in the “discovery of landscape” accompanied by the “discovery of interiority.” These simultaneous and reciprocal “discoveries” could be described as involving a perceptual separation of figure from ground and of text from world: According to van den Berg, the first landscape painted simply as a landscape in Europe was the “Mona Lisa,” in which for the first time the human was presented as alienated from the landscape, and vice versa. But we must be wary of the question which seeks the meaning of the Mona Lisa’s smile. We must not regard this as expressing some kind of interiority. For here, too, the case is the reverse of what we assume. It was because for the first time in the Mona Lisa the naked face, not the face as signified, appeared, that some kind of inner meaning expressed by this face has been incessantly posited. Interiority was not expressed here; the naked face, suddenly disclosed, began to signify interiority. This inversion took place contemporaneously to, and in the same manner as, the liberation of “pure landscape” from the figurative.24

These new modes of perception and interpretation affected practices from reading to painting, from psychology to sociology. Karatani insists, however, that these concepts were not new philosophical ideas that people then applied to interpreting and modernizing their world, but rather that

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ideas like “interiority” (the view that individuals all possess a deep subjectivity, an inner self defined independently of social relations) and “landscape” (the idea that space is homogeneous, that we are separate from space, and space is discrete from signifying practices) were the ideological effects of new material practices, new styles of writing and painting, new forms of social organizing, transportation, and political institutions. The architecture of the modern playhouse stage was one such material practice and had an ancestor in the Mona Lisa’s separation of the figurative from the landscape. While May Fourth intellectuals were digesting Cartesian models of individual interiority in their readings of Western philosophies and literature, less scholarly urban Chinese were encountering new social and spatial configurations that instigated the use of similar conceptual categories. The playhouse—with its backdrops, sets, and framed space functioning as a landscape distinct and separate from the figure of the actor—comprised a highly integrated set of technologies containing inherent ideological and epistemological implications that ran parallel with the shifts in literary and political discourses of Republicanera intellectuals. Along with the change in theater space, the performance of character in Peking opera underwent a fundamental reconceptualization. But demonstrating that shift is tricky. It would be preposterous to argue that Qing-era actors had not been concerned with bringing their characters to life; it would be equally wrong to say Republican-era actors dispensed with the techniques of their predecessors, which they had spent years inscribing into their muscles, minds, and voices through exhaustive training. Still, in the same way that the new-style stage framed the performance differently from before without necessarily forcing changes in particular singing styles or movements, so a different set of epistemological assumptions, a different way of conceptualizing the relationships between actor, character, and space, came to dominate perceptions of opera performance. We can locate the shift more or less between Tan Xinpei’s and Mei Lanfang’s generations by looking at anecdotes about their performances. While on tour in Shanghai in the early 1900s, Tan Xinpei, already in his fifties, was panned by the local critics. He was performing the role of Piggy in Stealing the Ghost Bell (Dao gui ling), a scene from the The Journey to the West, or The Monkey King (Xi you ji). It was a very popular and acrobatic scene that featured Piggy executing a taiman, a pikestyle forward flip from the top of three stacked tables. Piggy is, of course, “from head to tail a slow-witted fatty, a glutton and a lazybones who plays it dumb to the hilt, a comical character.”25 Tan himself was getting

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on in years, and besides had never really trained in such a specialized acrobatic feat. When Tan/Piggy was supposed to do his flip, he sized up his situation, shook his head, waved his hands in a comical tremor of cowardice, and retreated off the tables. The crowd booed, and the Shanghai newspapers hissed that Tan was not giving his all. When Tan pulled the same stunt (or rather, did not pull it) in front of the Empress Dowager, however, he got a quite different reaction. Cixi reportedly declared that if Tan had executed the taiman, he simply would not have been Piggy.26 Such different reactions to Tan’s revision show the range of interpretation available within Peking opera. The Shanghai crowd considered the actor Tan Xinpei had cheated them and shown a lack of skill; Cixi thought Tan had made a marvelous joke. Whether viewed as a brilliant or a cheap way out, Tan’s joke is indicative of a certain way of conceiving the relationship between actor and character. Tan is weaseling his way through the space between himself, the character of Piggy, and convention. Getting the joke requires knowing the conventions of the play, Piggy’s character, and Tan’s age and status. Tan’s joke, like Yang Yuhuan’s representation of the geese flying, depends on multiple levels of signification, but, rather than harmonizing the various levels of character, actor, and space through elegant technique, Tan’s scrambling off the table bounces these various levels against each other, rattling them for humorous effect. Compare this anecdote with the story of Mei Lanfang’s first encounter with Qi Rushan in 1912, when Qi attended Mei’s performance of the play The Bend of Fen River (Fenhe wan). The play tells the story of a scholar-official and his return home after eighteen years of service. In all those years he has not contacted his wife, and when he returns home, he tests her loyalty. The wife asks him, from behind a wicket so that she can remain demure, to narrate his life story to prove that he is really her husband. Qi’s letter to Mei critiquing his performance weighed this scene: The one fly in the ointment in the performance is the passage beside the wicket. After you shut the gate, you go and sit inside and pay no attention to [your husband]. It must be that your teacher instructed you badly, or you have seen that everybody else performs the play in this way, so you do likewise, but this is not how it should be done. It is not just insufficiently lovely, it really is illogical. A man tells you he is the husband you have been separated from for eighteen years, and though you do not believe him, there is a resemblance, so you make him recount his life story. The idea is that you will listen to verify his claim, and if what he says is wrong, he is lying. As he is recounting his story, what sense does it make for you to sit

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motionless, as if completely unconcerned and paying no attention? Other actors might do this, but you absolutely should not, because this approach is at odds with the whole point of the play.27

Qi went on to instruct Mei how his character should respond to the husband’s aria, line by line. Mei incorporated many of Qi’s suggestions, to some extent upstaging the laosheng during his aria.28 But what interests us here is that the justification for Mei’s innovations is strictly based on reflecting the character’s internal emotional life. The importance Qi gives to the consistency of character locks snugly with his campaign to make sure than nothing “real” disrupts the aesthetic world of the play, for the priority he places on the play’s integrity as a representational field also serves to lock the actor into his role as a character, making the actor as actor just as taboo in Peking opera as it is in realism. Mei’s innovations and lectures on acting show that conveying the internal experiences of his characters was central to his artistic vision. For instance, his favorite play to perform and write about was Beauty Defies Tyranny (Yuzhou feng). In it, the young and loyal widow Zhao Nu is being forced into a second marriage with a lustful emperor. She decides to foil the plan by pretending to go insane, but beneath her lunacy she must convey her suffering and righteousness in the face of danger. The role thus calls for a many-layered performance of acting within acting: I confess, of all the plays I have sung in my life, Beauty Defies Tyranny is the one I put the deepest work into. . . . The singing and the movements are all fairly easy to discuss. It is only the expression of emotion that is difficult to articulate. You know, there are two types of expression the actor has on stage. The first type is to express the emotions that are felt in the story, happiness, anger, sorrow, joy. For instance, when the character has a rewarding experience, you project a pleased attitude; at a tragic moment you take on a mournful air. This is just one side, and relatively easy to do. In the second type, you need to impart the inner psyche, the many complex contradictory feelings that you cannot tell to others; that is what is difficult to do. I would like to point out the existence of this type of “incommunicable suffering” to enlighten other actors of Zhao Nu to pay close attention to this.29

The idea that internal, incommunicable emotion was the most important aspect of the actor’s art was not exclusive to Mei; it takes center stage in Republican-era discussions of acting. But the substance of this shift is elusive. One reason for this, implied by Mei above and explicitly laid out by Karatani, is that interiority is an ideological effect that by definition is

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not directly representable: if it could be exteriorized as representation, it would not be interiority. In the end, any acting method concerned with capturing the innermost psyche of the character has to confront the paradoxical necessity of projecting that interiority outward. We could thus see this idea of character as the sublime essence of the art of modern acting, the point at which the form exceeds itself. If in the Qing a synesthetic experience that made the invisible visible was the sublime excess attained through great technique, this sublime excess was now shifting to the idea of character. But was Peking opera technique suitable for conveying this new aesthetic value? One of the key debates in the drama world focused on the relationship of technique to character. Perhaps not coincidentally, this debate over the role of individual interiority was linked to a question of Peking opera’s place in the national geography. To understand more fully how the tension between technique and interiority was managed, it is useful to take a detour through the debate over jingpai (Beijing style) versus haipai (Shanghai style).

Jingpai and Haipai A lot of people say today’s drama is not even worth our criticism. . . . [But]every month about three hundred thousand people attend [Shanghai’s seven biggest theaters]. If Shanghai drama can attract this big an audience, its magic power must be startling, so how can we ignore it?. . . . The Number One Stage . . . shows the most trendy plays, putting on around two or three each month, and each is more successful than the one before. No matter what, the new plays never escape the pattern of mechanical sets, a jumble of melodies, gods and demons, extraordinary lighting, and such—these are the musts of trendy plays. . . . Once I heard an old actor, bowed by despair, say, “We also know that trendy plays like The Fate of Hong and Bi (Hong Bi yuan) are completely meaningless and should not be performed . . . but the reasonable plays don’t sell as well as this utter nonsense; we long to promote the progress of drama and perform some higher quality plays, but the audience will not let us.”30

The above description from a 1921 Shanghai drama magazine gives a typically dismal sketch of haipai (Shanghai-style) opera, in this case a popular serial drama. Haipai actors, most critics claimed, “only devote attention to the appearance of confusion and gay bustle. They do not pursue true technical ability.”31 Moreover, many critics blamed haipai’s shortcomings not on its actors but on its audience. Unlike Beijingers, who were said to “listen to opera” (ting xi), Shanghai folks “watched opera” (kan xi); and between these two verbs, it was felt, lay a world of

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difference. “For jingpai actors to become famous, they need to sing well and pronounce accurately, and whether their appearance is beautiful or ugly is of little meaning. [A dan] like old chicken-skinned, bird-haired Chen Delin could only have been highly esteemed in Beijing society. For Shanghai actors to have a great reputation, they need a handsome physique and pretty face, and whether they are good or bad artists has no bite. In sum, Northerners value art; Southerners only value sexy looks.”32 In such critiques, the alleged penchant of Shanghai audiences for flamboyant and seductive visuality is usually attributed to their immersion in an environment of modern overstimulation, their exposure to the Western and exotic, and their crass commercialism. On the other hand, Beijing audiences are stereotyped as reluctant moderns, stubbornly lodged in the shell of the empire’s former capital, nostalgically and tenaciously clinging to traditional ways and literati aesthetics. Rivalries between jinpai and haipai arose in a variety of cultural fields during the Republican era, but the terms were first coined in relation to Peking opera styles.33 In the early 1900s, haipai was generally a derogatory description, with the spectacular liantaixi (serial plays) serving as the prime example of haipai trends. The popularity of the serial play was in many ways an extension of Shanghai theater commercial tactics that began in the late Qing. Because inviting star actors to Shanghai was potentially lucrative but also very risky, many theater owners turned to set, costume, and lighting designers to generate dazzling effects to attract audiences.34 By the 1920s this strategy had become pervasive: Not one [Peking opera theater in Shanghai] does not rely on new plays to make money. There are probably two major reasons for this: (1) Old-style Peking opera is stuck in a rut and is not in step with today’s trends. Except for a few actors with ample magic who can perform them once or twice and draw a crowd, other actors, no matter how much energy they put into it, have great trouble moving a mass audience. . . . (2) [Star] actors’ pay seems to multiply limitlessly, which is plenty reason to make theater managers shrink away from them.35

Though the serial play originated in Beijing around the 1840s, it only truly blossomed in Republican Shanghai. Some popular serials, like The Iron Rooster (Tie gongji) ran three nights consecutively; the twelve-part Hong Bi Yuan was staged over several months; and ostensibly openended sagas like The Monkey King’s Journey West (with its endless parade of demons and battles) and The Prince Exchanged for a Leopard Cub (Limao huan taizi, whose villains and heroes were as indestructible as Jason in Friday the Thirteenth) could stretch to more than thirty parts.

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Zhou Xiaoying, the set designer at the theater that ran the most successful series of Monkey King plays (the Reformed Stage, Gengxin Wutai), earned the title the Great King of Sets (bujing dawang). In addition to creating visionary, fairytale scenery, he found a way to make sparks shoot from the Monkey King’s head and feet. Tianchan Theater hired a magician to design illusions that included having a character’s head fly off his body and then proceed to speak.36 Such wondrous effects marked haipai’s most whimsical extremes and give an idea of the lengths designers would go to in order to excite their audiences. Of course, critics like Qi Rushan vehemently opposed such shenanigans. He and many others advocated what was generally seen as the jingpai line. Jingpai plays generally avoided elaborate sets and props, instead depending on, and showcasing, the refined technique of actors. Jingpai new plays focus entirely on the actor’s artistry. The singing and recitations are pleasant to hear, the gestures and acrobatics pleasant to watch, and they are not much different from old plays. They are able to move people on the level of spiritual feeling, so that even after seeing them a hundred times one is not bored. Both North and South welcome haipai new plays only because of the mechanical sets getting people to crane their necks at the material aspects [of the drama], but they have no deep emotive power, so we forget them as soon as they are over. Haipai plays indulge in completely ignoring singing, gesture, recitation, and acrobatics (chang, zuo, nian, da).37

Not everyone was this acerbic toward haipai: by the 1930s, when a few haipai actors were becoming national celebrities, the term gained a slightly more positive tinge. Jingpai artists, according to some critics, could learn a thing or two from the haipai about makeup, lighting, and set design, and a few critics even ventured to argue that haipai actors were more freely expressive and in step with the times than their jingpai counterparts.38 Still, given the association of the term haipai with shoddy technique, it is no wonder that many critics and actors disavowed the designation, laying responsibility for the stylistic divergence squarely at the feet of each city’s respective audience and attributing it to a difference in regional mentalities. Certainly important differences between Beijing and Shanghai opera trends, and between the urban cultural environments of both cities more generally, did exist; but that this multiplicity of differences should be conflated and reified into a fundamental difference between modern Shanghai and traditional Beijing mentalities—as is generally implied in jingpai/ haipai discussions—is both unnecessary and untenable. In her book on

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Republican-era Beijing, Madeleine Yue Dong has shown that, far from being sheltered from modernity, Beijing—in terms of economic production, consumption, financial trends, municipal planning, and cultural production—was engaging thoroughly with the same forces of colonial modernity that were shaping Shanghai.39 But if such reified stereotypes of Beijing and Shanghai are theoretically misguided and historically inaccurate, what explains the differences in theatrical trends? Practical economic matters played a large role: Beijing was the city where the institutions that manufactured actors, such as keban, were concentrated. Producing technically proficient Peking opera actors was no different from producing any other quality product or skilled labor force; it required a productive infrastructure. Once such concentrations are in place, they tend to stay fixed and attract future growth around them.40 For Peking opera, this critical mass of teachers, patrons, and performance venues had amassed throughout the nineteenth century in the city of Beijing, in large part as a result of the institutional pull of the imperial court (and the related commercial pull of elites who served the court).41 Peking opera’s growing popularity in other cities like Shanghai, Hankou, and Hangzhou during the late Qing and Republican eras encouraged the further growth of this infrastructure. Trends in Shanghai certainly had an enormous commercial, theatrical, and aesthetic influence on Peking opera performance, but the growing demand for skilled actors throughout China’s cities encouraged the expansion of Beijing’s training institutions rather than displaced them. From the late Qing until the Japanese invasion of 1937, all of Peking opera’s most renowned training schools were in Beijing.42 Indeed, even actors who were dubbed the heroes of Republican-era haipai style spent years training in the north: Zhou Xinfang, arguably the most illustrious Shanghai actor of the era, spent his adolescence with the Fuliancheng in Beijing; Gai Jiaotian, who became famous as the best wusheng of the haipai school, trained in a troupe that traveled around Beijing and Tianjin. In sum, Peking opera in the Republican era was an industry that was crucially interdependent and interregional, the Beijing region providing the bulk of the training, Shanghai hugely affecting marketing and staging. The jingpai and haipai trends were outgrowths of this economic interdependence: Beijing theaters could hire well-trained actors more cheaply, while Shanghai theaters found it more profitable and less risky to invest in sets and spectacle. A handful of Republican-era critics also saw the jingpai/hapai dichotomy as overly simplistic and deconstructed it from various angles.

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They pointed out that both styles were changing, that the flow of influences between cities was fairly fluid, and that most star actors could not be easily pegged as belonging to either school.43 Far from rejecting change, stars like the Four Famous Dan were dedicated innovators, making the genre more complete by adding visual excitement without sacrificing musicality: “Mei, Cheng, Shang, and Xun all work calmly and meticulously to remove the old and decayed and promote the new in their art and lyrics. Still, regarding all the old conventions, there are none they do not match and surpass, spurring the trendy actors of the day to stumble over themselves to imitate them.”44 Mei Lanfang’s innovative insertion of climactic dance sequences into his plays (such as the sword dance in Farewell, My Concubine and the scarf dance in Goddess Scatters Flowers) inspired a rash of trendy knockoffs by almost every leading dan in the country. Cheng Yanqiu developed a new style of melody that swept the nation. Xun Huisheng added colored lights and new-style costumes to many of his plays (aspects clearly associated with haipai), but his other innovations, like shifting between qingyi, huadan, and daomadan gestures in the middle of a performance, accentuated his jingpai roots in technical training.45 These stars’ innovations all defied a simple jing/hai split. Moreover, with Beijing-based stars playing to sellout crowds in Shanghai, and haipai stars like Gai Jiaotian and Zhou Xinfang being warmly received on their tours of Tianjin and Beijing, it was obvious that audiences in both regions shared similar tastes.46 Despite some of the fallacies embedded in the division between jingpai and haipai, it remains pertinent to our inquiry because it was terrain in which important discourses on acting were being hammered out. In their attacks on old drama in New Youth and elsewhere, May Fourth intellectuals had argued that Peking opera provided no means for the expression of individual character interiority, instead reducing all characters to rigid role types governed by obsessively specific techniques. The aesthetic of technique was disparaged by equating it with the English word convention (translated as chengshi). Peking opera acting was not true acting at all; indeed it precluded true acting. It was no more than a series of conventional melodies, acrobatic tricks, prescribed poses, and glitzy costumes divided into petrified role types too shallow to plumb the depths of individuality, too stiff to impart the creativity and idiosyncrasies of individual personalities. Painted-face characters (hualian) allegedly epitomized this primitive use of ritualized convention and were supposedly identified more by the color and design of their masks than by any specific qualities of character: red stood for heroic valor (Guan Yu); white

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for cunning evil (Cao Cao); black for righteousness (Judge Bao), and so on.47 The valorization of individual expressiveness was central to the contemporary discourse of drama as high art, and Peking opera could not vie for recognition as a national art without proving itself on these grounds. But the terms of the debate were loaded: to argue that technique was paramount meant being branded as conventional. Xiong Foxi’s defense of Peking opera is a case in point. Xiong averred great respect for this genre so beloved by his countrymen but complained that he often had to defend Peking opera against its own fans. He felt compelled to object to assertions by Peking opera lovers that “convention is the artistic essence of traditional Chinese drama,” a claim which to Xiong’s mind amounted to saying that it was not art at all. If Peking opera was going to be reformed, Xiong argued, convention needed to be attacked, not defended: “[Old drama] is decrepit, shallow, scattered, . . . having too few elements of ‘drama’ and too much convention and plot.” It needed to be pared of these extraneous trappings.48 Qi Rushan took a different critical tack, deftly managing to avoid picking up the discursive hot potato of convention. Qi—the consummate jingpai critic—time and again defended preserving the conventions of performance, but never upheld conventions in and of themselves as an end; instead he always presented them as a means subservient to the ultimate ends of aestheticism. While convention was a term best avoided, individual character interiority was a concept everyone wanted to be associated with, and artists on both sides of the rivalry claimed credit for attaining it. The haipai version of the story describes Shanghai actors as pioneers introducing interiority into the genre by breaking free of the prison of formulaic conventions: “This kind of shallow pursuit of singing and gestures, when manifested in characters onstage, results in their seeming to lack some part of their ‘soul,’ and they do not come alive. In his own artistic practice, Ouyang [Yuqian—a Shanghai star] always put great effort into this work of enriching the soul. He broke out of the ossified forms of Peking opera, and through minute delineation brought out, through his acting of his characters’ personalities and ways of thinking, the infinite changes of their inner psychic activities.”49 The haipai star Zhou Xinfang is often described in similar terms: “His exceptional gift was to bring individuality to the role-type quality of pihuang characters. . . . [Zhou believed that] in every movement and gesture of a character, in every inner psychic activity, one should experience a penetrating identification.”50 A frequently mentioned symbol of Zhou Xinfang’s deep identification with his

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characters was his tendency to shed tears on stage during tragic scenes. This was certainly a violation of Qi Rushan’s strictures on aestheticism, but such tears served as a sort of transcendent proof that beneath the technical performance was an actor profoundly in character. The Chinese drama scholar Kang Baocheng hypothesizes that the haipai style of staging probably contributed to Zhou’s innovations, the introduction of props and sets freeing Zhou and other Shanghai actors from expending their energy conjuring the environment around them and allowing them to concentrate instead on expressing their characters’ emotions.51 This idea clearly resonates with Karatani’s proposition regarding the simultaneous discovery of landscape and interiority; the adoption of elaborate sets and props enabled actors to discover character interiority as if for the first time and to experience the separation of figure and ground as a kind of liberation. An alternative solution to the paradox of technique and interiority, one more suited to the jingpai line, argued that the two were ultimately compatible. “When we arrive at the highest level of technical refinement in singing, dance, and physical gesture, or what we might called the pinnacle of onstage self-awareness in musical drama performance, then there is no longer any searching for self-control or self-correction. The actor naturally arrives at the forms and uses them as if they were her/ himself, no matter how great the level of technical difficulty. . . . [T]hese onstage movements and poses . . . become like an actor’s own body’s form and action, a ‘second nature.’ ”52 Here perfect technique becomes the ideal vehicle for representing interiority: technique poses an obstacle only when it is not perfected. Actors preoccupied with technique and imitating their masters are too stiff and therefore fall short not only of the technical demand for grace and naturalness, but of producing a convincing portrayal of character as well. Actors like Xun Huisheng and Mei Lanfang favored this explanation. In his lectures on acting, Xun Huisheng—typically described as the most technically accomplished of the Four Famous Dan in physical training and comportment—insists that he is not merely performing role types, that the goal of drama is “to represent the thought, emotion . . . and personality of individual characters.”53 Similarly, Mei Lanfang is described by Huang Zuolin as the greatest proponent of “the inner characteristics of Chinese acting,” combining the “inner technique” of introspection with the “outgoing techniques of representation;” and Cheng Yanqiu demanded that even the comic characters in his plays—who, as in many dramatic forms, made hay from breaking character and addressing audiences directly—must in

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every move and word stay in character and never distance themselves from the play’s plot.54 Republican-era stars and critics thus incorporated the discourse of individual character interiority into their conceptualization of Peking opera performance. The centrality of technique was not wholly displaced by the new discourse: the stars of the Republican era, all the products of late Qing keban and sifang training, had impeccable technical skills for which audiences and critics continued to evaluate and admire them. Rather, these skills and talents were recoded and recycled to meet the demands of a new discursive context. The jingpai/haipai debate performed another bit of discursive work by helping shape a geographic imaginary for Peking opera that conflated the conceptual space between Beijing and Shanghai styles with the national space. The debate allowed cultural elites in a handful of predominantly coastal cities (mostly in Jiangnan and near Beijing) to imagine a nation more within their grasp, more culturally familiar than Republican China actually was. By investing themselves in a debate that appeared to stand for two radically different paths of Chinese cultural development, intellectuals and drama critics in Beijing and Shanghai managed to construct an imagined community that they felt capable of arguing over, reaching out to, and defining. The debate is in this way symptomatic of the aspirations of an urban nationalizing elite experiencing an overwhelming shift in Chinese geopolitics, moving from a multiethnic Qing empire— where political and economic considerations were deeply concerned with a massive and diverse peasantry and with the northern territories, including Manchuria, Mongolia, and Xinjiang—to a Han-centered nation where coastal provinces, urban areas, and issues of Han and Western interaction were on the front burner. The jingpai/haipai debate was important, in other words, for what it marginalized, not only in terms of territories and populations, but in terms of cultural diversity: for instance, the plethora of regional dramatic forms that, in the framework of this debate, were of little importance in defining Peking opera’s direction. The terms of the debate involved treating Peking opera largely as a stand-in for Chinese culture. But perhaps there were good reasons for doing so. For if scholarship on the construction of nationalism has shown anything, it is that print capitalism and other related institutions of media dissemination are a powerful force for consolidating and mobilizing national culture, and there is no question that the elites in Beijing, Shanghai, Tianjin, and the like had overwhelming control over these institutions. Indeed, Peking

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opera’s increasingly national scope and reputation were dependent on these media, which disseminated images and texts on Peking opera not only between these urban centers but also far beyond the city limits. The nation that was being imagined by urban elites was also receiving, appropriating, and responding to that culture, and Peking opera’s promoters and stars would have to respond in turn.

Peking Opera Stars as National Citizens In today’s acting world, whether you are a famous star or an unknown, young or old; and wherever you go, whether it is your first appearance or your umpteenth return visit—as soon as you arrive, whether by train or boat, you immediately run to pay respects to the right people. You invite them out for a drink, and you must invite famous people from every sphere—mostly ones with lots of face, but don’t skimp on those with only a little face, . . . and you say some special words . . . and afterwards you hold a big banquet for them. . . . [Then,] preferably not in front of everyone, you should personally request that each guest support your performance (pengchang). Your guests, having had a big meal for free, dare not come without bearing gifts. . . . This way on opening night you are sure to have a big crowd of fans, and, whether or not you have sufficient talent, you certainly will make it through those first three days looking redhot. . . . [And] heaven forbid you slight anybody! You might incur an attack, and the problem can result in so many repercussions! So you must not, on your grave, forget this.55

If these words of advice from the Pear Garden News (aka Player) had not been laced with sarcasm, they would simply have been sound advice. Touring, especially in Shanghai, was an unnerving affair requiring intensive preparation and surgically precise social skills. One slip, and an actor could easily find his solid pedestal of fan support turning to quicksand: When Ma Lianliang came to Shanghai, he was red-hot, entirely because of the support of amateur clubs (piaoyou). But success swelled his head, and he was overheard cursing and swearing about those amateurs, making many of them very displeased. On this second trip to Shanghai, all the clubs met together before his arrival and decided to boycott Lianliang. When Lianliang arrived he inquired about the situation, and anxiously entreated a patron to mediate, inviting the newspapers and amateur circles to a banquet. The atmosphere warmed a bit, but most fans remained steadfastly opposed to him. [As a result, Ma’s business was dreadful]. . . . The theater was taking such a huge loss, the owner demanded Ma “help out” for fifteen days. This was the first time ever that after only one month of business, a Beijing actor was asked to perform half a month’s worth of free shows.56

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Even three years after this incident, critics were still commenting on how cool Shanghai fans were towards the north’s favorite laosheng. The mass media—mainly newpapers, pictorial papers (huabao), magazines, the record industry, and to a lesser extent radio and film—transformed the economic logic of the Peking opera world. Mass print media were by far the most important vehicles for an actor’s public image, and the cultivation of allies in the media world became essential to a star’s career. Mei Lanfang was a master of this art. On arriving in a city, Mei would invite the chief editors and drama critics of all the major local papers out to dinner, and they in turn would write up the affair to whet fans’ appetites for the shows ahead. Beginning on his first trip to Shanghai in 1912, Mei “immediately called upon Shibao’s Di Pingzi, Shenbao’s Shi Liangcai, and Xinwenbao’s Wang Hanxi,” who then further introduced him to famous Shanghai artists and literati.57 By Mei’s 1928 Shanghai visit, Shenbao was running a daily column titled Mei News (Mei xun) that reported Mei’s every banquet, change of hat, and business chat; moreover, the Tianjin-based pictorial Beiyang huabao informed its readers that Mei had hired a journalist at one hundred yuan a day to write that Shenbao column.58 Such reports by one newspaper on the articles in another were tinged with business rivalry and machinations; everyone knew that no actor, however talented, could become a star without the help of the money-fueled and patronage-driven mass media. Competition was tight and the scent of corruption everywhere: “Troupes struggle against troupes and theaters battle with theaters, therefore advertising ploys diversify and flourish. Some [theaters] publish their own drama magazines. [As the saying goes]: Old Wang hawking his own wares / Cries, ‘No one else’s can compare!’ Others employ a special critic so that everyday the newspapers extol and praise them.”59 The public had good cause to suspect the coverage in the gossip columns and drama news of being biased and manipulated: they read all about such manipulations every day in the gossip columns and drama news. To give this kind of support was called pengjuer (boost actor), a word combining, in approximately equal parts, the concepts of fan and patron, and describing a fairly new phenomenon distinctive to the Republican drama scene. In the Qing, when acting had been a “mean profession” catering to the literati elite, patron-actor relationships were decidedly unequal, between an elite subject and an aesthetic and sexual object. But the social logic shaping taste cultures and actor status were already clearly in flux toward the end of the Qing. In treaty ports like Shanghai, actors could find some respite from the degrading abuses that came with

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their station; and with commercializing and star-centering trends, actors were rising to the cutting edge of fashion, wielding greater economic and social influence in the empire’s dying days. The advent of the Republic shifted the balance of power between patron and actor still further: the cultural and political authority of the literati elite crumbled (at least relatively speaking, for they were no longer running the empire), while actors became technically their legal equals and often their economic betters. The imperial court, which had been the fount of elite cultural validity, was defunct, and the phenomenon of mass popularity, which had little cachet among the elite under the imperial polity, took on a more positive coloring now that nationalism was highly valued. These economic and political dynamics changed the relationship between actors, their patrons, and the public: “The major Beijing actors of the late Qing, partly patronized by the imperial court, had a much more restricted audience, and did not feel the same need to make themselves known as individuals to their public. In contrast, as communication networks multiplied in the 1890s, and still further in the Republican period, actors came to depend for their success on a generalized public.”60 But if actors were more dependent on the general public, that public also very rightly perceived that actors, critics, and patrons could also manipulate these media networks and the images they conveyed. The banqueting and schmoozing between actors and patrons, which in the Qing had been a clear expression of the patron’s authority and status, in the context of the Republican era mass media began to look like something else. It was now the actors who, as often as not, were paying for these affairs and appeared to be using their money, charm, and prestige to purchase their reputations and cultural cachet. “Oppose actors ‘calling on hosts’ and ‘banqueting hosts’!” insisted the headline in one drama magazine, highlighting the role reversal. Among other abuses, the author of the article recounts how the actor Li Wanchun, on tour in Hankou, spent so many long nights carousing with his influential friends that when it came time for him to perform, he had completely lost his voice.61 Clearly, the author concluded, cronyism in the drama world was harmful to the public interest. The media quickly responded to these public suspicions. By the 1920s respectable critics and publications were taking pains to avoid the taint of self-promotion. The preface to the Drama Monthly’s special issue on Mei Lanfang began by denying that the magazine’s editors were “thick friends” with Mei, and later they made good their promise to combat favoritism by dedicating a separate issue to each of the Four Famous

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Dan.62 Drama critics constantly declared that it was their duty to provide expert, objective, and literate reviews and not to pengjuer. If critics were no better than advertisers, then the tasteless masses would have no compass by which to evaluate the difference between true art and second-rate shenanigans: [In Beiping the drama criticism] is all located on the butt end of the newspapers. The articles in that section all use the same formula. The ones that peng qingyi [boost qingyi performers] must say, “Brightly gorgeous as the blossoms of peaches and pears, cool as the icy frost . . . a song that lingers in the air for three days. In the future he alone will fill the space which had begun with the Four Famous Dan.” . . . Why is it that these kinds of nauseating articles are always extolling someone as if they should be borne in an imperial carriage? There is always a deeper reason behind it. There are plenty of pengjuer in Beiping, just like slippery carp crossing a river.63

But obviously such protests were of little use in stopping the pengjuer phenomenon, for it was an integral part of the commercial drama business. Money and political influence provided the momentum that enabled Peking opera stars to wheel through the heavens of the national media, and in their turn the stars could shine flatteringly on those who gave them support. The favors that stars could impart varied. On the economically and politically powerful, the star could bestow cultural capital or an air of populist appeal. When Zhang Jian brought stars into his model theater in Nantong, he demonstrated that his influence and concern over China’s development extended beyond mere personal economic interests; when Du Yuesheng organized a massive star-studded tanghui that was open to the public, he embellished his status as a power broker with populist trappings. And of course such wealthy patrons also gave to actors in return, and not just monetarily. Among the most common gifts from patrons to their favorite actors, particularly to dan, were sumptuous costumes.64 In terms of ostentation, few displays of admiration could match the erection of a ceremonial gate or a scenic pavilion in honor of a visiting artist. Patrons also purchased seats by the acre, filling row upon row of the theater with their friends and underlings. Some fans, like the generals and bankers who penged Zhang Eyun, bought only a dozen rows of seats, but did so every night she performed.65 Others, like the head of the Zhejiang guild, who admired Cheng Yanqiu, simply bought out the entire theater for a night.66 Such patrons rarely came to the show emptyhanded. By the 1920s and 1930s, dan actors’ dressing rooms were being inundated with baskets of flowers, vases, and ornamental mirrors, and

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the ledges and sides of the stage were crowded with flower baskets discreetly bearing their givers’ names.67 While such support was more form than substance, it wreathed stars in a corona of glamour which no doubt helped them dazzle their audiences. Gift exchanges between actors and the more down-to-earth journalists or fan-club members were less sumptuous but equally crucial, for it was their support that ultimately generated both profits and spectacle. The star could bestow moments of glamour—appearing at a banquet or a club meeting—and other small but valuable favors. One such favor might be a seat in the theater, as the prices for star performances were rising well beyond the reach of the average person’s income. By 1922, the best seats for a star performance in a Beijing theater sold for two yuan— three yuan when Mei Lanfang performed a new signature play.68 By the 1930s, Mei Lanfang and Cheng Yanqiu were charging up to six yuan for front-row seats in several cities, and that price did not include markups that might be demanded by scalpers and table tenders if the shows were selling out. Stars’ salaries were rising accordingly. In 1922, for example, Cheng Yanqiu was reported to be earning approximately four thousand yuan a month at the New Bright Theater in Tianjin; by 1928 he was making eight thousand a month touring Shanghai; and for a ten-day tour in Hankou in 1935 he was said to be making fourteen thousand yuan.69 Within the theater business itself, nurturing connections was indispensable to all concerned, at times lending stability and reliability to a highly volatile business. An example of such a lifelong relationship was that of Mei Lanfang with the Shanghai theater manager Xu Shaoying. When Xu Shaoying first invited Mei on tour in 1912, Mei was second fiddle to the laosheng lead, Wang Fengqing. But Xu was perceptive and quickly realized that Mei was fated to rise. He treated Mei affectionately, raised his pay, and upgraded his accommodations. For the rest of his career, Mei counted on Xu to arrange his Shanghai tours, a reciprocation that certainly benefited Xu—whose success at running theaters at a profit was far from consistent—far more, in the long run, than Mei.70 Indeed, enough money was at stake in Shanghai tours that one or two professional brokers emerged who made a living by smoothing the waters between stars and theater owners. Li Huating was the most famous of such middlemen: [He was] really a master of the soft sell, greeting you with a welcoming smile, a big chuckle and a bit of a muddled air. Even though he took advantage of the actors, they all liked him. Say a certain actor was invited

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to perform for 1,800 [yuan], and when payday came he only got 1,700. Or say it was clearly arranged that a gig last ten days and the sales the whole time were excellent, but he would come and plead that the actor “help out” one more day; some big unforeseen expenditure! A lot of people were sneaking into the show for free! Some theater boss was on his case! Somebody’s wife had taken ill, and money was needed to treat her!71

Even after being gently worked over by Li, the biggest winners in this business environment were clearly the star actors, who could claim as much as 90 percent of the gross from a sellout run in a Shanghai theater. Taking into account the cost of theater upkeep, electric bills, staff, and supporting actors, the theater owner’s profit was marginal even when business was excellent; and “if business was not so good, how could they avoid losing money?”72 In addition to commercial performances, stars had several other sources of income, both direct and indirect. The most direct source of new income was record-company contracts. Stars could make from six hundred to one thousand yuan per record side. Recordings typically included a limited selection of arias from a popular play; most actors were careful not to record complete versions of their plays for fear it would undermine their ticket sales or that rivals would steal their repertoire.73 Over the course of a career such earnings could be considerable: Shang Xiaoyun recorded more than fifty record sides, Mei Lanfang more than one hundred. Another source of money came from affiliating with advertisers to sell a product. Mei Lanfang, by all accounts the most beautiful actor of his day, had his name plastered on ads for countless products, including face creams, eye makeup, cigarettes, and eyeglasses.74 In most cases advertisers borrowed actors’ and actresses’ names and images without even informing them, but actors did at times receive some compensation for their services. Some advertisers donated shoujiu (expensive, beautifully embroidered backdrops) specially designed to incorporate their product’s image and the actor’s name, brightening up the stage and essentially turning the entire show into a billboard for their product.75 Once they became stars, actors were bathed in incessant limelight. Media scrutiny could be tremendously taxing. Of the Four Famous Dan, Shang Xiaoyun was apparently the least skilled in his offstage act, especially when it came to touring Tianjin. In 1928 Shang had to cancel a Tianjin tour because Second Master Wu, who had purchased all the box seats during Shang’s previous tour, suddenly had to flee south for political reasons.76 Some months later it was reported that Shang was on cozy terms with a certain Japanese fan who was despised by Tainjin’s theater

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Figure 12. Magazine advertisement for Mei Lanfang cigarettes. From Luxing zazhi (Travel Magazine), 1930.

community for his “imperialist” attempt to influence the Pear Garden with his power and wealth. Shang was accused of “pledging a foreigner as his adopted father.”77 Shang’s losing streak in Tianjin resumed in 1935, when he flubbed the publicity for a short gig at the Chunhe Theater. The theater business in Tianjin was particularly weak that summer, and most Beijing actors simply stopped visiting the city. Many theaters temporarily closed, and some converted to showing movies and hiring young female hostesses to attract customers.78 For Shang to visit Tianjin at this time was admirable, and advance advertising reported that he would perform an exciting set of martial plays. But on arriving in Tianjin he abruptly changed his plans and announced that he would per-

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form several less demanding plays, claiming poor health. Fans were incredulous, and on opening night the theater was half empty. Though Shang’s performance showed no evidence of illness, he announced the following day that he had returned early to Beiping, so weak “he could not rise from his bed.” Alarmed, journalists and fans rushed telegrams to his bedside, only to learn that, after all, he had only a minor cold (or perhaps just cold feet). Such temperamental behavior fed plenty of ammunition to Tianjin’s peevish journalists.79 Opera critics expended as much ink reporting on behind-the-scenes deals and publicity banquets as they did describing onstage performances, their information network criss-crossing the nation like telegraph wires. The Shanghai-based Drama Monthly featured a Beijing report with more than one hundred items per month, listing which actors performed which plays at which Beijing theaters and which tanghui, who went to Tianjin or Jinan for how many days and for how much money, and so on. No star could tour Hankou or Harbin without fans in Shanghai and Tianjin knowing how much they were being paid and how high local ticket prices were being hiked. As national celebrities, stars came under pressure to perform good deeds for their compatriots, particularly by raising funds through benefit performances (yiwu xi). Of worthy causes that desperately needed money, Republican China had no lack: there were victims of famine, flood, and battle on the northern borders; impoverished elementary and girls’ schools; bankrupt municipal governments served by valiant but penniless police departments; starving brother and sister actors; flagging keban; and failing theaters. The charity performance soon matured into a rather nebulous scheme by which all manner of organizations might try to raise a little cash. At one point, so many private middle schools in Beiping were raising money through dubious charity benefits that the Beiping Bureau of Education published punitive regulations limiting such performances and demanding that itemized accounts be submitted to the appropriate municipal offices.80 With their enormous salaries a matter of public knowledge, stars were beleaguered by requests, some genuine, some exploitative, to put on benefit performances. Provincial and municipal politicians did not shy away from using their political muscle to pressure a touring star into donating a performance as a way of giving back to the local fans. On his tour of Hong Kong, Mei Lanfang was waylaid by the governor of Guangdong until he agreed to put on a benefit performance. Peking opera stars had struggled hard to earn the mantle of nationalist educators, but the welfare of the nation was a heavy burden to shoul-

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der. In the wake of the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931, China’s acting community strongly proclaimed their mission to lead the country in “patriotic fervor” by performing patriotic plays, organizing benefits for war victims, and boycotting Japanese goods.81 Only weeks later, a critic condemned several Peking opera stars for betraying the country by refusing to perform benefit performances for soldiers on the Soviet border: “Our nation’s demise is nigh! Recently exalted actors have become too proud. They think themselves absurdly precious but know nothing of current affairs. They have forgotten who they are.”82 Such hostile denunciations smacked of literati resentment that the once-lowly actors had become so high and mighty (and perhaps that the literati had fallen so low): [Back in the Qing,] the actor Da Fenguan was hired by a certain [Shanghai] teahouse at a baoyin of eight hundred yuan a year. At the end of the year, the boss wanted to give him a two-hundred-yuan raise. Da Fenguan leapt up in horror saying, “I am just a singer of hualian parts, and eight hundred yuan is already too much. If you raise me to one thousand, how much will the laosheng and huadan be losing? I could not endure such cursing.” After pleading with Boss Sun, he finally prevented the raise. . . . But today artists hate a boss who does not raise their pay and take extreme stands to intimidate him. . . . Now that artists have reached a status that they are not afraid of being abused and cursed, have they really progressed over earlier artists?83

If conservatives painted actors as greedy upstarts needing to be put back in their place, progressives often scorned them from a populist or class perspective. The more successful the star, the more vulnerable he or she was to negative publicity. On Cheng Yanqiu’s historic first visit to Chongqing in 1936, he received a hero’s welcome from dozens of opera fan clubs and youth groups. After a few days as Chongqing’s honored guest, Cheng set another historic first for Chongqing by charging a record four yuan per ticket for his shows. As the local papers began their attack, several critics contrasted Cheng’s banquets with the famine raging in the northwest of the province. When the committee representing the famine victims got wind of the media coverage, they sent their lead representative to Chongqing to disseminate leaflets publicly denouncing Cheng. Cheng agreed to perform three days of benefit shows, and was again dubbed a hero for raising ten thousand yuan for disaster relief. But that was not the end of the story. Next the theater owner needed a benefit show, then the youth league, and then a fan club or two; Cheng was stuck.84

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Mei Lanfang’s finances were similarly a constant topic of tabloid speculation. Mei tried to present his outlays (which included business expenses, charity, and cultural cultivation) as equal to his income, but that claim was clearly preposterous. An article in a 1928 issue of Drama Monthly dedicated to Mei (precisely because the editors wished to acknowledge him as a national figure) aims to persuade him to lower his ticket prices, the cheapest of which “cannot be had without sacrificing around three yuan.” Since Mei had traveled throughout China, to Japan and Hong Kong, and perhaps one day would visit the United States, would it not be appropriate for him to advocate the great harmony of the public (gonggong datong) by making his art accessible to the less wealthy? The author argued that if the greatest actor in the nation displayed such magnanimity, all others would have to follow, and the masses would finally benefit from exposure to greatness.85 The pressure tactics Mei faced at times escalated into inflammatory attacks. In 1936 two “Oppose Mei Lanfang” clubs spontaneously appeared in Hankou and Kaifeng when Mei announced he would tour those cities. The Hankou group patriotically protested that Mei’s visit would damage the local economy by robbing local actors of their livelihoods; soon, however, the group switched from threats of boycott to hoisting welcoming banners after a little “mediation” that involved Mei paying one thousand yuan to several local newspapers as an “advertising fee.”86 The Kaifeng protesters made similar claims, despite the fact that on Mei’s last visit to the city he had raised seventy thousand yuan at a charity performance. The journalist reporting on the protest believed that the real reason behind it was that Mei had arranged to perform at a theater owned by a local despot hated by Kaifeng’s actors, and suggested that if he could not disassociate himself from the owner, he could probably appease his fellow thespians with the usual benefit performance or two.87 Stars made it a point to demonstrate to the public that they had overcome their uncultured past, and it was part of a literati patron’s duty to introduce his young talent to the classical arts of calligraphy, brush painting, and literary study. The pages of pictorial magazines were frequently adorned with painted fans and calligraphy scrolls from the hands of opera actors: “Since the days when Tian Jiyun sought to get rid of the humiliating sifang, with their fawning and wine pouring, actors’ status has risen a little, though they are still not equal with the average bureaucrat. . . . Lately there has been a sudden resurgence, and all actors, male and female, if they yearn to be famous, aside from their singing, must work hard to be proficient at calligraphy and painting. The tide of this

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trend is so powerful that if you do not follow it, you cannot become a sensation.”88 Mei Lanfang, who was especially fond of Buddhist imagery, hired the master Wang Mengbai as his instructor and had several gallery shows at home and one in Japan.89 Wang Yaoqing was good at plum blossoms, chrysanthemums, and birds; Cheng Yanqiu’s brushwork reportedly mimicked that of his patron Luo Yinggong; Zhou Xinfang’s characters were a bit heavy-handed; Shang Xiaoyun delicately rendered flower arrangements in vases, while Xun Huisheng preferred landscapes.90 The symbolism of actors’ taking up the brush resonated on many levels. The brush had been the hallmark of elite imperial culture, symbol of the literary culture from which actors had been excluded. By demonstrating proficiency in such classical arts, actors not only raised their cultural profile but also implied an affinity between opera and the enshrined arts of traditional Chinese culture,. Such a claim would have seemed absurd to most Qing literati, but in the post–May Fourth remapping of China’s cultural landscape, it was increasingly accepted as an aesthetic and historical truth.

Conclusion With changes in the political context in which Peking opera was produced—as the Qing became the Republic of China—the means by which the genre gained and maintained social and cultural legitimacy changed radically as well. Elite patronage practices by no means vanished; indeed, in many ways they expanded and diversified, but they became enmeshed in networks of media publicity that compelled all involved to address a potentially national audience. If, to the cynical eye of the tabloid reader, such posing often seemed perfunctory and selfserving, it was nevertheless significant, for Peking opera boosters were clearly earnest about (as well as economically and personally invested in) making the genre into an object of national recognition and pride. Achieving such cultural legitimacy was both a social and an aesthetic undertaking. If on the social level this process involved Peking opera stars’ asserting their identities as individual national citizens, it was paralleled by a related compulsion in the representational sphere to prove Peking opera amenable to the expression of character interiority. Just as embracing the ideal of citizenship was seen as crucial if China was to gain international respect, so the idea of character interiority was indispensable if a dramatic form was to achieve international cultural respect. And though at times actors’ media performances of good citizenship

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seemed self-serving, or Peking opera boosters’ aesthetic arguments about character interiority seemed forced, these ideologies were still in many ways embraced in earnest, for few social groups in Republican China understood better than actors the significance of the idea of citizenship, the idea of having one’s individual identity and social worth confirmed.

Chapter 6

The Limits of Reform

Chinese cities in the 1920s and 1930s were awash with proclamations of reform. It seemed that the aim of every government plan, the wish in every citizen’s heart, the ineffable by-product of every pack of domestic cigarettes and virility-boosting tablets, was the improvement of the greater good. Part of the public appeal of reform was its anticommercialism. The irony that reformist idealism was often transparently employed as an advertising stratagem was lost on no one, but the insipid parroting of the ideal did not make real reform any less urgent or desired. In fact, it was precisely because most reforms (like public education, urban renewal, and poverty relief) were such bad business (requiring large capital outlays and returning little if any immediate profit) that they depended on propagandistic appeals for support, which, not surprisingly, ended up closely resembling manipulative advertising campaigns. Moreover, because most reforms were not profitable, they required some sort of patronage, which could easily blur into corruption and selfaggrandizement. This atmosphere of simultaneous crisis and reform pervaded the three main productive institutions of Peking opera: commercial theaters, acting troupes, and training academies. These institutions were all simultaneously confronting economic crises while attempting to implement fundamental social reforms. In many respects the economic and representational crises (or sets of disjunctions) facing Peking opera were two sides of the same historical phenomenon. 209

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Theater Reform Bigger Is (Usually) Better Reforms in theater construction and management were driven at least as much by the profit motive as by ideological and aesthetic concerns. Though the ultimate gauge of success was the economic bottom line, this in turn depended on the approval of audiences whose aesthetic expectations were neither homogeneous nor easily malleable. Theater reform was therefore extremely complex, involving the number and timing of performances, audience demeanor, set design and staging, methods of ticket purchase and advertising, and architectural innovations, not to mention the quality and content of the performances themselves. Reformers described the public theater as a set of linked technologies that, if properly engineered, could improve the audience experience, help mold new citizens through forms of modern sociability—and turn a profit. Since all the theaters have changed themselves into “stages,” not only is the construction solid, ventilation sufficient, and sanitation more suitable for the audience; there are also stringent fire safety laws governing ticket sales and seating that prohibit casually cramming in extra benches which prevent customers, in moments of hurry or panic, from being unable to get in or out. . . . The front of the stage is half-moon style with no stage pillars to obstruct the audience’s line of sight. The construction is specially gradated, with the topography of the upstairs and downstairs seating inclining toward roundness and the seats further back getting steadily higher. To the greatest extent this improves on the old-style theaters, which were a disaster, with people seated even slightly in the rear unable to see. Further improving the order, there are no more tables set up in the main audience, which is now filled with seated rows. The upstairs has no box seats, but layer upon layer of row seating. Seats have increased innumerably. The old-time theaters could hold several hundred to a thousand; today the limit is around two or three thousand.1

For the municipal authorities, this more rigid ordering of the seating space made it much easier to maintain public order and meet safety regulations. The new arrangement also benefited theater management, for the improved visibility of the stage facilitated expanding the size of the audience and hence potential profits. This vision of huge audiences and equally huge profits inspired the laosheng actor Yang Xiaolou (who served as backstage manager), along with two other investors, the actor Yao Peiqiu (the accountant) and the businessman Dian Langxian (front-

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stage manager), to open the Number One Stage. When it opened in Beijing in 1914, it was the country’s largest theater, three stories high and seating more than three thousand. “The first floor ‘pond’ seating included a total of twenty-one rows of backed benches. Long wooden shelves ran along the back of each row of seats on which the people in the row behind could place their teacups and snacks. This new style of seating in a stroke changed the old playhouse arrangement of long tables running perpendicular to the stage and was a great improvement.”2 The vision of an infinitely expandable theater soon foundered; the Number One Stage was too big. Even with his reputation as the greatest laosheng since Tan Xinpei, Yang Xiaolou had trouble filling his theater. A crowd of 1,400, which would have packed any other venue to the rafters, left the Number One Stage less than half full. In 1917, trying to fill those seats, Yang briefly organized a troupe in which he costarred with the young Mei Lanfang. As a result of this unbeatable double bill, the theater regularly sold out, but many members of the audience left after Mei’s performance and before Yang had taken the stage, causing Yang’s reputation and pride to suffer. What money the theater did make went disastrously unaccounted for by Yao, who had never bothered to pay back any of the bank loans for the theater’s start-up capital. In 1919 the Beijing courts repossessed the theater, bankrupted Yao and Dian, and seized Yang’s lifetime savings of thirty thousand yuan. From then on, the Number One Stage ceased to hold regular performances. Instead it became the venue for special occasions and charity performances like the Beijing Actors’ Guild giant annual charity gala, which actors nicknamed wotouhui (corncake party).3 Aside from these occasional bursts of radiance, the theater remained dark for the better part of a decade before it burned down in 1937.4 Following the failure of the Number One Stage, designs for Beijing’s new theaters all had seating capacities of less than two thousand, with the optimum size for a Peking opera theater in Beijing somewhere around 1,500.5 The older theaters of the Dashalar district, which could squeeze at most eight hundred to a thousand people into their two-story wood and brick frames, consistently lost out to these new, larger playhouses. Famous actors quickly revealed a preference for the modern trappings and bigger earnings available at the new playhouses, and the reputations of Dashalar’s venerable teahouses began to slide. By the 1920s these older venues generally featured less prestigious genres, like clapper opera, big drum singing, and all-female troupes, while Peking

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opera stars moved to the larger modern theaters in the neighborhoods around the Dong’an and Xidan markets. By the 1930s several of Dashalar’s theaters had been converted into shopfronts.6 Only three Peking opera venues in Dashalar continued to thrive. Of these, the only old-style teahouse was the Guanghelou, where the Fuliancheng keban performed every afternoon well into the 1930s. The Guanghelou was beloved as a “people’s theater,” where old men and young students paid minimal prices (sixteen coppers) to cheer on the young talent. The theater could afford these cheap matinees because many student actors were unpaid, and the theater could occasionally stage a second, more expensive show, at night. Just around the corner from Dashalar, the Zhonghe Theater, the fortress from which Tan Xinpei had ruled the drama world in the last decade of the Qing, was a dingy, half-empty wreck until it was thoroughly renovated in “modern” style near the end of the 1920s. In the 1930s Cheng Yanqiu had a three-year run there. A third Dashalar venue, the Kaiming Theater, had been founded in 1913. A joint venture between a Chinese and a Japanese investor, it was originally strictly a movie theater. With its novel, rotundalike facade and comfortable individual seats with excellent visibility, the Kaiming Theater targeted an elite audience. In 1921 the theater began featuring the crème de la crème of Peking opera stars, including a two-year collaboration between Mei Lanfang, Yu Shuyan, and Yang Xiaolou. Though the theater only sat eight hundred, ticket prices were exorbitantly high, and the audience was strictly “rich officials and big merchants.”7 Of these three prosperous Dashalar theaters, only Guanghelou survived through the 1930s without thorough renovation. With the above exceptions, Dashalar’s heyday had passed: in 1930 a Beijing pictorial newspaper ran a series of photographs of Dashalar’s sagging theater exteriors to protest the area’s woeful state of disrepair.8 A seating capacity of around 1,500 seems to have been optimal for Tianjin theaters as well. The most glamorous theater in the city’s Japanese concession, the Great New Light Theater (Xin Ming Da Xiyuan) held 1,500 and hosted Peking opera’s finest performers.9 Another modern-style playhouse, adjacent to a department store in the French concession, seated only nine hundred and so was never able to attract such luminaries.10 Seating in Shanghai’s Peking opera theaters ranged between six hundred and three thousand, though only the larger ones could attract big stars. The precise number of Peking opera theaters in Shanghai is hard to pin down.11 Almost every major theater built after 1920 switched from

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Peking opera to film, or vice versa, at some point in its business. The Gengxin Wutai, launched in 1922 as a Peking opera theater, started showing movies as well in 1926. In 1923 the Zhongyang Da Xiyuan started as a movie theater but hired its own Peking opera troupe the following year. On opening in 1926, the Tianchan Wutai specialized in Peking opera, but it added regular movie matinees two years later. Altogether, at least ten major theaters in Shanghai mixed or switched between Peking opera and movies during the 1920s and 1930s.12 Similar stories could be told for Beijing, and in Tianjin all the large Peking opera theaters doubled as movie houses.13 The fact that glamorous theaters so readily swapped Peking opera and first-run films speaks of Peking opera’s status as among China’s most urbane popular entertainments. Peking opera was held above and apart from “local” dramas and given a separate heading from these genres in Shanghai’s municipal register. This elevation in cultural position went hand in hand with a shift in the physical and social environment of Peking opera theaters themselves, from the bustle and chat of the teahouse to a space architecturally identical to that of the modern movie house—the movie house being the cultural venue par excellence designed around the strict separation of representational and audience spaces. Performing regularly in these large, modern, and expensive venues had its effect on Peking opera troupes; with ticket prices ranging from three to twenty times those charged in smaller theaters, elite Peking opera actors entered an entirely different economic and social world. How to Act in a Theater How did the new-style playhouse contribute to reshaping the meaning and social significance of going to a Peking opera, and how did theater workers, managers, and audiences adapt these new conditions to their own purposes? Generally speaking, theater owners consolidated power, or at least tried to. The Qing-era teahouse had been a relatively small establishment, and the ushers and the tea, snack, and towel vendors were all independent contractors, fending for themselves and bargaining with every customer. In Republican-era playhouses, theater owners put all these workers on the payroll; playhouses were much more expensive to build and maintain, and workers’ wages were a relatively minor expense. Theater owners covered the additional labor costs by adding a surcharge for tea to the ticket price. “Tea tickets” thus became theater tickets, usually purchased at a ticket booth before entering the theater. At the same

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time, management transformed the teahouse’s hodgepodge of vendors into hired employees whose activities could be disciplined. Marketplace activities were thus removed from the auditorium, the idea being that after entering the theater customers should not have to pay anything— except attention to the show. Nevertheless, when theaters’ profit margins were low, as most were throughout the depression of the 1930s, vendors began edging their way into the seating area to chase down extra tips. Towel tossers also tended to resurface with the coming of summer, for even the most fastidious customers sought some refreshing relief in a sweltering summer theater. Despite a variety of attacks on their trade, the towel tossers invariably reappeared, as did the towels, moving “from first class, to the second class, then to the third floor. Once these customers have wiped off, the white towels have turned gray, and the gray has turned black.”14 In general, however, vendors were shuffled into the lounge, and the towel trade was annexed by tacking another surcharge onto the ticket price.15 In many elite theaters, memories of the teahouse bustle had been reduced to a whisper. When the Chang’an Theater opened in 1937 with the most modern appointments of its day, there was still a small shelf behind each seat reserved for teacups. Tea servers discreetly shuttled through the aisles, never asking for fees or tips.16 Other theaters, like Tianjin’s Great Republic Theater and Shanghai’s Great Golden Theater, eliminated tea service entirely.17 If moving marketplace activities from the auditorium to lounges and ticket booths was the first step, removing the marketplace mentality from the audience members themselves was the next. Modern theater owners joined drama reformers in proselytizing about the theater as a tool for social education and preaching the gospel of audience discipline. Xiong Foxi described Chinese audiences as “loving to chat about the weather during the show, and wear hats, and cough, and spit, and smoke, and bring along their precious little ones under the age of twelve to make a ruckus.”18 The True Light (Zhenguang) Theater that opened in Beijing in 1921 aimed to change that. We erected our humble theater with the intention of supporting education, reforming society, and disseminating knowledge. As for essential character, though this theater is a type of commercial business, our inner feeling is to really promote citizens’ knowledge. . . . The theater is a type of public space and so is in every way intimately related to the sociability of human society, public-mindedness, national civilization and progress, and the inferiority or superiority of citizens’ morality.19

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The True Light boasted elaborate architectural features and fittings, including a lounge with snack stands, a film projection booth, a rooftop garden, leather-cushioned individual seats, and a driveway for carriages and cars. Rules were posted for the audience: “Attend to public welfare. Peacefully abide by order. Take off hats upon sitting. Quietly keep chatting to a minimum, do not clap inappropriately, do not shout ‘Hao.’ Do not spit randomly, do not block others.”20 Employees were held to an even higher standard: “Uniforms are required during work. Numbered badges must be worn on the chest. Hair must be brushed, facial hair shaved clean. No drinking alcohol or eating garlic, onions, chives, or other odorous foods before work. No smoking on the job. Wear a smile. Speak quietly and politely.”21 The True Light was not unique in imposing these strictures on audience and workers, though it was perhaps more zealous than average. The management’s conscientiousness likely relates to the theater’s goal of attracting foreign customers as well as Chinese elites, for its first shows included not just Peking opera but also Russian and Italian dance troupes and foreign films. The Shanghai theater world, too, was abuzz with talk of order and cleanliness. In 1923 Shenbao ran a fourteen-part article on theater reform, denouncing vendors for their haughtiness and shoddy service, vividly detailing the stench from restrooms and grime on teacups and face towels, adamant about the need for a logical system of assigned seating, and full of praise for advances in the printing of playbills.22 Republicanera playbills were indeed becoming a fortuitous merging of culture boosting and advertising. Qing-era playbills had been little more than small slips of red paper with several play titles brush-painted on them. Only a few were made, just prior to the show, and they were given as formal mementos to elite patrons for a customary fee. In the Republic, playbills came to be printed for the entire audience. Gradually they began to fatten, with the names of important actors becoming more and more prominent and advertisements appearing with rising frequency. Playbills also took on an educational role. If a play’s plot was unfamiliar, the playbill might provide a brief summary. When star actors began having their scripts formally composed by literati authors, the bills began featuring the lyrics of important arias, enabling the audience to better appreciate the richness of the language. When Mei Lanfang or Xun Huisheng performed a new play, their audiences frequently left the theater with a small booklet in hand.23 The Haerfei theater in Beijing, probably the most aggressive advertiser in the Beijing theater scene, took these innovations a step further by distributing a free eight-page weekly paper to its audience, listing

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the week’s schedule, introducing troupes, and describing plays. The Haerfei even delivered its paper to the homes of important customers, offering them the convenience of consulting the paper’s schedule and then making advance ticket reservations by phone.24 Through the playbill, theaters could both promote sales and cultivate a more literate and refined dramatic culture in their audiences. The only aspect of silencing the audience that critics occasionally resisted involved the shouting of “Hao!” For opera connoisseurs, this heartfelt exclamation of delight was too dear a custom to part with. Still, almost all agreed that a more conscientious policing of such interruptions would prove salutary for the theater environment and the cultivation of audience taste. There was, many critics remarked, an increasing herd mentality among shouters, a sure sign that audiences were losing their aesthetic sensibility and becoming slaves to media fashions: people automatically shouted for top-bill actors but never for other performers, no matter how well they sang.25 Even more reprehensible, the lines between pengchang (fan-supporting) and guaisheng (strange-sounding, lascivious) hao, which had long been blurry with regard to male dan, became even more indistinct when actresses took the stage. One comical article described such naughtiness as an art: “When going to a play to peng an actress, [my] ‘Hao!’ should make her notice that I’m here giving my all to support her. In this way I might slowly ‘leave a missive in the empress’s bosom’ and get an opportunity to approach her, or at least receive a few flirtatious winks (lit. batted eyelid telegraphs). The knack of getting this kind of ‘Hao!’ right is not yelling it with the crowd. The best is just before everyone else is ready to open their mouths, I race in and lead the way, with everyone else like spring thunder following right on my ass.”26 Such catcalls were universally prohibited at elite theaters.27 But though most theaters formally discouraged shouting “Hao!” management rarely came down iron-fisted against more benign salutes, and an apposite “Hao!” remains to this day the mark of a seasoned opera fan. Efforts to elevate Peking opera to a higher cultural plane targeted those on the stage as well. Actors were expected to adhere to disciplinary standards like everyone else; practices like yinchang or the ostentatious parading of servants onto the stage were judged inexcusably disruptive. Stagehands were dressed in uniforms and their comings and goings during the performance minimized. The stage was to be well swept and actors forbidden to wear any shoes other than those reserved for stage use; in this way the incongruous practice of flinging cushions to actors to

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protect their costumes when they knelt on stage could be eliminated, while also improving the theater’s general hygiene.28 The orchestra, which had typically sat at the back of the stage or beside the stage door, was also seen as disruptive, especially now that star actors had their own accompanists, who shifted seats frequently during the evening. Resolving this dilemma was not easy; to work in perfect synchronization, actors and musicians needed to be able to see one another. Around 1930 a solution was finally reached: the orchestra was moved into a small separate area at the side of the stage that was hidden from audience view by a screen but still visible to the performers.29 Taken as a whole, the disciplining of audiences, actors, and theater personnel was not only a process of socialization, of redistributing and redefining cultural authority; it was also about enforcing the new regime of representation. As they were disciplined in how to behave in the face of (and facing) art, audiences were being immersed in an environment that materialized that regime, exteriorizing and substantiating the bifurcation of “representation” from “reality.” A clearer example of enframing—the merged functioning of technologies of discipline and representation— would be hard to come by. Nothing and no one was supposed to come between, or blur the boundaries between, the stage and the audience, the world of representation and reality, the consumer and the cultural commodity. Ideally, all disruptions or extraneous traces of social relations that might interfere with the immediacy of the nexus between the consumer and the object being consumed were to be eliminated; was not such a pristine audience environment the perfect expression of the publicminded ideals of equality and respect for each and every customer? But from another perspective, audiences were trading their share of participation in the cultural production process—their freedom to disrupt the show—for unimpeded access to a prefabricated cultural product. No one, not even the star actor, was supposed to disrupt the coherence or challenge the authority of that product. Republican-era Peking opera theaters in this way illustrate a the shift from a commercial to a commodity form of exchange, a shift from a marketplace where people meet and participate together in determining the disposition of a product, to a purchasing process in which the buyer directly confronts the product itself— a process in which social relations are effaced and submerged. But this ideal was hardly ever realized. Despite the new forms of discipline and the overwhelming consensus upholding them, elite theaters never quite became the models of public decorum and cultural edification that reformers intended. The problem was simple: the fair marketing

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of tickets for assigned seats was devilishly difficult to implement. Various parties demanded privileged access and would apply both economic pressure and coercive violence to get it, thereby distorting the market, disrupting the show, and—from the historian’s perspective—perhaps indicating some of the premises and limitations to building public spheres of civil society in Republican China. The Pesky Persistence of the Table Tenders In analyzing the stratification of taste cultures that attended the imposition of order and silence on audiences in the United States in the late nineteenth century, Lawrence Levine writes of a conceptual fusion that occurred between a stultifying model of public order and the mission of “ennobling” culture: “If order was a necessary prerequisite for culture, it was also one of culture’s salutary by-products. If without order there could be no pure culture, it was equally true that without culture there could be no meaningful order. In late nineteenth-century thought the two were so intricately interwoven, so crucial to one another, the circle they formed was so complete, that they could not be easily distinguished.”30 Paralleling the new professions—which were rising to power in the United States during this period and which gained their authority by “reducing the layman to incompetence”—the “cultural professions,” seeking authority in their realm, deployed this tautology linking order to culture as a means of reducing audiences to a relatively supine “silence in the face of art.” This attempt to shift cultural authority out of the purview of the general audience and into the hands of cultural professionals did not go unchallenged. American theaters became stages for public power struggles, including riots and tense confrontations between actors and audiences, but in the long run audiences lost their right to be disruptive. Whereas a New Orleans judge ruled in 1853 that ticket holders had “the legal right to hiss and stamp in the theater,” by the twentieth century the theater’s right to deny its cultural product to disruptive customers usually took precedence.31 The illusion of the fourth wall—that transparent divide between stage space and audience space instilled by the lighting and architectural technologies of the modern theater—was further reinforced by an alliance of invisible authorities: property rights, public morality, and cultural professionalism. In China, the predominantly middle-class clientele of the urban playhouses generally venerated the disciplinary codes of urbane cosmopolitanism. They had good reason to do so, for they were living in pro-

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foundly disordered times. Efforts to make theaters into areas of polite public association gained momentum at precisely the same time that China’s political order was coming unhinged. Especially during the warlord era (1915–27), authority was more fragmented, more contested, and more often asserted through brute force. The idea that theaters could become islands of decorum and order was actually quite idealistic. Civility proved difficult to foster, even at Beijing’s Civilized Teahouse. In 1914, a riot broke out between soldiers and police over some seats. The theater’s interior was demolished, chairs were smashed, and a policeman was beaten to death with a broken table leg.32 Brawls, intimidation, and disruptive exhibitions of authority became commonplace in warlord-era theaters. In the Qing, government authority in the theater had usually been limited to a few officials’ observing the show from their reserved boxes. In 1910s Beijing, government authority took the form of a group of police called “the big order” (daling), who occupied reserved seats called “the quelling box”: A regulation was handed down in the days of warlord dictatorship called the big order. Their purpose was to “quell the theater.” They were eleven men all together: one carried the “order,” a two-foot placard with the character for “order” written on it; two packed Mausers; four carried rifles; and four brandished billy clubs. When the “big order” arrived, the play immediately stopped, and trumpets and drums were sounded to receive them. The whole audience had to stand up and face the “big order” until they had been seated, served tea, melon seeds, fruit, and dim sum . . . and ordered the performance to resume.33

Not all expressions of authority were so ostentatious and predictable. On a stint in Tianjin, Mei Lanfang premiered his contemporary-costume play The Imprisoned Mandarin Ducks (“mandarin ducks” meaning lovers) to an oversold crowd. A few men tried to push their way to a good vantage point without any tickets whatsoever; when the manager courteously demanded that they leave, they responded, “Fine, we’ll just see about that,” and left. The next evening, on his way to the theater, Mei was stopped by some patrolmen who claimed that his carriage was being improperly driven. These police wordlessly escorted Mei to an abandoned basement where he was detained until showtime. He was then permitted to phone the theater manager, who rushed to collect him. No damage was done, but the incident was unsettling.34 Such intimidation was most common in Shanghai, where the infamous Green Gang dominated the entertainment world. A short story in Drama Monthly titled “Impossible to Deal With” satirized the Shanghai

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scene. It tells of a naïve old drama buff who tries to open an honest little theater: The first thing when opening a theater in the city was to be sure not to offend Eighth Master. If Eighth Master was interested in attending a show, you quickly looked after him. Whether he bought a ticket was beside the point. You also had to prepare some pots of good tea, a few boxes of Big Pearl cigarettes, and be extraordinarily polite to keep the peace. To do otherwise was to court disaster, a squabble that could escalate to closing down the theater . . . Above Eighth Master were Sixth and Seventh Master, [whose lackeys] might wear Western suits or Chinese suits just like typical customers. However, just above the lapel or top button of their robes they wore a very tiny silver badge, the special symbol that they could go to the theater for free.35

Dealing with organized criminals and their associates was part of the theater business. During Mei Lanfang’s 1922 Shanghai tour, a loud explosion in the balcony sent crowds stampeding. Xu Shaoying later explained: “Ten days ago I got an extortion letter, the basic message being, ‘This time you’ve invited a famous Beijing actor to your theater. You’ll do such good business, you’ll really strike it rich. Please lend us a hand.’ To pacify this type of Shanghai hoodlum I gave them a sum of money, but it must not have satisfied their wishes, because later I got another letter, in a more serious tone than the first. But the amount they asked was too much, how could I comply?”36 Fortunately it was only a smoke bomb, but only two days later a sulfur bomb thrown outside the theater badly burned a supporting actor’s face. Xun Huisheng’s run-in with the Green Gang led to a backstage brawl, escalating threats, and a conflict that was resolved only when Xun pledged the gang’s leader, Huang Jinrong, as his godfather.37 And the famous laosheng Yu Shuyan was so shaken by a series of kidnapping threats while visiting Shanghai that he vowed never to return. Such incidents point to the fragmented state of urban authority as well as to the precarious economies of the Peking opera world. These tensions converged to form one deceptively simple-seeming logistical dilemma: how to implement assigned seating. This problem took human form in the shape of the table tenders. In the Republican era playhouse, table tenders were still the only sure way to getting a good seat, and they came to symbolize everything that was blocking reform. Things progressed to advance ticket purchasing and assigned, numbered seating. But while it was this way on the surface and you could buy average seats in advance, the best front-row seats remained firmly in the hands

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of the table tenders (kanzuoren). In reality their wages were horribly meager, as can be seen in that they wholly relied on customers’ tips for their living. In addition, the theaters used their familiarity with customers to help guarantee that the best seats were consistently sold, so, with one eye open and the other closed, they allowed [the table tenders] control over the good front-row seats. At the modern-style Changan Theater [in Tianjin], for example, the first six rows were divided into plots of “turf” among four table tenders, one piece of “turf” for each.38

Table tenders remained an intractable problem in Beijing theaters as well. “Recently, advance sales and numbered seating methods have become common. The Huale, Kaiming, Zhonghe, and Mingxing theaters are all like this, but this is just old wine in new bottles. If you want to find a good seat, you still have to seek out the table tenders, so even for a seventy-two-cent matinee show you have to cough up more than a dollar.”39 Table tenders acted as institutionalized scalpers and were considered by many to be the theater world’s ultimate behind-the-scenes manipulators.40 Not only did they distort a potentially fair ticket market, but their bustling about sullied the cultural environment. Decorating their services by giving perks like free cigarettes, tea, and dim sum to their patrons, table tenders contaminated the atmosphere of the newstyle theater with memories of the teahouse past. In Shanghai, table tenders were an indispensable cog in the economics of Peking opera touring. Importing Beijing-based stars to Shanghai venues cost between twenty thousand and eighty thousand yuan. To guarantee a profit, the management had to cultivate a wealthy audience willing to pay high ticket prices. Table tenders played the indispensable roles of both raising the initial investment and recruiting elite customers. But table tenders themselves were far from wealthy; their capital was typically advanced by gangsters. Most were on cordial terms with, if not members of, the Green Gang. The head honchos of Shanghai’s gangland in turn nurtured a great affection for the theater and were by far the city’s most influential Peking opera patrons. Huang Jinrong built two theaters himself, held controlling concerns in several others, and owned the Great World amusement center. He was the patron to several stars, and contemporary opera magazines always referred to him in the warmest terms. Du Yuesheng was an amateur actor, fond of singing black-faced hualian roles (black symbolizing justice) and of marrying Peking opera actresses. His Luhe Opera Club had more than a thousand members and invited all the greatest opera stars in to hold private singing lessons. Du seems to have com-

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manded more fear than respect in acting circles. Though he was said to be a laughably poor actor, tickets for one of his rare public appearances sold out at fifty yuan a head. Swift in coming to aid or revenge, Du was not someone to be crossed. When Zhang Junqiu went for more than two months without receiving any pay at the Great China Theater, he contacted Du, who made a brief phone call to the theater’s manager. Within hours the manager presented Zhang with five solid gold bars. On the other hand, when Cheng Yanqiu was stingy in giving free tickets to one of Du’s comrades, Du ordered a hand grenade thrown into the crowded theater.41 Mei Lanfang also seems to have been particularly prone to stepping on Du’s toes. Legends about their rivalry over the affections of the actress Meng Xiaodong could serve as the premise for a TV miniseries. Mei also accidentally infuriated Du when he performed with another of Du’s actress wives, Tao Yulan, at a charity play in Shanghai in 1936. Du scheduled Mei’s play next to last, with his wife’s play as the finale. As soon as Mei’s performance was over, the crowd began streaming into the street. To soothe his wounded pride, Du forbade all of Shanghai’s theaters from booking Mei’s troupe. But Mei’s web of connections stretched beyond even Du’s reach: his patron Feng Gengguang mobilized some European friends, and Mei managed to book several shows in foreignowned movie theaters.42 By far Du’s most renowned feat in the Peking opera world was his throwing of one of the greatest tanghui of the Republican era to commemorate the completion of the Du lineage temple in 1931. An entire issue of the Shanghai Pear Garden News, of which Du was a sponsor, was devoted to trumpeting this success; the guild also bestowed a congratulatory stele on him in honor of the event.43 For three days all the most famous living opera stars (with the exception of Yu Shuyan) performed on a temporarily erected stage for hundreds of specially invited guests and thousands of onlookers.44 The entire Pear Garden stopped in its tracks for several days to pay its respects to Du. With the interests of figures like Du and Huang behind them, the table tenders were not easily disposed of. Middle-class citizens found them especially irksome. Several letters to opera magazines recount similar scenarios: A big star comes to town, and you try to buy good tickets in advance, but with no luck. Arriving at the theater and seeing several good unoccupied seats, you beg repeatedly to be seated there, only to be bounced like a rubber ball from one table tender to another. Unless you

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are a client of the table tenders, when the night is over all you have seen is “a face full of haughtiness,” not a Peking opera.45 For middle-class customers, not the least embarrassing part of the experience was being ignominiously pushed around by someone little better than a thug. To these customers, table tenders came to symbolize the corruption plaguing Chinese society and the nation’s inability to modernize and establish basic civic values. Why was it so difficult to institute assigned seating? Although many practical explanations were given—the pervasive corruption of municipal administration, the greed of star actors who demanded such huge salaries that theater owners had to resort to extortion to survive, the brazen egotism of elites who compromised at nothing to show off their status—all of them seemed to point to the same disturbing conclusion: some flaw in the national character was preventing Peking opera theaters from completing the self-confirming circuit linking order and culture.46 While the elite theaters hoped to pose as model public spaces, they were controlled by the private interests of a small group of wealthy elites and by power brokers whose ready use of violence underscored the reality that these spaces were not, in fact, wholly public by any measure. Also implicated in the problem was a host of nagging logistical issues that revealed an underlying disjuncture between the institutions of Peking opera’s production and the pattern of commodity consumption into which it was being fit. To begin with, Peking opera shows were too long. In the Qing teahouse, shows had lasted all day, with customers casually coming and going as they pleased. Elite Republican-era theaters, in keeping with the new urban temporality, now staged shows at night; yet they were still exhaustingly long, beginning around seven in the evening and lasting until well after midnight. Rather than stay glued to a chair for six hours, wealthier customers skipped the opening acts and strolled in halfway through the performance, in plenty of time to catch the stars.47 Thus customers arriving early and seeing rows of vacant seats might still find it impossible to sit in any of them. Yet moves to shorten the program faced resistance, not just from opera fans but also from the actors and artists who would face unemployment if shows were drastically shortened. Shanghai theaters, paying salaries on the monthly baoyin system, employed around one hundred actors and artists each, and managers did not want to pay them just to lounge around all night.48 In the other cities, where actors were paid by the play-point system, wages for bit parts had dropped to a pittance. Hundreds of actors were living hand

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to mouth and needed every opportunity to appear on stage and make a few cents. To be successful, theater reform would also have to address the employment crisis in the acting community.

Economic Disparities in the Acting Community The demands of the new urban temporality that were reshaping Peking opera—molding it into a commodity for distribution during a few focused hours of leisure time on evenings and weekends—also put new strains on the acting community. As the wage disparity widened between the bit actors and the stars, mobility up the career ladder decreased. The Qing custom of a full-day program with actors of all levels performing throughout the day had given hundreds of actors the chance to improve and display their skills and exposed audiences to their varied abilities and styles. As theaters focused increasingly on stars, intermediate-level performances grew fewer and more sparsely attended. If theaters suddenly decided to ax such performances entirely, not only would the entire acting community shudder from the economic jolt, but the connection between audiences and the group of actors from which stars eventually emerged would be short-circuited. By the Republican era, the Peking opera troupes that had provided a lifelong community in which actors all ate, worked, and lived together in the “big lodge” (daxiachu), anchored by yearlong contracts, were a thing of the past. The new star-centered troupe (mingjue tiaoban) system elicited little solidarity. Actors were free agents paid on a play-point system (xifen) that doled out set fees per stage appearance and afforded no long-term security. Troupes regularly dissolved, regrouped, and changed names and personnel; stars lived in comfortable homes and hotel suites, bit actors in crowded squalor. The hierarchies in star troupes were explicit and stark. A single top-bill (toupai) actor was in charge and performed the finale at every show. This star chose his own supporting cast, selected second- and third-bill actors to play the lead roles in the preceding plays, reserved the use of a master accompanist, and had his own personal wardrobe, wardrobe manager, makeup artist, and assistants (genbaode). The second- and third-bill actors were allowed one personal accompanist and a few assistants, and their wages were lower, often on a geometric scale. For instance, in Mei Lanfang’s 1917 company, Mei earned eighty yuan per play, Wang Fengqing (the second-bill actor) forty, and Yu Shuyan (the third-bill actor) twenty.49 Next in the hierarchy came the supporting actors (erlu), who accompanied the leading actors in their

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scenes. At the bottom of the heap were dozens of bit performers who made only a few jiao (dimes) per stage appearance. To survive, these actors scurried from company to company during an evening, took day jobs selling cigarettes, and pawned their clothes every season.50 Their fortunes hung increasingly on the star’s whim: Today [1918] stars (haojuer) often organize troupes, but they know only that they act in a play, that they make money. The bit (lingsui) actors’ share gets smaller every day, and they learn to chase after pennies. . . . The situation is very different from the past, and stars are particularly conceited. If the star takes a day off, then that’s a day off for the troupe, and the bit actors get one day’s less money. If the star doesn’t want to show his face, the troupe has a hard time putting on a show, and after a while the bit actors have no way to survive. . . . The relationship between today’s stars and bit actors is like that of capitalists to workers.51

This gap only increased over the decades, gaping particularly wide in times of economic crisis. “These last few years, more and more of our acting comrades are out of work, and the number of troupes are also fewer,” reported Drama Monthly in 1930. That year in Beijing, the proceeds from a special charity performance were distributed to over 580 local actors, 360 musicians, and 400 other backstage workers, as well as dozens of widows and orphans from theater families.52 The Shanghai Actors’ Guild did what it could to support the community: they laid out contract guidelines for traveling actors to help insure they were not cheated while on the road, mediated with the government on issues of registration and taxation, and organized charitable activities and services. In 1937 actors in Tianjin formed a separate organization, called the National Drama Union, specifically for poor actors. Members rejected the star-centered troupe structure, divided proceeds more evenly, and regularly put on fund-raising performances for their destitute comrades.53 The economic depression and territorial insecurity of the 1930s sent tremors through the opera world. For several months after Japan’s invasion of Manchuria in 1931, business in Tianjin theaters was dismal, and actors were unwilling to travel there from Beijing.54 In 1935 Beijing theaters were having trouble attracting customers even when they slashed ticket prices by half.55 Moreover, the movies were winning a growing segment of the urban entertainment market. One critic offered this sketch of the situation in 1935: More than a few actors still overvalue themselves. It seems they are oblivious to the fact that the prosperity of 1926 and ‘27 has passed. . . . In Peking opera’s hometown of Beiping, ticket prices have been slashed, and

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theaters are again double-billing headliners, but sales are still lackluster. Bosses are pawning costumes to survive, and bit players are tightening their belts The middle and poorer classes have really been affected by the depression. They have been hit hard economically, and when they want entertainment, the masses head to cheap movies. Toward the tediously long, overly expensive, uncomfortably seated, table-tender-infested Peking opera they feel only contempt. This is the main reason for Shanghai Peking opera’s collapse and failure. These last few years theater bosses dare not book any Beiping stars, and are only willing to show serial plays with mechanical sets. All these crimes are the fault of the actors, they brought it all on themselves. In the business world, a fellow with no education or skills (actors that can recognize over a thousand characters are, I’m afraid, fewer than two in ten) who made twenty or thirty thousand yuan a month would be pretty extraordinary, but these days second-string actors make a thousand a month, yet they still whine that it is not enough. . . . [Actors today] have only just learned a few plays, and they want to be headliners. . . . They call the pointers given them by concerned old hands “dog farts” and the nonsensical babble of hair-slicked dandies “pure gold.”56

A generous dollop of scorn is mixed into this business prognosis; though actors had achieved unprecedented wealth and were now occasionally dignified as “artists” (yiyuan), all the brightness of stardom had not dispelled the shadow of discrimination over their profession. Perhaps the most abiding legacy of that discrimination was illiteracy, a stigma that became more damning given all the rhetoric about drama as an edifying art form. In redressing this legacy the actors’ guilds were determinedly activist. On its reestablishment in 1927, the Shanghai Actors’ Guild showed unstinting dedication to improving literacy within the community. Publishing their own newspaper, The Pear Garden News, in 1928 was a small but monumental statement of actors’ concern for their own education. The first issue declared the paper’s missions: to study art, to spread information, and to correct errors and absurdities within the acting community.57 The first issues were blanketed with letters praising the newspaper’s goals: “What a joy, what a cause for congratulations! Who would have thought our Pear Garden would come to have its own newspaper? . . . To raise the level of actors’ art, to lead the ignorant down the right path, it is tantamount to a compass for the acting world!”58 The Shanghai guild’s bylaws stipulated that membership fees would be used to establish a primary school, free for the children of all guild members, and in early 1929 they opened the Zhenling Elementary School.59 Two years later, when the guild completed a small physical education facility for recreational sports teams, a cry went up to build a complementary library, an “intellectual education facility.”60

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Young actors needed to be literate to become respected citizens, but they also needed to be trained as competent performers. Actor training was probably the weakest link in the Republican-era Peking opera system. In the Qing there had been three primary institutions of actor training: the sifang (private school—and brothel), the schools attached to large acting troupes, and the keban (the independent training school). The sifang had been explicitly outlawed, along with the xianggong. The troupe schools had disappeared more quietly as an unforeseen consequence of troupes’ adopting the star-centered structure and play-point payment system. The old saying “Each troupe carries a school” (yi ban dai ban) was now a vestige of the Qing past; star-centered troupes no longer provided a live-in community, and they eschewed any responsibility for training young actors. This left only the keban system, which was also ailing. With its indentured students, corporal punishment, and complete neglect of subjects like literacy and math, the keban needed a complete overhaul to meet basic standards of Republican citizenship.

Reforming Actor Training There was no economical recipe for making great actors. In the nineteenth century, most young actors had trained in troupe schools, working as apprentices, receiving instruction from troupe actors and filling in small parts over the years. Only during the closing decades of the Qing, with palace performances an almost daily event and urban touring becoming profitable, did independent keban surface in modest numbers. Several, such as the Changchun keban, were established with Cixi’s blessing and sponsored in part through palace funds.61 Others, like the Fuliancheng, were financed by wealthy officials or businessmen. But keban relied only partially on patrons’ donations, usually for their startup capital, and were primarily subsidized by performances at tanghui and ticket sales from student shows. A keban counted itself lucky if one student in each “generation” turned out to be a cash cow, a young talent able to draw large audiences and lucrative engagements. In the meantime, scores of growing athletic bodies needed food, shelter, and lessons. Students’ parents were far too poor to afford tuition; most had allowed their children to be conscripted into the keban in the first place because they could not afford to raise them. Because audiences were unwilling to pay very much for an amateurish performance, keban rarely survived for long.62 At their height in the 1910s there were around two dozen Peking opera keban in Beijing; by 1929 an opera buff lamented, “Keban are

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fewer than stars in the morning sky,” with only two surviving in Beijing, the Fuliancheng and the Binqingshe. The later disbanded in 1930.63 From 1931 to 1937 the Fuliancheng was the only keban in Beijing, and it too had several close calls with bankruptcy: its biggest asset, its costume collection, was confiscated more than once by Beijing courts.64 Though reformers viewed the keban as inhumane and uncultured, its wholesale reconstruction was a daunting task. Merely founding a keban, as Shang Xiaoyun did in 1937, was viewed less as a business enterprise than as an act of charity. “In the early Republic, our Pear Garden was really prosperous. But lately the mature and experienced are dying out and there is no one to carry on. . . . A disciple’s bosom fills with melancholy. Add to this that the children of our profession are mostly very poor. The resources for those seeking to learn the profession are not easily donated, and when the business planning is clumsy there is not even enough for a simple meal of porridge. Oh, what the poor waifs endure!”65 Shang Xiaoyun’s Rongchunshe eventually housed, clothed, and fed more than four hundred children, with physicians visiting the school regularly to check on their health. But aside from this stress on hygiene, the Rongchunshe implemented few reforms and never provided literacy or other elementary classes. Few keban headmasters felt they could risk watering down their school’s training regimens with distracting courses in literacy or math. Neither did they have the funds to hire a second group of teachers (the old acting teachers were almost all illiterate) or the wherewithal to reform their master teachers, most of whom held that the method of “beating drama” into students was an unfortunate necessity. Only after the death of its patriarch, Ye Chunshan, in 1935 did the Fuliancheng begin refashioning itself in the style of modern elementary schools, adding reading classes, bringing in physicians, and using bells to signal the beginning and end of classes.66 The school’s strict codes of behavior and corporal punishment were not altered. At its worst, the economic imperatives of the keban could even override its artistic mission, resulting in what amounted to institutionalized abuse. This destructiveness was epitomized in the handling of daocang (the stage when adolescent males’ voices changed). As boy actors approached their last few years in the keban —just as they were reaching maturity in their art and establishing a fan base—they were also reaching physical maturity and entering the unpredictable stage of daocang. Many a talented young actor had his voice destroyed by a keban master who worked him furiously at a time when his voice required rest and attention. When the student’s contract with his master expired, he emerged

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highly trained but often vocally crippled, his career ruined.67 Occasionally a lucky prodigy was saved from this fate. A more senior actor might secure him as a supporting actor over these years and nurture his development, as Sun Juxian did for the young Shang Xiaoyun. Or a fatherly patron (or group of patrons) might heroically swoop down, buying out the boy’s contract and enfolding him in the relatively opulent and hospitable world of private coaching and artistic cultivation, as was the case with Mei Lanfang, Cheng Yanqiu, and Xun Huisheng. In sum, the reproduction of productive forces (skilled actors) in the acting world depended upon relations of production (such as master-disciple relations which condoned physical abuse, and patron-actor relations) that clashed with Republican ideologies of citizenship. The first major attempt at Peking opera keban reform came from the Nantong Actors Academy (Linggong Xueshe).68 Started in 1919 by Ouyang Yuqian under the patronage of Zhang Jian, who financed it at eight hundred yuan per month, the school and its sibling institution, the Reform Customs Theater (Gengsu Juchang), were intended to operate as one complete theater-reform package and serve as the central cultural and publicity symbol of Zhang Jian’s model modern town, Nantong. Ouyang was an ambitious and confrontational headmaster. Slogans on the school walls proclaimed: “The Actors Academy aims to raise actors of reformed drama; it is not a keban!” and “The Actors Academy is an arts organization to serve society; these are not private quarters for raising young song-and-dance servants.”69 The school’s mission was not to churn out marketable products for the entertainment business, but to train knowledgeable citizen-artists. Students were aged from eleven to eighteen, markedly older than those of a typical keban. Entrance examinations were held in which two hundred young applicants competed for fifty places. The selection process included tests in singing ability, health, and literacy, with “the number one requirement being that they could read and write.”70 Ouyang also brought down twenty students from Beijing as models to help the local students improve their pronunciation of standard Mandarin. Twenty teachers were hired, and the class schedule was divided between opera training in the morning and literacy and other basic education classes in the afternoon. Ouyang also taught classes in spoken drama and spent much of his own salary gathering instruments for a Western-style orchestra, including a piano.71 Ouyang was a strict disciplinarian, but he forbade any beating or other physical punishment in the school. He demanded hygiene and order backstage, once ordering a defiant actor to scrub his spit off the

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stage carpet. He even butted heads with invited guests, refusing to allow Gai Jiaotian to perform his martial plays with real swords and spears (Zhang Jian eventually overrode Ouyang’s prohibition) and scolding Yu Shuyan for peeking out at scenes from behind the curtain.72 He opposed all forms of backstage “superstition,” refusing to hold the customary “stage-breaking” ceremony (to bring good luck to a newly opened theater) and banning statues of Laolangshen, the ancestor god of actors, from backstage (though one was eventually installed in an out-of-theway corner). In the end, however, Ouyang abandoned his effort in Nantong after only three years. As the historian Qin Shao has observed, the school’s failure was partly due to a difference in priorities between Ouyang and his patron Zhang Jian. Zhang was more interested in the modern-theater component of the project than in the actors’ academy, as the Reform Customs Theater generated wonderful publicity for Zhang’s model town. This clash in priorities became more intractable when Zhang’s Dasheng enterprises faltered after World War I, leaving him much less money to invest in an acting school that generated neither income nor publicity. In hindsight, we might also wonder if Ouyang’s goals were unrealistic. He writes in his autobiography: I was not willing to have our students be completely ignorant, so I bought a lot of new magazines and new novels and urged them to look at them, like New Youth, New Tide, Reconstruction, and so on, and I exhausted myself trying to explain a little to them. But it was futile, the students were too young and too immature, it was hopeless. Add to it that their drama teachers encouraged them day and night to practice performing so they could go out quickly to earn a big salary; this sort of talk was far more powerful than anything I could say.73

Yet Ouyang did not revise his approach. He spent what little money the school had on things like lessons in Western music, in which neither his students nor Nantong audiences had any interest. Moreover, Ouyang wanted to have students train for two to three years before having them perform at the Reform Customs Theater; but the theater’s managers and the students themselves wanted to earn money and began putting on shows even though their skills were far from polished.74 Ouyang refused to compromise with the economic and social realities confronting his venture, be it the poverty that motivated his students or the desire for face and profit that motivated his patrons, to whom he refused to make himself amenable. He shunned banquets and published an open letter asking not to be bothered with obligatory socializing.75

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Frustrated by what they saw as Ouyang’s stubborn refusal to make the venture profitable, the theater’s managers mobilized against him, at one point gathering over half the academy’s teachers and students into a shadow keban. Ouyang left Nantong soon afterward, in 1922, and the rudderless academy rapidly decomposed. Within a year the only student who showed any real promise at the academy, Li Jinzhang, was sent to Beijing to train with Mei Lanfang.76 A reporter visiting Nantong in 1929 described the school as little more than an unruly passel of street urchins and the theater as an old beauty laid waste.77 The next great effort at Peking opera school reform came with the unification of the country under the Guomindang (GMD) in 1928. Intellectuals concerned with cultivating the “national essence,” Cai Yuanpei among them, urged the establishment of a government-sponsored national opera school.78 Funding was as always the obstacle, but in 1930 Li Shizeng announced that funds from the repatriated Boxer Indemnity would be used to establish the National Opera Music Institute (NOMI). The Institute comprised four departments, including a publishing company, a museum, a research institute, and the Chinese National Opera Vocational School, Beijing Branch (Zhonghua Xiqu Zhuanke Xuexiao, Beiping Fen Xiao), or National Drama Academy (Zhonghua Xi Xiao) for short. As with so many other reforms of the day, the initial plans were unrealistically ambitious, with plans for a center in Nanjing and branches in Shanghai, Shenyang, and Qingdao.79 In the end, the Nanjing component never materialized, and the only branch of the institute was in Beijing, though the National Drama Academy, by far the largest of these undertakings, was of considerable size. Its public announcement inviting enrollments read in part: 1. Purpose: The purpose of the school is to cultivate talent in professional opera, to reform drama, and promote art. 2. Curriculum: This school mixes training and book learning. The period of study is seven years. In the first three years students will take basic classes equivalent to finishing middle school. The later four years are broken into departments (national drama, spoken drama, and music), and on learning these specialized courses students will have achieved professional level. 3. Qualifications: Those wishing to enter as first-year students must have graduated from elementary school or completed a year of middle school. 4. Age: Students must be between ten and fifteen years old. 5. Limitations: This school’s education methods are extremely strict. After students are accepted, they must live continuously at the school and must sign a guarantee and a contract of intent, and are not permitted to withdraw midway. 6. Tuition: Yearly tuition and living expenses are twenty yuan, but those whose fami-

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lies are too poor can postpone paying tuition. . . . After completing classes, students must donate half a year of performances to their alma mater before they will receive a diploma.80

The academy accepted one hundred to two hundred students every year, covering all their expenses for the first two years. In the third year students began receiving play-points for their performances, with 80 percent of their wages going to the school.81 But unlike the students of Ouyang’s academy, they were a huge success onstage. The school began contracting with some of Beijing’s best theaters, performing both matinee and evening shows. A spirited rivalry soon arose between the National Drama Academy (NDA) and the Fuliancheng, complete with pundits forecasting which schools’ students had greater promise. In 1936 Beijing’s Liyan bao organized an elaborate popular “election” for Peking opera’s best child actors, with the schools coming in neck and neck.82 Rivalries between keban had long been part of opera culture, but with the Fuliancheng’s reputation as traditional matched against the modern NDA, some extra punch was added to the competitive sparring.83 A comparison of the schools is illuminating. Both were “seven-year prisons” that provided food, uniforms, and housing to their students and allowed parental visits only once a week. Both quickly put their students onstage and pocketed most of their earnings. The NDA also adopted the keban custom of giving stage names to students, with each cohort sharing a common auspicious character. But the NDA radically broke with keban custom by training a contingent of female students. Girls and boys lived separately, and, though they occasionally trained side by side, they remained separated, if not by physical walls, then by customary ones. The actress Bai Yuwei recalled uttering fewer than one hundred sentences to boys in all her years at the school.84 Still, educating girls was a progressive move and a direct affront to conservative Confucians. In what almost seems a rejoinder to such moralizing traditionalists, the NDA proved its dedication to physical and moral hygiene by giving each student a separate bunk bed and clean sheets, in stark contrast to the Fuliancheng, where ten boys slept together on one kang. And while Fuliancheng students were famous for their rain-or-shine soldierly march to the Guanghelou Theater, the NDA students rode to the theater on their own bus with the words “Drama Academy” emblazoned on its sides. “When we ran into them [the Fuliancheng students], we were naughty kids. We would be all smug and self-satisfied there on the bus, shouting at them, ‘Why don’t you get on board!’ ”85

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The most aggressively antitraditional act of the NDA was the headmaster Jiao Juyin’s decree that any student caught backstage worshipping Laolangshen would be beaten. Many in the acting community saw this rule as an attack on their ascribed lineage. Gossip flew about NDA students: “ ‘They do not worship the ancestor, they worship Sun Yatsen.’ There was also a jibe that ‘The NDA’s ancestor has a red beard,’ because the Peking opera ancestor has no beard, and the characters wearing red beards on stage are demons. Even the vast majority of the Actors’ Guild opposed our practice and warned that ‘in the future [graduates] will not be admitted into the Guild.’ Of course, later the school produced more than a few ‘good actors’ [hao juer], and the Guild stopped raising the issue, but that was only much later.”86 The school’s daily curriculum was identical to that of a keban until the evening, at which point students who were not performing in night shows took academic classes. The Chinese language and drama history teachers were particularly reputable, and the classes certainly raised students’ level of literacy, even if by the time they began (eight p.m.) the students had been up for fifteen hours.87 As significant as these alterations in the curriculum were, some things remained unchanged: “If you did not get a skill right, you got hit. From this angle, there was no difference from the old-style keban.”88 The most fearsome teacher in the school taught acrobatics: “Teacher Zhu was famous in the acting world for beating students, and not one of us was not afraid of him, so that even today when his name comes up, we go a little pale and get that chills-without-being-cold feeling.”89 For all its reforms, “beating drama” (daxi) remained the indispensable fire through which the NDA’s actors were forged, though hitting students around the face and head, or in ways that might result in internal injuries, was forbidden.90 Perhaps in theory the sort of technical excellence being pursued could have been passed to students without resorting to physical punishment, but in practice most opera teachers seemed to feel no other training methods could produce results. The NDA also implemented an institutional reform that keban had prohibited: permitting and even encouraging students to apprentice under famous actors (bai shi). In this regard, institutions of actor training were conforming to the star-centered logic of the Republican opera world. Allowing particular students to form privileged relationships with famous teachers outside the school was a public admission that cohort solidarity was valued less than individual success. Pledging ceremonies, which in the Qing were typically private affairs of offering incense and a

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few koutou, became ostentatious media events staged at grand banquets that the NDA willingly subsidized. 91 Though the Fuliancheng’s patriarch, Ye Chunshan, predictably resisted this trend when he was alive, his son, Ye Longzhang, finally gave in to the gravitational pull of the star system in 1936 when Qi Rushan, working as Mei Lanfang’s envoy, made repeated visits to the school to request that Li Shifang pledge Mei as his teacher. Though Li had never trained with Mei, he had been nicknamed “Little Mei Lanfang” by critics because his grace and style were uncannily similar to those of the young Mei. It seems Mei preferred adopting his namesake to having him on the loose, and sent Qi to lean politely on Ye Longzhang: I am sure Mr. Longzhang knows a chance to pledge Mr. Mei as master is not easy to come by. Today Mr. Mei is raising the idea that he would receive Li Shifang as his disciple. This is a very rare opportunity for him, and would be an honor to you and the Fuliancheng. Mr. Mei’s reputation at home and abroad are unmatched, and he was a Xiliancheng student, so the connection is quite intimate. It only makes sense that “Young Mei Lanfang” should pledge “Old Mei Lanfang.” And you need not worry. Shifang is your family’s apprentice, so you can propose it, and if you agree and you tell your own apprentice to pledge somebody, how can other people raise objections?92

Ye agreed, but only with the proviso that three other students also be allowed to pledge Mei as a teacher, to diffuse the tension this break in precedent was certain to create in the keban. The banquet itself was a huge and dignified publicity stunt. Though such public rituals carried a traditional label, they were in fact evidence of the increasing influence of mass media commercialization and the erosion of institutional solidarity. It is not difficult to understand why the NDA was the Republican era’s one and only successful reformed Peking opera training school: it pulled out all the stops and had every possible resource at its disposal. Though specific financial data are lacking, the school’s funding was undoubtedly beyond any keban’s dream, being the pet project of Li Shizeng, the GMD culture clique, and several of their banking allies.93 The school grounds were custom-built and included a modern stage with electric lighting, a library, an auditorium, classrooms, and a small shop selling snacks and school supplies.94 Counting the opera teachers alone, the school’s staff was more than twice the size of the Fuliancheng’s. Just as crucial as the school’s economic and political power base was its power in the acting community. The string of affiliated names read like a Peking opera allstar team: Cheng Yanqiu and Jin Zhongsun (Cheng’s literary collabora-

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tor) were the codirectors of the Nanjing Branch; Mei Lanfang and Qi Rushan were codirectors of the Beijing branch; Weng Ouhong was head of the Opera Reform Committee; Wang Yaoqing the dan instructor; Ma Lianliang the laosheng instructor; Shen Fuhai the kunqu instructor; and Chen Moxiang the literature teacher. Under state sponsorship and promotion, the NDA succeeded as a new form of Peking opera training institution, but such a mustering of resources and prestige could hardly serve as a reproducible model, and it predictably remained the only such institution of the Republican era.

Conclusion Peking opera theaters, troupes, and schools, the three key institutions of Peking opera production and consumption, were integrally tied to one another, efforts to reform one necessarily impinging on the others. New theaters enabled greater profits, but only if the seats were filled, and it took star actors to fill them; as stars rose to national recognition, troupe solidarity disintegrated, and star-centered troupes could no longer function as training grounds for young actors. Star actors were not born of advertising alone, but also of a grueling training process that was increasingly difficult to finance and challenging to reform. Though Peking opera saw the height of its popularity, earning power, and national stature from the 1910s to the 1930s, market success failed to translate into improved training conditions or brighter prospects for most actors. As the rift between success and failure yawned ever wider, it even affected the internal management of training schools, dividing a select handful of students from the rest of their fellows even before they had graduated. It is impossible to say whether, given another decade, the Peking opera world would have been able to resolve these dilemmas; the Japanese occupation of 1937–45, followed by the civil war of 1946–49, were enormously disruptive and transformative of the Peking opera scene, and the 1950s saw a complete reorganization of all three of these productive institutions under the CCP’s guidance. Though we cannot say with certainty whether the institutional crises of the 1920s and 1930s would have led to Peking opera’s decline, it is clear that the attempts at reforming these institutions into models of Republican civil society generally failed. Certainly the ideal of transforming public theaters into ideal spaces of fair access and audience decorum was a somewhat far-fetched goal, given the kind of violence and contestation that characterized urban authority and policing, particularly in treaty-port cities. Moreover,

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the same economic and social forces that elevated Peking opera to national prominence also made it impossible to fully implement reform. Modern theaters demanded flows of capital that came at the price of mortgaging the rights to equal public access; nationally recognized stars were pivotal to Peking opera’s bid for the role of China’s national drama, but their fame came at the price of impoverishing and stifling mobility within the acting community; reforming training schools was crucial to making Peking opera a respectable model of national cultural ideals, but required massive investments that brought little if any returns. Raising Peking opera to national prominence involved elevating a handful of players to positions of wealth and power while straining the general fabric of the community, leaving the majority of its members on the brink of poverty and institutional collapse.

Chapter 7

The Gendering of National Culture, Or, The Only Good Woman Is a Man

On 8 March 1935, International Women’s Day, China’s most beloved movie actress, Ruan Lingyu, committed suicide. Her funeral procession literally stopped Shanghai traffic in its tracks, drawing more than a hundred thousand fans into the street. Such a massive spontaneous outpouring leaves little doubt that by the 1930s, in Shanghai at the very least, film as a media industry had the power to generate all the effects of a modern spectacle. The story of Ruan Lingyu’s suicide was uncanny. She had recently starred in a film called New Woman (Xin nuxing), based on the life of the actress and author Ai Xia, who had committed suicide a year earlier. In the film, Ruan’s character, after being hounded by a prying and unctuous male journalist, commits suicide by taking an overdose of sleeping pills. Two months after the film was released, Ruan also committed suicide by overdosing, leaving a suicide note that protested the very sort of exploitative media sensationalism that had driven her film character to her suicide. But the convergence between life and drama did not end with Ruan’s funeral. The tabloid media dwelled on the event for months, frequently quoting from her suicide note, until her accusatory words, ren yan ke wei (gossip is a hateful thing), directed at the press itself, became almost a household phrase. Within weeks of Ruan’s death, theaters were advertising plays based on her suicide. Like the tabloids, these plays claimed to unveil the truth behind Ruan’s tragic death, often enhancing their claim to realism by decorating the stage with morbid souvenirs as 237

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evidence of their authenticity: her “real” suicide letter or “her bloodstained shirt.”1 The whole event had a disturbing hall-of-mirrors quality, with real life presaged in fiction and fiction endlessly repeating the tragedies of life, until the cycle of suicide itself almost seemed impelled by the very act of its representation. It is this uncanny way in which representation and reality seem inescapably to mirror one another that reveals something of the gendered effects of representation in the Republican era. Ruan Lingyu’s suicide is one tragic example of the dilemma of an entrapment within the field of representation that pervaded the lives of Republicanera actresses. Film was certainly the exemplary medium for such claustrophobic mimeticism: in his essay on the careers of Republican-era actresses, Michael Chang describes how they were invariably selected according to their alleged bense (natural character) and cast in roles that supposedly matched their real-life personalities, so that they were perceived as hardly doing any acting at all.2 What about the Peking opera actress? Was she able to take advantage of the supposedly clear distinction between the world of the stage and the world of the real? I have argued that in the Republican era, discourses and institutions of enframing were deployed in an attempt to enforce a sense of a clear separation between reality and representation, a bifurcation that became the foundation not only for conceptualizing Peking opera as pure aestheticism but also for its formal opposite, the mimetic realism of modern literature, spoken drama, and film. But enforcing and naturalizing this regime of representation was an exercise of power whose effects were distributed unevenly. This chapter looks at this unevenness with regard to gender. Male actors, notably Peking opera’s Four Famous Dan, gained greater cultural legitimacy and prestige from their ability to differentiate their onstage roles as icons of femininity from their offstage lives as modern male citizens. But whereas male actors found new agency and mobility in the space opened up by the disjunction between representation and reality, for actresses to assert such a distinction seems to have been all but impossible. The uneven functioning of this representational paradigm is a critical component of understanding Republican Peking opera and one that sheds light on gendering processes in the Republican era more generally. While actresses found little space for agency in the disjunction, for the Four Famous Dan it was indispensable, enabling them to perform a broad range of images of femininity, indeed enabling them to do so with more legitimacy than their actress colleagues and competitors.

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Limits of Representation Acting as Sex Objects In theory, the Republican-era playhouse stage was a purely representational space that could serve as host to numberless fictive worlds in which all manner of approaches to social issues—including those touching on women’s identities, sexualities, and social positions—could be imagined and experimented with. Qualities from chaste martyrdom to wanton sexuality could be enacted; ways of harmonizing conflicts between public and domestic spheres could be proposed; extremes of oppression or defiance could be presented as social critiques of the paradoxes facing women in society. But, despite all the discursive, perceptual, and behavioral techniques conspiring to the contrary, the stage was also always a social space—it was, after all, physically located in the crowded theater. For actresses, this all too obvious ontological fact perpetuated what Faye Dudden has called the “body problem,” the problem of being treated as a sexual object against one’s will.3 Actresses, even as they performed within the fictive stage world, were women simultaneously physically located in the “real” social space of the theater. As such, they were judged, scrutinized, and subjected to pressures that not only constrained their offstage personal lives and careers but also affected the range of characters and qualities that they were allowed to represent onstage. The representative anecdotes that follow, gleaned from the pages of drama periodicals and actresses’ biographies, outline some common social stereotypes and forms of sexual exploitation that actresses confronted on entering the space of the theater. For the actress, the illusion of the stage as a purely representational space could not be maintained; it was always disrupted by the social reality of her commodification as a publicly displayed sexual object. For actresses the connection between sex work and acting was often immediate and explicit. Many actresses began as children of impoverished families and were indentured as prostitutes when their households collapsed in destitution. A handful of these young women rose from rags to riches. As a child, the actress Xi Caiqin was sold to the brothel madam Yang Cuihong for one hundred yuan. But Madame Yang was a sensitive woman. Discerning Caiqin’s talent, she paid for her to train as an actress. Caiqin did not disappoint Madame Yang’s expectations; eventually she was earning a thousand yuan a month on the stage. Caiqin apparently never married; rather, on becoming famous, she allowed Madame Yang

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to retire, supporting her as she would have her own mother.4 Lin Fengxian, a rebellious personality and bengbeng opera actress, also began her career as a prostitute and sing-song girl and, despite her success on the stage, continued to work occasionally as a prostitute, supposedly because she just really liked money. Dying at the age of twentyfour, Lin “left a fortune to her mother.”5 Xi Caiqin and Lin Fengxian both (more or less) fit the model of the filial daughter who, though forced by circumstances into prostitution, proves loyal to her family (surrogate or biological) and uses her earnings to support them. But most girls, like the actress Zhang Xilin, found success at best bittersweet and short-lived. Xilin was sold in her youth to an “evil procuress.” When she became popular, her mistress forced her to meet a performance schedule beyond physical endurance while also taking male clients.6 The perception that actresses were sexually available was pivotal to their careers, for their fortunes hinged on being patronized and penged by male admirers. In tribute to male actors, patrons would bestow gifts, pen eloquent odes, and leak flattering gossip to newspapers, but they were careful to avoid actions that might be interpreted as bearing homosexual implications. Toward actresses, on the other hand, the male penger was assumed to harbor sexual interests and did little to disguise the fact. Theater critics, it was felt, were among the most notorious such pengers, “ranking actresses exactly as they would prostitutes and writing any drivel they dared for a chance at having sex with them.”7 A sizable part of the actress’s male fan base seems to have thrived on the fantasy of receiving their idol’s private attentions. A short story in Drama Monthly titled simply “Pengjuer” poked fun at this phenomenon. In it, a Mr. Ye makes a show of being the actress Xue Kehong’s most admiring fan, even publishing his own Xue Kehong News. People start to wonder, “the way this Ye kisses up to her, what benefits does he think he’ll get?” Watching Xue perform, Ye would share his insights with his buddies: “Do you hear how she sings that passage . . . so charming. . . . And look how her sea-moon buttocks swing and sway to make one spellbound.” But a few days later Ye is looking a bit down, and, when asked why, explains: “My initial aim was to make her my concubine, but I didn’t have the means. . . . Now I just hope she’ll let me shoot a couple of rolls [of film of her] and go out for a drink with me. I won’t let these many days I raced around ‘penging’ her go to waste!”8 This short fiction seems hardly less believable than the allegedly true story of Xi Caifen, a performer of meager talent forced to return to the stage in middle age following her husband’s unexpected death. A Mr. Yu fell madly in love with this unremarkable loner actress.

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After miring himself in debt to buy tickets to her every performance, he made himself a great nuisance by publishing a pamphlet (with the money left to him by his recently deceased mother!) acclaiming Xi Caifen as the “Princess of Martial Beauty.” This act of penging was seen by the public as hilariously absurd and only served to humiliate his beloved. Finally, Mr. Yu, emboldened by drink, sneaked into Caifen’s apartment and departed only after she dumped a full chamber pot over his head.9 Stories of penging were not always so comic: male patronage presented a very real dilemma for actresses, for accepting and fending off persistent suitors were equally risky tacks. When pengers gave actresses extravagant gifts (called chantou, the same term used for gifts given to prostitutes), the implications were quite clear.10 The heroically “honest” actresses simply refused all such gifts; others merely ignored the onus to reciprocate. Shisan Dan was reputedly the honest type. Constantly pressured by rich suitors, she rejected all chantou, demurring that she knew herself to be ill-fated (she was, after all, an actress) and so hoped only to marry a simple merchant who could support her mother and brother. In the Drama Monthly’s moralistic anecdotes, most actresses who accept the lure of the chantou, whether out of naïveté or greed, get hooked, only to be thrown back into the shark-infested waters of the acting world. Such was the fate of Wang Keqin, a ravishing “feast for the eyes,” who fell for the advances of the Qing restorationist general Zhang Xun. When he summarily divorced her, all she had to show for her trouble was her new nickname, “the queued general’s abandoned concubine.”11 Warlords’ offers were especially difficult to refuse: “Since female troupes first emerged, those actresses with the most feminine charm, regardless of their artistic talent, just need a hint of becoming a warlord’s concubine and their prestige increases a hundredfold.”12 Given the profitability of such socializing, being forbidden to entertain such suitors could be just as oppressive as unwanted attentions. Jin Langyin was a popular fixture at Beijing’s Tianqiao, but she was unable to free herself from her surrogate “father,” who had taken control of her at an early age. He treated her as a “money tree” and obstructed any chance she had of receiving suitors, both limiting her career and destroying her opportunities to marry.13 And marriage, for most actresses, was the only viable escape from the stage. Indeed, for actresses, marriage and retiring from the stage were essentially the same thing. Except for those who married fellow thespians— and even for many of them—retirement upon marriage was a foregone conclusion.14 Marriage might mean escape from the toil and degradation

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of the acting life, but it also meant loss of financial independence and abandonment of one’s art. A few exceptional actresses—such as Meng Xiaodong, who had gained an almost legendary reputation by being one of only two disciples of the great laosheng Yu Shuyan—continued to practice their art as teachers. But even Meng withdrew from the stage on marrying Du Yuesheng in 1947, and in the late 1920s she had taken a two-year hiatus from her career during her “marriage” to Mei Lanfang. Mei and Meng’s relationship generated a small tempest of gossip and scandal, punctuated at one point by a failed attempt on Mei’s life by a jealous fan of Meng’s. Mei and Meng’s romance appears to have been part love affair, part publicity stunt—what could be better than Peking opera’s most acclaimed male dan marrying its most talented female sheng? But in the summer of 1926, rumor spread that the marriage was off: Once a person’s reputation is big, they cannot avoid attracting other people’s jealousy and ridicule. How much more so an actress. It is even more difficult to prevent our rumormongering friends from looking to make fun of her, making her the favorite target of their gossip. In the past, Beijing folks said Meng and Mei would make a model marriage, and now that the result is otherwise they make even more ruckus and are even more idiotic: some servant who looks after [Meng] says she dare not show her face in a theater to sing. . . . Shanghai papers are even more warped: they say she has already committed suicide.15

Meng soon resurfaced, but such alarming rumors were unfortunately all too believable given the frequency with which actresses were assailed by such humiliating public scandals.16 In sum, the Republican-era actress’s sexuality was not just a public commodity, it was a pivotal factor in her career, an essential condition for her entering the realm of onstage representation. This essentializing of the actress’s sexuality trumped and undermined the meaning of any gendered performance she might present. Although the stage in other respects functioned as a space of fictional representation, this did not hold true for the Peking opera actress’s performance of sexuality. Both the purity of the qingyi and the flirtatiousness of the huadan were denied her, the first because she could never be perceived as innocent and chaste, the second because her performance of alluring sexuality was always too real and hence too close to the obscene or to realism. Because the actress lacked social legitimacy, her art necessarily lacked cultural legitimacy. Certainly by the 1930s a handful of actresses had won a degree of critical respect, but they could not escape the milieu that shaped female troupes’ performances. Female Peking opera companies were of a dis-

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tinctly lower status than their male counterparts and badly paid; they performed in relatively cheap venues and amusement centers, usually for lower-class audiences. Elite critics disdained to be associated with such rabble: “Their average customers are all ‘see’ and no ‘hear,’ they are loafers who smell like goats.”17 To Cross-Dress or Not to Cross-Dress The permeability between the stage and society where female sexuality was concerned also had ramifications for troupe composition, specifically regarding whether troupes were mixed or single-sex and whether actors and actresses would cross-dress. By the 1930s the enforcement of sex segregation had been overturned: mixed-sex audience seating was universally permitted in China’s major cities, mixed-sex (or “genderstraight”) performances were legalized, and backstage taboos against women had been abolished;18 yet, despite these changes, single-sex troupes doing cross-gender performance remained the norm in Peking opera and in several other regional forms of drama as well. In spoken drama and movies—forms seen as stressing realism and Westernized modernity—gender-straight acting had become the norm. If the West had abandoned cross-gender acting, should not China follow suit?19 A regular contributor to The Pear Garden News repeatedly objected that “having a woman’s voice come from a man’s mouth” violated universal truths; cross-gender acting was a shameful throwback to China’s feudal days and made Chinese culture a laughingstock. He berated patrons, pengers, and newspaper editors to immediately cease bestowing public approval on cross-gender Peking opera performers, and he argued that teachers should refuse to train any future cross-gender performers and that the government should ban such performances.20 But cross-gender acting remained extremely popular in Peking opera and other regional genres. Jiang Jin, in her work on the rise of women’s yue opera in Republican Shanghai, cites one critic’s explanation: The acting seems more earnest and real in all-male or female theaters. The plot almost always falls apart when men and women perform together. For the actress certainly wants to avoid getting too close to the actor she is performing with, and the actor is also too restrained by various considerations to guarantee a well-acted play. In the case of romantic love stories, the passion felt by the lovers is reflected in the story line through flirtation, elopement, or sexual intercourse, and has to be adequately performed in order to bring the play to a climactic ending. Look at the performances put on in

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mixed-gender [sic] theaters: actors and actresses are indifferent, listless, and merely muddle through the show. That is why I always oppose mixedgender theaters. It is not that I am old-fashioned, but rather that the final product does not encourage mixed-gender performances.21

Here again the echo of the stage as a social space ramified into the realm of representation, making gender-straight performers so tentative in expressing passion that cross-gender acting seemed vivid by comparison. But though single-sex troupes remained common in many forms of drama into the 1930s, Peking opera was distinctive in the overwhelming dominance of its male troupes. In other regional genres mixed troupes were becoming increasingly common, and in genres like yue opera allfemale companies were gaining on, if not surpassing, male troupes in popularity. What explains this difference? While Republican-era actresses in all genres confronted the essentialization of their sexuality, its effects in Peking opera played into a particularly male-dominated, at times even misogynist logic because of the particular status of the genre and the discursive context reinforcing it.22 As China’s most representative national genre, Peking opera was subjected to an authoritative male hegemonic gaze. As it became a world of big money and national prestige—a rise that was, ironically, fueled largely by the rapid growth of the female audience—it became even more securely ensconced in a male milieu of politicians, bankers, journalists, and intellectuals. Many male Peking opera actors themselves contributed to this atmosphere. Whether to protect their public images or their own sense of masculine authority, most actors refused to accept women as patrons, and many even refused to take female disciples.23 Elite women who wished for a role as patron of the arts generally sought it with actresses in other genres (female patrons were quite influential in yue opera, for example); and, though there was no lack of women in the audience, their voices in the media coverage of Peking opera remained all but inaudible. Absent as subjects, female audiences hardly even appear as objects in the Peking opera press, and when they do it is usually as undiscerning novices, easily dazzled by costumes and sets, who understand little of what Peking opera has to offer. One critic, playing the urban anthropologist, brings back this report after attending a play immensely popular with Shanghai women: The better part of the audience was women. Where I sat it seemed I was surrounded by gowns, hair tresses, and perfumed clothes, so that I felt almost drunk. At most 20 percent of those seated in the first ten rows

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were men, so we know that The Pearl Tower (Zhenzhu ta) story makes its deepest impression on women. If we went according to the words of the new literature writers, we would say that twentieth-century women are unable to leave behind the stench of feudalism. We could then divide the women into types: 60 percent are chicken-skin, crane-haired types over thirty years old, 30 percent are in their twenties, and 10 percent are under twenty. . . . Fifty percent of the younger women were prostitute types, and only 10 percent were female students or intellectuals . . . so we can say that those welcoming The Pearl Tower are mostly women from the old society.24

When mentioned, female fans are typically described as interested only in fashion: this year’s fad in Guangzhou has all the “modern young women” dressing in “Mei Lanfang–style” outfits; the trendy young housewives of Shanghai are all insisting that their tutors teach them how to sing in Cheng Yanqiu’s “new melody” style.25 Though the critics tell us next to nothing about what female audiences thought about Peking opera, we know at least that the Four Famous Dan had large female followings.26 Many admired and even emulated the models of beauty these men presented on stage. Thus, while the genre’s national status explains the excessive dominance and disciplinary power of the male gaze over its performance, we must still look more carefully at these actors’ representations of female characters to understand the powerful attraction the genre obviously held for its audiences. Doing so may reveal how the social and historical context of Peking opera shaped it as a representational field grounded in a fundamentally sex-discriminating aesthetic while at the same time enabling its male dan stars to present rich portrayals of female characters that could appeal to both male and female audiences.

The Four Famous Dan The Four Famous Dan rarely, if ever, performed the roles of salacious or evil women. Instead they portrayed heroines: loyal widows facing tragic circumstances with fortitude; beautiful and virtuous young women resisting a heartless patriarchal marriage system in order to marry worthy men they truly loved; courtesans with hearts of gold swearing loyalty to their ill-fated loves. The range of characters and plots were usually within parameters appropriate to a nationalism that prized tradition. Repressive manifestations of Confucian patriarchy were often criticized, but all-out attacks on Confucian values were rare. It would make little sense to characterize Peking opera as a site of resistance to gender norms, Confucian values, or the government, but it would also be a distortion to

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see it as a cultural tool solely devoted to maintaining these systems. The images that the Four Dan produced were complex enough, and their texts open enough, to allow for a wide range of readings and identifications. Each actor had his clear style (pai) and particular skills that were honed in the charged atmosphere of comparison and competition. One critic gave a typical summary of their styles: “If we say Mei Lanfang’s artistic style carries the dignity of a palace noblewoman, Cheng Yanqiu’s style captures the simplicity of the common woman, and Shang Xiaoyun’s artistry has the vehemence of a filial heroine, then Xun Huisheng’s style more resembles the adorable liveliness of a humble family’s precious daughter.”27 Obviously, a single chapter cannot give a deep analysis of specific plays or a comprehensive picture of the range and complexity of these great actors’ works; each could easily be the subject of its own book. Here I merely sketch an outstanding aspect of each of these actors’ styles in order to flesh out the differential affects of this representational regime, beginning with the undisputed leader of the Four Dan, Mei Lanfang. Mei Lanfang’s Virtuous Beauty: Fantasy of a Reality Deferred When Zhang Eyun, the Republican era’s most successful actress of Peking opera dan roles, was a child, her mother took her to see Mei Lanfang perform. “Even though at that time I was studying to be a laosheng, in my heart I had a secret thought, wondering whether, if I ever performed dan roles, I could be as beautiful as Mei Lanfang. Of course it was just a crazy dream!”28 A few months later Zhang in fact did switch to performing dan roles and was later dubbed by the actor Wang Yaoqing “the Mei Lanfang of actresses.”29 Even for the stage starlet Zhang Eyun, Republican China’s ideal embodiment of feminine beauty was a man. More than any other dan, Mei Lanfang was renowned for his physical beauty. When the Drama Monthly held an essay competition scoring and ranking the Four Famous Dan, Mei was always the clear winner, with Cheng Yanqiu and Xun Huisheng battling it out for second, and Shang Xiaoyun generally ranking fourth. Mei’s singing technique was not thought particularly outstanding; Cheng Yanqiu was always the resounding victor in that field. Nor could Mei compete with Xun Huisheng in terms of acrobatics and movement. But regarding stage appearance (banxiang), carriage, and beauty, Mei always came in first.30 One critic described the primacy of beauty in this way: “In general,

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whether an actor’s appearance is good or bad depends half on nature and half on skill. Even if your talents at makeup and costuming are superb, if [an actor] is born with a face beyond help, even after being made up, he is still ugly. In the past, people were not so attentive to dan actors’ looks. In terms of appearance, famous dan like Chen Delin and Tian Guifeng simply could not help how awful they were. If they were around today, no matter how great they were as singers, they would never be popular (hong).”31 Such “ugly” dan could still excel as qingyi during the late Qing, when the distinction between qingyi and huadan roles was clear. But, as chapter 3 shows, in the Republican era these role types were quickly blurring or being merged into the huashan, with Mei leading the way. Mei’s characters not only sang beautifully but also danced and moved alluringly, and by the 1930s the huashan role type dominated the Peking opera stage. The huashan was at the center of an overall refiguring of Peking opera dan roles during the Republican era. In her fine study on the vanishing practice of dan performers’ use of qiao (the stilts that created the illusion of the actor’s having bound feet), Huang Yufu compared compilations of the most commonly performed Peking operas of the mid-nineteenth century (1845–61) with those of the Republican era (1917–37). Using commonly assigned dan subtypes (qingyi, huadan, huashan, and so on) and customary descriptions of primary character traits (filial daughter, unchaste woman, female martial heroine,and so on), she provides a sketch of the general trends in dan roles. The chart below, a slightly simplified version of Huang’s, is quite revealing. While the proportion of dan embodying Confucian virtues remains fairly consistent from the Qing to the Republic, the number of dan characterized as evil or salacious dwindles dramatically, marking a shift away from obscene and reviling images of women and toward more idealized portrayals. The Republic witnessed a dramatic surge in the proportion of romantic beauties, as well as the emergence of two new types of heroines, the tragic heroine and the goddess. The new huashan role type accounted for almost three-quarters of dan performances. Moreover, the range of characters granted to the huashan was unprecedented, encompassing roles from models of Confucian virtue (which had been dominated by the qingyi) to prostitutes (previously assigned to huadan) to goddesses to romantic beauties. Indeed, as the performances of the Four Dan reveal, the huashan admitted a broad range of character personalities and interpretations. But, to return to Mei’s case, though he was arguably the most influential figure in the rise

31

8

3

20

20

31

3 27

8

3

3

5

13

3

Huadan

11

3

8 16 3 5 16 0 23 0 3 100

34

Other (laodan, etc.) Subtotal

14

3

11

Qingyi

5

1

3

1

Huadan

7

6

1 6 6 6 4 74

27 6

19

1 27 6 4 6 12 10 4 100

30

Daoma Other and (laodan, wu dan Huashan etc.) Subtotal

Source: Adapted from Huang Yufu, Jingju, qiao he Zhongguo de xingbie guanxi 1902 – 1937 (Beijing: San lian shudian, 1998), 113. Note: Laodan are old-woman roles.

Confucian virtues: virtuous mother, chaste wife. filial daughter Evil, unchaste, lustful Romantic Prostitute Demon Goddess Patriotic heroine Tragic, oppressed Other Total

Qingyi

Daoma and wu dan

As percentage of all roles in each period

Figure 13. Key characteristics and subtypes of leading dan roles, in late Qing and Republican periods

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of the huashan role type, and though he performed dozens of different huashan characters, these characters represented a relatively narrow range of elegant, refined aristocratic beauties. In fact Mei’s greatest limitation, according to many critics, was that his innate elegance made him unsuited to play anything but the most aristocratic of women, imperial concubines, and goddesses. Not every critic was delighted by trends requiring every female character to be visually alluring. In an article titled “What Mei Lanfang Tells Us about Changes in Audience Psychology,” one critic linked Mei’s popularity to a general decline in cultural refinement: “Why can all these tricks attract big audiences and excite people? Naturally, because they are overstimulating and carry a little sexy flavor.” According to the author, dan actors had not yet exceeded propriety, but would not the public soon demand they do so?32 Certainly the commercial print media enjoyed playing off Mei’s sexual allure. As photographic reproduction became easier and more widely available in the 1920s, pictorials found it both provocative and profitable to direct their ambivalently gendered gaze on China’s most beautiful man/woman: “Everyone has seen the Mei Lanfang of the stage; the offstage Mei Lanfang is someone everyone wishes to see. The Mei Lanfang wearing his seaside bathing suit, revealing every beautiful curve of his figure, is someone that none have seen but everyone dreams of seeing. When Mei and his wife arrived at the shores of Beidaihe, all the visitors and travelers emptied the streets to take a look. They really saw a wonderful sight!”33 This article was accompanied by several photos; Mei’s image boosted sales of everything from newspapers to cigarettes to cosmetics. Journalists alternately described Mei as exquisitely dignified, a handsome playboy, a youthful bride, and a natural femme fatale (tiansheng youwu).34 Such risqué press coverage and blatant commercial exploitation would seem to undermine efforts to make Peking opera into a respected symbol of national culture. Moreover, in his onstage performance Mei was a master at walking the fine line between propriety and suggestiveness. In several of his signature plays, like Guifei zui jiu and Hong Ni Guan, his characters linger longingly over sexual fantasies: Each scene [in Hong Ni Guan] clearly presents [Xin Wenli’s wife, née Dong Fang—the female lead] as dignified and solemn. But as soon as she sees Wang Bodang, her feminine beauty begins to stir. Finally, it overcomes her chastity. Only Mei can perform such subtleties to capture their deepest essence. After seeing Wan Bodang, [Dong Fang’s] countenance abruptly changes. When singing the line “Glimpsing that handsome general on the

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battlefield,” her tone gradually turns tender, very different from the earlier scenes. She repeatedly thinks to kill herself with a spear, yet keeps hesitating. At this moment, the two concepts of chastity and carnal lust do battle in her breast. Mei performs such moments of faltering with consummate skill.35

Given that the male dan’s image carried connotations of deviance, immoral indulgence, and commercialism, how did Mei manage to expand the license accorded the spectator’s gaze—presenting viewers with the curvaceous figures of elite women and goddesses, often in sexually charged scenarios—yet rise above these negative connotations, thereby maintaining both his own and his characters’ virtue? Such connotations would surely have destroyed any woman’s reputation as virtuous, much less her attempt to gain national stature. The answer, of course, is that Mei was a man. We return, then, to the central importance of the split between the real and representation. This split functions both aesthetically and sociologically: the two effects are inextricable from one another. Aesthetically, Mei was seen as an artistic genius creating entrancing representations of femininity, whereas the actress who performed femininity was seen as doing little more than displaying an alluring reality. While Mei’s artistic talent consisted of creating highly visual embodiments of femininity that concealed his biological sex, his femininity remained untainted and ideal because it was illusory, and therefore immune to the social and moral misgivings that would disrupt his performance were he “really” a woman. The logic of gender here exactly recapitulates that of Qi Rushan’s theory on the essence of Chinese drama. Qi argued that Peking opera was pure Chinese theater precisely because it perfected aesthetic essence and abolished all traces of realism; similarly, Mei Lanfang is capable of representing the essence of virtuous womanhood only because, while perfecting the aesthetic form of femininity, he is not a real woman (socially and biologically speaking), nor even a “realistic” woman. (That is, a dan clearly inhabits the world of the stage, not our social world—hence the necessity that he avoid contemporarycostume plays). Both Mei’s performance and Qi’s theory rest on a logic that relentlessly quarantines the aesthetic (with its integral connotations of Chineseness) from the real (associated with Westernization). Thus, in the eyes of many critics, the male dan was not just one aspect of Peking opera among others but an indispensable element of its aesthetic essence: The movements of national drama are all abstract. It is absolutely different from spoken drama and film, which aim at realism. Spoken drama and film, in all their representations, demand a convincing realism; therefore

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this “men playing women” or “women playing men” institution would be a huge obstacle and do great harm to its realistic quality and should undoubtedly be eliminated. But in national drama we must symbolize the plays’ abstract meanings; its flavor resides in being in accord with representing the imaginary and unreal (xuwei), and the audience simply does not place on it demands for a type of realism. Therefore, in the performance of national drama, it is of course good to use women to perform women characters. But if men dress as women and perform even better? This is far from impossible. . . . This “men playing women” institution should not be overthrown, no matter what, otherwise we will fundamentally do away with “national drama.”36

For men to represent femininity was a national artistic achievement, whereas for women to do so strayed from the aesthetic premises of Peking opera and required little talent and questionable morals. On the stage, the ideally virtuous and beautiful woman was, necessarily, a man. In sum, unlike the actress of the era, the Republican-era male dan was released from the “body problem” under which he had labored during the Qing. In the all-male milieu of the late Qing teahouse, the male dan did not merely sell a staged performance of femininity; he also circulated as a socially and sexually feminine body. His biological sex did not undermine his social and behavioral gendering—the male dan actor was a feminine body. In the political and representational context of the Republican era, this was no longer the case; his femininity was refigured as an aesthetic illusion, a performance contradicting the real fact of his biologically (and socially) male body. Homoeroticism was certainly not absent from the new theater, but it was effectively disavowed, for to confuse the fact of biological sex with the illusion of gender now violated the dominant epistemology, confusing reality and representation. It was, in other words, deviance.37 In a context of publicly mandatory heterosexuality, sex and gender were no longer mutually constituting: biological sex was now seen as the basis of gender. Considering that, for women, the Republic meant release from domesticity, coupled with exclusion from political citizenship and legal sanction for the commodification of their biological sex through prostitution, the unequal effect of the “body problem” on female actresses is quite clear.38 Xun Huisheng: One of the Last Huadan Xun Huisheng started as something of an outsider to Peking opera. Intensively trained in his youth in bangzi drama, Xun began training in Peking opera quite late, registering with the Actors Guild as a Peking

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opera performer only in 1918, at twenty years of age. In this respect, Xun is a good example of the cross-pollination between forms that persisted in Peking opera: he injected bangzi’s lively singing and acting into his plays and adapted many bangzi plays into Peking operas. Xun further stood out among the other Four Famous Dan as the only one who was trained specifically as a huadan; all the others were trained as qingyi. From some angles this left Xun at a disadvantage; his voice was not especially suited to Peking opera singing, and his movement style was more vivacious and playful than elegant. But Xun took advantage of his strengths, creating huashan characters with a strong huadan flavor. Where Mei’s huashan were “refined daughters of respectable families” (dajia guixiu), Xun was most famous for his “jade daughters of humble homes” (xiaojia biyu) and his endearing servant girls. Xun was one of the only great talents to continue performing as a huadan throughout the Republican era. Indeed, the huadan fell on hard times in the Republic. In the late Qing, a typical Peking opera program almost always included at least one huadan play. But under Republican and GMD police censorship, banning plays seen as having explicit sexual content became common, and one of the easiest ways to draw such lines was to ban the huadan and the “spring longing” (sichun) plays in which they fantasized about sex.39 By the 1930s the huadan was becoming an endangered species.40 Xun performed certain banned plays only in secret, at private parties, while the other Four Famous Dan gave up performing them altogether.41 If male performers avoided such roles, their tainting effect on actresses is easily imagined. Indeed, the critic Zhang Cixi, who mourned the passing of the huadan, blamed it on the actress: “The great actors’ huadan plays were perfect expressions of style, and there was nothing obscene about them. Indeed, to know blatant lustfulness and to be cautious and fearful of wildness is not necessarily bad for social customs. But since Shanghai actresses took up huadan plays, no buffoonery is too outrageous. One imagines they would not blink an eye at going naked to please the crowd. This is really the worm eating away at our customs and wills.”42 For Zhang Cixi and other self-proclaimed “old opera buffs,” Xun was something of a living national treasure.43 In continuing to perform huadan roles, he also preserved increasingly rare qiao techniques, executing with startling agility the difficult stage walks and poses distinctive of huadan. The other Four Famous Dan all abandoned wearing qiao, a reasonable choice considering they were primarily trained as qingyi and so were never exceptionally accomplished in qiao techniques;

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Figure 14. Xun Huisheng as the huadan character Li Feng in the play Meilong Town (Meilong zhen). Xun is wearing qiao shoes in imitation of a woman’s small, bound feet. From XJXK 11 (1936).

moreover, the qiao’s imitation of the “antiquated” fashion of foot binding smacked of feudalism.44 Xun was the exception. Though he changed many previously qiao-wearing huadan characters into huashan, several of his most acclaimed plays foregrounded his mastery of the qiao. And preserving the huadan from extinction appealed not only to critics like Zhang Cixi but also to a variety of audiences with whom the huadan’s

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mischievous humor and fresh energy struck a chord. For instance, an article in The Pear Garden News titled “The Huadan’s Mission” interpreted the huadan politically. Huadan might be mostly lowly characters driven by lust, greed, or vanity, but they portrayed “people sunk deep into ruts by oppressive poverty, or by an evil marriage system.”45 The huadan, argued the author, was thus a crucial channel for social protest and should not be lost. Xun’s version of the play The Battle of Wan City (Zhan Wan cheng) provides an example of how he used the huadan to present a multivalent image. In this episode from the Three Kingdoms saga, Xun played Widow Zou, a young woman widowed soon after marriage who has, in her own words, “Alone bitterly borne out three springs / Pitifully guarding a lonely winter candle, sleeping alone.”46 In the story her nephew Zhang Xiu surrenders the city of Wan to the ruthless general Cao Cao, who, while touring the city happens to spy Widow Zou. Immediately their eyes meet, and we know that Widow Zou has abandoned all propriety; and she is soon abducted and all too easily accedes to Cao Cao’s desires. Learning of his aunt’s shamelessness, Zhang Xiu makes a surprise attack on Cao Cao, who, on fleeing, leaves Widow Zou behind, her blot on the Zhang lineage quickly avenged by Zhang Xiu with one thrust of a spear. Few actors in the Republican era elected to perform the role of the licentious Widow Zou, but Xun made Widow Zou into one of his acclaimed huadan performances. The role demanded excellent qiao skills, particularly in the climactic scene of Widow Zou’s attempted flight and death. The play also included a “thinking of spring” scene for which Xun developed an intricate pantomime of the young Widow Zou fantasizing enviously about companionship while watching a pair of mice affectionately stealing about her bedroom, a pantomime that was deleted because of its impropriety when the play was revised in the 1950s. Yet, though Widow Zou clearly belonged in the category of evil, licentious women, Xun revised the play in ways that removed the villainy from her character. That her lust is stirred on witnessing the affection of two mice for one another seems rather pitiable. On first seeing Cao Cao, Widow Zou mistakes him as the spitting image of her husband, making her attraction to him more justifiable. Finally, in Xun’s interpretation, the death scene is extended to allow Zou and Zhang Xiu time to wordlessly communicate a range of emotions. As Xun described it: “Widow Zou should not be cowardly and afraid, and even more should not seek Zhang Xiu’s pity and mercy. Widow Zou should give no thought to life

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and death, her deep remorse being far greater than her fear.”47 In these small ways Xun managed to perform a qiao-wearing, licentious huadan while also creating a text that was a deeply ambivalent and moving commentary on the value of chastity. Xun had tremendous range as a performer, with a repertoire of more than three hundred plays and dozens of “signature plays” (daibiao zuo) ranging from tragedies to comedies to military plays to revived classics to Peking opera adaptations from bangzi. More than any of the other Four Famous Dan, he was said to “present the lives of everyday people, the loves and tragedies of common folks.”48 Indeed, Xun was most beloved for his portrayals of mischievous servant girls like Hong Niang from the classic Western Chamber (Xi xiang ji) and Spring Orchid from Mistakes in Flower Field Garden (Hua Tian cuo). Mistakes in Flower Field Garden is a romantic comedy of errors in which Spring Orchid, after a series of botched rendezvous, eventually manages to get her lovely mistress Yu Yan (and incidentally herself) engaged to a promising young scholar Bian Ji.49 Though the romance between the mistress and the scholar drives the plot, the plucky and flirtatious Spring Orchid is very much the center of attention. As is typical in such plays, the servant girl is far more outspoken about romantic matters than her mistress. Here are a few snippets from the first encounter in the garden: Spring Orchid: Ah, mistress, I didn’t pick you any flowers, but if you will look to where I’m pointing, isn’t that man better looking than any flower? Yu Yan: Ask what he is doing. Orchid: OK. Ah, sir, what are you doing? Bian Ji: I’m selling calligraphy and paintings. . . . But what should I take as my subject matter? Orchid: Hmm. What subject? Eh, why not take our mistress as your subject? . . . Come, come, I’ll grind the ink for you. (Bian Ji stops at the railing and accidentally bumps Orchid’s hand. Orchid misunderstands.) Sir, what improper things are you up to? [Bian Ji writes a flattering poem and gives it to Yu Lan, but the women have no money and make an appointment to return the next day to pay for the calligraphy.] Orchid: Sir, we are going, we’ll be back tomorrow. (She looks back at Bian Ji, who is looking at Yu Lan. She takes on a naughty air.) Goodness! You really are ill-mannered, looking at someone like that, are you some sort of bug that wants to get a bite of her meat?

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Peking Opera to National Drama Bian Ji: Your mistress is beautiful, I enjoy looking. Orchid: Oh! My mistress is beautiful, and you enjoy looking. In that case, what do you think of my looks? Bian Ji: You’re good, too. Orchid: Ah! But I could do without that word too.50

Spring Orchid lets few opportunities for such humor get past her, and even enjoys niggling her mistress: Orchid: Have you bundled the clothes? Then give them to me. I’m off to Crossing Immortal Bridge. (Pausing at the door.) I, I’m not going! Yu Yan: Why not? Orchid: Why should I go? I run around back and forth, I run my legs into twigs, and who is it for? Yu Yan: Oh, I understand. When this is all done I’ll make some clothes for you, some embroidery. Orchid: I don’t want any. Yu Yan: I’ll give you a bit of money. Orchid: I have some money. I don’t want that either. Yu Yan: What do you want then? Orchid: Yes, What do I want then? It’s like this: I want you to call me. Yu Yan: To call you! Fine. Spring Orchid. Orchid: What “Spring Orchid?” Who doesn’t know I’m called Spring Orchid, what do I need with another Spring Orchid? Yu Yan: If I don’t call you Spring Orchid, how should I call you? Orchid: Address me once as “older sister.” Yu Yan: Enough. I am the master, you are the servant. This is unacceptable. Orchid: So now you put on a mistress’s airs. If you don’t address me, I won’t go. Yu Yan: Fine. Spring Orchid Sister. Orchid: Throw out the Spring Orchid, it gets in the way of “older sister.” Yu Yan: If I do that . . . Orchid: Address me! Yu Yan: Older Sister! Orchid: Ah, My good little sister! (Sings) Mistress has a generous heart, willing to regard us two as a happy pair.51

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In performing such roles Xun charmed not just Peking opera aficionados but a broad range of audiences, including social progressives. Still, the fact that Xun was a man anchored his representations of such female characters, affording him the leeway to be both flirtatious and rebellious while simultaneously assuming the role of a protector of an endangered tradition. Shang Xiaoyun’s Martial Maidens In his teenage years Shang Xiaoyun was, to use contemporary showbiz lingo, a phenom. In the Shuntian News’s 1917 election that voted Mei Lanfang the King of Actors, Shang came in a resounding first as the child-actor king at the age of seventeen. By the 1930s, however, Shang placed a distant fourth among the Four Famous Dan. One reason was his temperament. Stubborn and quick-tempered, Shang was not easy to work with. The literati authors—including Qi Rushan, Luo Yingong, and Chen Moxiang—whose collaboration was so pivotal to the careers of the other Famous Dan were all older men who expected to be treated as mentors and father figures, but Shang’s personality seems to have made it difficult for him to retain such mentors.52 Shang is also described as having a less than excellent stage presence and a limited emotional range, deficiencies he seems to have tried to remedy through hyperbolic acting.53 But he also had exceptional attributes, particularly his voice, which all critics agreed was by far the most naturally resonant and fluent of the Famous Dan, “a throat of iron” that effortlessly traversed an astounding musical range. Not surprisingly, Shang emphasized this strength, and, while he did occasionally perform as a huashan, Shang generally hewed closer to the qingyi line than his counterparts. This choice directly influenced the kinds of characters Shang performed and the typical messages of his plays. While the other Famous Dan were generally performing plays that tweaked or critiqued Confucian double standards regarding women, Shang consistently portrayed heroines whose main concern was to uphold their chastity, such as Ren Yueying, who resists the merciless threats of her abductor in The Pearl Fan (Zhenzhu shan), and Tao Menglan in Fragrance in an Empty Valley (Kong gu xiang), who attempts suicide repeatedly to protest her father’s breaking her engagement in order to extort the greatest sum out of her prospective suitors. At the same time, however, Shang embarked on a trail of creating a minor revolution within the qingyi role type itself, increas-

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ingly blending qingyi and marital heroine daomadan roles. Shang eventually became most acclaimed for a host of plays featuring heroic women in battle dress: Li Menglan, who, together with her brother Mengxiong, saves the Zhengde emperor from a usurper’s plot in Thousand-Mile Steed (Qian li ju); Lu Linggu, who avenges her father’s murder in The Nineteen Knights of Qingcheng (Qing cheng shijiu xia); and the Lady Hua Rui (in the play by that title, Hua Rui furen), King Meng Yong’s loyal widow, who dies in a failed attempt to assassinate the Prince of Qin, her husband’s rival who had hoped to make her his concubine. The unwavering loyalty and chastity of these women placed them clearly in the qingyi category, but in addition they had a chivalrous martial spirit and demeanor, being willing not only to sacrifice themselves but also to fight to defend the values of family and nation. With his indomitable (gang) and clarion (qingliang) voice, Shang brought these proud and virtuous characters to life, turning the traditionally gentle and demure qingyi into characters marked by their fortitude, vigor, and martial prowess. Moreover, in the 1930s, in the atmosphere of increasingly bald Japanese military aggression, Shang’s female knights, who took up arms or sacrificed themselves to defend the nation, became all the more poignant: the upright Qin Liangyu (in the play of the same name), who loyally defends her post against all odds, uprisings, and betrayals; and the Han dynasty heroine Wang Zhaojun (in the play Han ming fei), who submits to a political marriage that exiles her to a foreign land, sacrificing her ties to her parents, her lover, her countrymen, and her homeland, in order to save a weak empire from inevitable defeat. Mei Lanfang, though instrumental in bringing about the blossoming of the huashan, was not the first to sow its seed; that credit is often given to Wang Yaoqing, who began blending techniques from various dan role types in the last decade of the Qing. Similarly, Shang’s transformation of the qingyi had roots that reached back to Wang. Indeed, all of the Four Famous Dan at some point studied with Wang Yaoqing and owed some aspects of their signature innovations to his advice and inspiration. Shang Xiaoyun’s performances showed the influence of Wang’s path-breaking performance as Thirteenth Sister from Story of Heroic Sons and Daughters (Ernu yingxiong zhuan). In performing this martial daomadan, Wang abandoned the qiao and thereby changed how Thirteenth Sister walked and moved, adopting many techniques not from other dan, but from the martial male role type, the wusheng.54 Shang Xiaoyun expanded on Wang’s innovation, incorporating a host of wusheng techniques into his rendering of heroic women. Spending several years per-

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forming side by side with the famous wusheng Yang Xiaolou, Shang perfected his stage walks, horse-riding pantomime, fighting styles, entrance poses, and battle stances under Yang’s influence.55 In sum, Shang endowed his heroines with many physical mannerisms that were clearly reminiscent of the stalwart, highly masculine wusheng. Though an occasional critic averred that Shang’s stage walk was defective (you bing) or inelegant, the overwhelming consensus praised him for conveying the defiant strength of his characters.56 Shang’s portrayals of martial maidens were generally well received because they were consonant with the changing times. Of course the filial and chaste maiden who dons a man’s armor in order to protect empire and family is an enduring trope in Chinese literature, the best-known example being Hua Mulan, but the Mulan image took on tremendous social significance in the Republican era. In her work on Republican-era feminists, Wang Zheng demonstrates that Hua Mulan served as a model for many female activists of the era; she even ventures the phrase “Mulan feminism” to describe a form of feminist identity characterized by the ideal of sacrificing one’s personal desires and sexuality so as to dedicate oneself to bettering the public and the nation. Moreover, the Mulan image resonated throughout Republican-era popular culture, which is rich with images of women shedding the dominant signs of femininity and adopting masculine-coded dress and behavior as expressions of nationalist dedication, from the renowned activist Qiu Jin, who donned male garb and fashioned herself as a knight in the cause of the nation, to politicized fashion trends like bobbed hair and the qipao, which before its refashioning as a curve-hugging dress was intended as a unisex approximation of the typical Chinese male student uniform. Republicanera women were experimenting with dressing, moving, and behaving in new and often masculine-coded ways, and Shang’s innovations resonated with such changes. To this play with gender roles and images, Shang’s performance of martial maidens adds another layer of gender inversion, for he is a man performing women performing masculinity. The complexity of gendered play here affords a marvelous range of interpretations: perhaps, amid all this, Shang is still a feminized man in an era of threatened Chinese masculinity? Perhaps he demonstrates an attempt by men, by appropriating and imitating women’s masculinization, to defuse the sense of threat that such changes implied for male and patriarchal power? Perhaps what is of greatest historical import is the density and playfulness of gender itself, simply another example of the rich possibilities for experimenting with

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gender and sexuality in this era? All these interpretations have merit— gender and sexuality in Republican-era urban China was often radically open and experimental, impelling many self-conscious and unconscious reactions to suppress, master, or seek empowerment through such changes. Amid this complexity it is perhaps worth stating the obvious: that while the gendering of female representations was clearly in flux, and in some senses even becoming more masculine, male Peking opera actors were afforded the freedom, and even admiration, for such innovations, far more than were actresses. Cheng Yanqiu’s Tragic Women There was often an intimate connection between an actor’s vocal qualities and the characters he excelled at portraying, and this was certainly true for Cheng Yanqiu. After puberty Cheng’s voice was thought to be flawed for dan roles—in the typical dan registers it carried a “ghost pitch” (guiyin) squeakiness—and he was advised to change role types or give up the stage. But with the insightful intervention of Wang Yaoqing and his own musical brilliance, Cheng crafted new approaches to dan melodies, becoming, to many, the most inventive and emotionally moving singer of the era. With a voice described as autumnal, plaintive, gentle, “a cloud-shrouded moon,” Cheng generally sang in a lower register than was typical of dan; when reaching into the higher range, his voice became sharper, seemingly angry, defiant. With these vocal elements, enriched by his talent at smoothly weaving together different melody styles and sensitively varying his pacing to reflect his character’s emotions, Cheng developed a mournful “new melody” and won accolades for his portrayals of tragic women. Early in his career Cheng seemed to be heading down the huashan path blazed by Mei Lanfang, pledging Mei as a teacher and performing plays that, like Mei’s, highlighted his beauty, with plots often centering on romantic love and featuring the solo dancing and singing interludes so characteristic of Mei’s signature plays. Indeed, some of Cheng’s accolades sound very much like those of Mei: “Graceful and attractive, naturally elegant. Glimpsing him is like traveling to the topmost of the jade mountains, one thinks not of earthly affairs. As a young Miss he is calm and dignified, perfect for the status of a guixiu . . . as a servant he is adorably naïve, without a whit of dullard talk.”57 As his art matured, however, Cheng increasingly accented the political messages and tragic tone of his plays. While the work of all the other Four Famous Dan bore elements of

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Figure 15. Cheng Yanqiu as Zhang Huizhu in Tears on Barren Mountain (Huangshan lei). The patches on her clothes help convey the character’s poverty. Cheng’s costume is very typical of a qingyi. From XJYK 3, no. 2 (1930).

social and political critique, Cheng set himself apart by speaking explicitly about his political messages in his 1931 article “Evaluating Myself”: Pear Blossom Plot (Li hua ji) tells of Mistress Lu’s sincere love for Zhang Youqian, which will not bow to the material environment [wuzhi huanjing], and in this way denounces the death sentence of arranged marriage [maimai hunyin]; this is its strength. But its ending is of the old style: “The scholar passes the exam in the day and is wed that night.” Legend of the Red Buddha (Hong Fo zhuan) tells of Zhang Linghua rejecting the aristocracy (Yang Su) and embracing the common people (Li Jing), this revolutionary tendency [geming qingxiang] is its strength; but its emphasis on the heroic individual is excessive, much like the Napoleonic political plays that followed the French Revolution. Flower-boat Fate (Huafang yuan) and Jade Mirror Terrace (Yu jing tai) both describe the evils of the literati class’s [shiren jieji] cheating of women. The Bludgeon of Romance (Feng liu bang) promotes punishing (beating) literati elites with multiple wives. Taken together, we can say the first two plays state the problem, the third

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gives the answer; but none of these plays escape the tired formula of the talented-scholar and beautiful-maiden romance.58

Cheng had first performed the above plays in 1922 and 1923, and he was reviewing them to distinguish them from his newest plays, Tears on a Barren Mountain (1930) and Spring Chamber Dream (1931), which he sees as breakthroughs. Both plays are tragedies with strong antiwar messages. In Tears on a Barren Mountain, a family of five is gradually destroyed by the government’s insatiable hunger (symbolized by a tiger) for taxes to feed an ongoing war. The tax collectors will stop at nothing, kidnapping young boys for the front lines, stripping clothes from the recently deceased in lieu of money, and eventually driving Cheng’s character to commit suicide in grief and protest. In Spring Chamber Dream we watch as families and couples are ripped apart by forced conscription, the men driven to fight a senseless and losing battle while the women wait anxiously for news of their fate. After over a year of no word, Miss Zhang finally is reunited with her husband (the audience already aware he is dead) only to find it was just a dream, her final aria recounting the horrors of war: “Most pitiful of all, an arrow pierces the chest, a sword severs an arm, and even to their death they still know not for what cause. Isn’t that a cracked head, the dead eyes not yet shut? And there a dead man’s beard frozen with ice. Sovereign! The lonely widows, the orphans, who will come to inquire after these thousands upon thousands of nameless corpses?”59 Though, as chapter 8 shows, the political implications of Cheng’s pacifism were quite controversial, there was nothing ambiguous about his desire to make his plays serve as direct comments on contemporary social and political issues. Of the Four Famous Dan, Cheng was the most vocally engaged in the debates and discourses of the intellectual Left, analyzing the revolutionary potential of his work and its class implications, critical of its reliance on classical literary conventions. His choice to throw his efforts into creating tragic dramas speaks to a keen awareness of the prevailing claims of the era (dating back to Wang Guowei) that Chinese drama lacked great tragedies. His career even seems to trace a trajectory similar to that of many leftist writers, from engaging the more personal issues of family and sexuality early in his career to marginalizing such concerns in the 1930s in favor of topics like war, corruption, and class inequality. Cheng could thus do something that actresses of his day found extremely difficult: he could use the roles of women to express social protest while staying relatively aloof from sexual associations. Indeed, while all the Four

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Famous Dan could be described as performing a kind of gendered ventriloquism, Cheng’s didactic stance toward his own work clearly indicated that Cheng the actor was very much distinct and distanced from the female characters he created for the stage. Managing the tensions between these on- and offstage personas was an indispensable art for any Peking opera star seeking to become a national cultural icon.

Chapter 8

Nationalization through Iconification The title dawang [Great King] is not to be written off lightly, it comes with reason. . . . In olden times when speaking of sages one meant Buddhists and Confucians. Now we speak of the arrival of Mei Lanfang. People overseas are also expecting a phoenix to arrive. As the flower of the Republic he was elected by the people. Such honor did not come through bribery. In honesty his looks are merely average, but his merit lies in studied femininity. . . . In his ancient costumes he is a living ancient portrait. He excels in painting and inclines towards scholarship, and the literati who follow him are both old and new. Wuxing Mianlao, “Yong Mei ling shi,” 1928

In 1918, when Mei Lanfang was first named King of Actors (lingjie dawang), the appellation, which had so perfectly suited the laosheng Tan Xinpei, seemed an awkward fit; few critics accepted the new king, and detractors scoffed at the inappropriateness of the title. By the time the above accolade, like a succinct argument in poetic form, was written, the title was firmly in his grasp. Yet the fact that an argument still needed to be made implies that the issues remained vexing. Whence did cultural legitimacy arise in a China that was no longer an empire? What institutions could be entrusted with such authority in an age of corrupt politicians and dissimulating commercial media? How could it be assured that the persons or works chosen as the leading representatives of Chinese culture truly encompassed the nation, the people, or the culture? This problem applied to the term national drama as well. Though by the 264

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1930s anyone reading the characters guoju took them to mean Peking opera, the term was primarily deployed by Peking opera boosters, while the general public stuck with jingju, pingju, pihuang, and the like. The 1930s constituted the high-water mark for the Peking opera as a centerpiece of Chinese national culture. With the GMD in power, there was now finally a state—albeit weak both institutionally and in terms of popular legitimacy—that could lend support to propagating the genre. Mei Lanfang’s United States tour (1930), the establishment of the National Opera Music Institute (Guohua Xiqu Yinyue Yuan—NOMI), Cheng Yanqiu’s trip to Europe (1931), and Mei’s later trip to the Soviet Union and Europe (1935) all garnered various degrees of GMD support. Yet of all these events, Mei’s U.S. tour was by far the most elaborate media spectacle in Republican-era Peking opera, and arguably served more than any other event to secure the genre’s status as China’s national drama and Mei’s as a national icon. The importance of Mei’s U.S. tour punctuates the significance of Western imperialism in the Republican-era cultural crisis, for it was precisely imperialism which had induced the necessity to forge a Chinese national culture while simultaneously placing all efforts to construct one fundamentally in doubt.

Mei’s U.S. Tour A Decade of Preparation On his six-month tour across the United States in 1930, Mei Lanfang took the hearts of American theater lovers by storm. In both China and the United States, his tour was a hailed as a triumph of cultural exchange. Both the New York Times and Shenbao proclaimed it a historic validation for Chinese theater and transpacific understanding. When delivering humble speeches, whether at swanky press parties or stately graduation ceremonies (Mei received two honorary doctorates, one from Pomona College, the other from the University of Southern California), Mei invariably spoke of peace: Real peace cannot come from reliance on military force. . . . [I]f we want to protect real world peace, humanity must mutually understand, mutually tolerate and sympathize, mutually assist and not battle. . . . To achieve this goal everyone must concretely study both art and science to understand each other’s problems. . . . The people of my country in common with yours, desire peace among nations. . . . You condescend to view our imperfect portrayals of China’s ancient drama . . . and you have chosen me for

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this distinction [an honorary doctorate] which is intended as an expression of your friendship for my people.1

Attaching such earnest purpose to a Peking opera tour stamps it as a utopian mission; and, as this speech was extolled as “a model of public utterance” throughout the press, his listeners must have seen his point.2 China-U.S. relations at the time were far from harmonious. The predominant images of Chinese people in American newspapers were of “a hideous figure with a queue hanging on the back”3 and of starving, ignorant masses, ruled by brutal military regimes which even stooped to sabotaging Christian attempts at famine relief. Chinese Americans were segregated and stereotyped, and the Chinese Exclusion Act was so firmly established that it was hardly subject to debate. Some Americans were more inured, others more sensitive to the violence of these representations. In China, urban Chinese were quite familiar with the West’s racist representations, and many were irate at the humiliating one-way stream of insults: “They pick out the extraordinary vices of particular individuals and wrongly present them as the common characteristics of Chinese people . . . thus disgracing Chinese people. . . . They only show the Chinese people’s ugly side, never our virtue.”4 Those who sponsored and cheered Mei’s tour aimed to refute these images, to wrest control over the representation of China abroad. Hence, it is not surprising that despite Mei’s mollifying rhetoric of culture as a transcendent realm of peaceful understanding (he was dubbed a “Cultural Ambassador” in both the Chinese and U.S. media), many of his fans persisted in seeing culture a bit more competitively: “Recently a Japanese theater troupe following on his heels prepared to do battle with our nation’s King of Actors over this new continent; who would have expected that on opening day their audience would be so thin, a far cry from the situation at the sardine-packed Fortyninth Street Playhouse [where Mei’s troupe is playing]—good cause for [the Japanese] infuriation and mourning. Because New Yorkers have been so deeply impressed by Mei’s troupe, they find old Japanese culture is just plagiarized from China, that their art cannot come near topping China’s.”5 Clearly Western eyes were not the only ones watching. Mei’s U.S. tour was not merely a spectacle orchestrated exclusively for “curious Americans” but was just as much designed to impress his audience back home in China. In the Chinese media Mei’s U.S. tour was more than just a six-month event. By 1926, reports of an impending U.S. tour were appearing with increasing frequency, but rumors had begun even earlier. Qi Rushan

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claims that plans for the U.S. tour incubated for more than a decade. Indeed, at the time of Mei’s first tour of Japan in 1919, the papers were already predicting that this was just a rehearsal for future ventures to the United States or Europe, and similar rumors were afloat when he returned to Japan in 1924.6 Mei’s Japanese tours received hardly more press than his visits to Shanghai and Hong Kong, all of which were covered almost daily in the Chinese press. Even more conspicuous throughout the 1920s were Mei’s connections with illustrious foreigners. His private performance to honor the king and queen of Sweden, his exchange of painted fans and poems with Rabindranath Tagore, and his dinner parties for the ambassadors of Spain, Italy, and the United States were all recounted and photographed for newspapers and pictorials.7 Becoming a central fixture in this powerful circle of Chinese and foreign elites—a community which thrived on intercultural exchange, both as a means to executing their duties (be they educational, commercial, or political) and as an ideology explaining their lifestyles and work—Mei gradually began building his reputation as a cultural ambassador. Thus the U.S. tour was a crucial undercurrent shaping Mei’s public image years before it actually took place. Through the 1920s Mei hosted at least eighty events, entertaining more than six thousand guests of all nationalities. Until the Nationalist government took charge in 1927, Mei himself probably footed the bill for these galas. When Mei invited foreign guests to such intimate gatherings and performances, Qi Rushan commenced his “subliminal advertising”: “Every method used in entertaining [foreign friends], every object, was in pure, ancient Chinese style. The dishes and refreshments were all extremely elegant; cups and plates and all embellishments in the room, every square inch was in Chinese style. . . . All the paintings hung had to be ink landscape paintings . . . because I could take advantage of them to explain Chinese theater. . . . All the energy expended [on these occasions], the time, the money, cannot be counted.”8 Mei and Qi were meticulous in cultivating contacts. Friends in government, like Li Shizeng, were well situated to introduce Mei to ambassadors. Educators like the Nankai University president, Zhang Boling, his nephew P. C. Chang, and John Leighton Stuart of Yenching University connected Mei with foreign teachers and writers. Qi kept in touch with these overseas acquaintances, sending them publicity photos and asking them to lobby their local papers to cover Mei’s long-anticipated visit. Qi estimated the cost of photos for foreigners at more than four thousand yuan yearly, but they resulted in more than thirty American magazines running articles about Mei before

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he ever set foot in the United States.9 Public-relations tendrils extended from France to South Asia. Mei’s membership on the board of the Nanyang Tobacco Company, manufacturers of Mei Lanfang Cigarettes, helped spark several attempts to bring Mei to Singapore and Southeast Asia, and advertisements for Mei Lanfang Cigarettes often loomed in Shanghai newspapers heralding Mei’s arrival just prior to a tour.10 These social networks were clearly more than instrumental: they were the relations of production that shaped Mei’s public image. While Mei was China’s most famous actor, many of his admirers had only seen his picture in the papers. Public impressions of his image, personality, and lifestyle were shaped as much by press reports and urban folklore as by his performances. Mei was said to be one of the two must-see sights of China, because all the foreign VIPs went to see him, along with the Great Wall.11 The Chinese press constantly showed Mei as the object of foreigners’ admiration, clearly contributing to his construction as a national symbol. But while his immersion in a glamorous world of international elites meant that his national identity was constantly made emblematic, it was precisely such scenes that could also make his nationalism seem suspect. Mei’s supporters were keenly aware of the potential backlash. Negotiations over the funding for his tour provide an example of this sensitivity. The tour would require a large amount of capital up front, for which Qi Rushan mobilized the influence of Li Shizeng, a buddy from Qi’s days in France. Before Li agreed to support the tour, he queried: “There are two ways of putting this. If Mei is going out for business purposes, if this money will earn a profit, then he does not need any help—and there is no way to help. If he is going in order to link up cultures for the public good, then not only will I help, but I should wholeheartedly assist.”12 Li’s attempt to quarantine Mei’s promotion of national culture from any contaminating associations with commercial interests might seem disingenuous, but it is illustrative of the social tensions that Peking opera stars had to negotiate because of their changed social standing. Qi vowed that profit was not the aim, and Li did indeed help, though indirectly. Li decided first to establish the National Opera Music Institute, toward which he channeled funds from the French portion of the Boxer Indemnity Fund, which was under his auspices. NOMI then “invited” Mei to go abroad, an act that fell short of directly funding the tour but did officially stamp the trip as a government-supported cultural mission. Soon two separate loans for fifty thousand yuan apiece were negotiated by Mei’s banking friends, especially Feng Gengguang of the Bank of China.

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Mei’s publicists and literary advisers worked tirelessly to disinfect Mei’s onstage image of any whiff of aesthetic or moral impropriety and to cleanse his offstage image of any taint of greed or arrogance. Yet even when, or perhaps especially when, government officials dubbed Mei a national figure, he still lacked the public’s overwhelming confidence. An air of opportunism haunted such official claims, a sense that officials were capitalizing on Mei’s popularity and he on their power and status. No matter how often Mei’s performances were described as living resurrections of China’s ancient cultural heritage, nor how many penging journalists sermonized on Mei’s loyalty to Sun Yatsen’s memory and the Three People’s Principles, some other article would emerge challenging his patriotism, the authenticity of his costumes, or his ticket prices. Respect for Mei’s greatness was far from unanimous: other actors had their patrons who penged them loyally, and constantly pointed out where they exceeded Mei’s talents: Cheng Yanqiu’s singing was more inventive, Xun Huisheng’s gestures were more fluent and his ticket prices more affordable. Several critics found Mei’s new plays pretentious and gauche.13 On the eve of his U.S. tour, Xiong Foxi announced his skepticism in no uncertain terms: Everyday while he is [in the United States] he will trot out some “neither horse nor donkey” rainbow-lit, ancient-costume plays like Chang E Escapes to the Moon and Goddess Scatters Flowers. . . . These plays require that the most essential attention be given to lighting and sets; any mistakes and they are laughable. . . . The pity is that not only is Mei Lanfang completely ignorant about such arts, but he has no one working with him who is expert in lighting or sets. Look at how he uses every color of light at once! . . . It is really a sloppy mess to make one’s eyes burn. . . . Of course Mei Lanfang can go to the United States, who could stop it? But I urge him not to perform there, and certainly not to be responsible for the mission of promoting East-West artistic exchange. Because he will fail. The reasons are simple. . . . Just in terms of the kind of music used on stage, that is enough for Americans to find it hard to take. . . . And if he thinks his kan [visual appeal] will make him outstanding, then Mei Lanfang is really hallucinating. . . . But yes, there still is one way that Mei Lanfang can attract Americans: by being one of China’s great dan actors! A man who performs women’s roles! On this score he certainly can be successful! Because Americans love this kind of thing, just like our rural folks love sideshows.14

Xiong’s bitter prediction that Mei’s exoticism would make him a laughingstock did not come true. Over the years Mei had learned to manage his on- and offstage roles with great dexterity. Though the Chinese press

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clearly enjoyed playing with various gender-bending possibilities, such as Mei’s “marriage” to Meng Xiaodong, by the 1930s journalists no longer impugned Mei on the basis of his effeminacy or made allegations of homosexuality, and Mei’s advisers consciously managed his public image to resist associations with homosexual patronage, foregrounding instead his relations with his wives and children. Of course, equating Mei’s offstage images with heterosexual masculinity and onstage images with femininity is reductive: part of what made him so riveting was the gendered ambiguity of his beauty and his ability to transform. Still, when Mei played his offstage roles of husband, citizen, star, or businessman, the Chinese press took his maleness for granted. To become a national icon, it was necessary that Mei accomplish two radically different performances: onstage performances of virtuous, traditional femininity, and offstage performances of modern male citizenship. The dominance of a regime of representation that rigidly divided these two realms was thus, in a certain sense, constitutive of Mei’s iconic status, and this bifurcated persona would be similarly reproduced in the U.S. media coverage of Mei’s tour.15 Mei Lanfang’s U.S. Tour as Tactical Orientalism Curious Americans stared at the visitor as they do at their own movie idols. From the Kansas City Independent, as quoted in English in Northern Pictorial, 19 April 1930

If the construction of Mei Lanfang into an icon of Chinese national culture were written in the form of an equation, it might look something like this: National Culture = National Drama = Peking Opera = Mei Lanfang The preceding chapters have documented the tortuous path by which Peking opera was recoded as national culture, but there was no lack of dissenters, both outside and inside opera circles, who objected to one aspect or another of this equation. But this problem was not faced only by Peking opera and Mei Lanfang. No force of media or government had the authority to make the “national culture” label stick to any chosen representative, because during the Republican era the concept of Chinese national culture was itself an oxymoron. The crisis of national culture was not simply an

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internal matter; it had become a crisis, indeed, had become a concept and object requiring construction, precisely because of imperialism. Imperialist justifications for the discrimination against and domination of China boiled down to the assertion that Chinese culture was incompatible with the concept of national sovereignty. Extraterritoriality, the U.S. exclusion policy toward Chinese, and Japanese incursions into Manchuria (to list only a few key issues) were all founded on the contention that the Chinese were culturally incapable of the moral, rational, and legal discipline required of a modern citizenry with national sovereignty. The colonial modern context framed China’s lack of sovereignty and selfdetermination as a cultural issue; hence Chinese intellectuals toiled and experimented anxiously to find those cultural and communicative practices that would unite a national audience and forge them into citizens. Whether these intellectuals saw the immediate cause for China’s fragmentation as external aggressors or internal malaise, they concurred that the problem China faced in the present manifested itself as a lack of an effective national culture. As has been argued powerfully, though from extremely different angles, by Rey Chow and Joseph Levenson, we must therefore read China’s debates on culture and nationalism within this context of global imperialism and colonial modernity.16 As we have seen, altercations over Mei Lanfang’s ability to symbolize Chinese national culture were usually fought on the basis of issues internal to China: the extent of Mei’s patriotism, his class affiliations, and the cultural messages and aesthetic quality of his performance. Yet despite great efforts exerted by his supporters through both the popular and scholarly media, the underlying doubt generated by China’s subservient position ultimately subverted any positive claims. It was specifically the occasion of Mei’s U.S. tour—the moment in his career when the structures of imperialism were most explicitly addressed and redressed—that naturalized and fixed Mei’s status as an icon of Chinese national culture. Mei left Beijing on 28 December 1929, passing through Tianjin, Hangzhou, and Shanghai for farewell banquets and last-minute injections of capital, and he steamed off for the United States on 18 January 1930. In the days before his departure from Shanghai, Mei had appeared daily in the papers with Li Shizeng, the mayor, Zhang Qu, and other national figures who plugged Mei’s mission as patriotic.17 At his Hangzhou farewell party, the city’s Mayor Cui “gave a deeply moving speech, saying that of all China’s contributions, unfortunately only our art wins foreigners’ appreciation, so we must fervently promote it.”18 The troupe’s

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itinerary in the United States was christened by a special performance in Washington, DC, attended by the former first lady Edith Wilson.19 They moved on to perform in New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Honolulu and finally returned to Shanghai on 19 July 1930. Mei’s slow journey home to Beijing was punctuated by innumerable congratulatory banquets and welcoming processions. By the time Mei arrived in the United States, the cameras, bouquets, banners, and libations were all poised to greet him. In each city where he performed, the China Institute or China Society had organized a squad of sponsors (more than two hundred socially prominent figures, such as Edith Wilson, Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford, and Norman Chandler), who backed Mei’s performance, dined with him, and appeared with him in the society pages of the United States (and the Chinese) press. Mei tirelessly hobnobbed with actors; Paramount was putting out feelers on a movie deal. As in the Chinese press, the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, and the San Francisco Chronicle covered his social activities as closely as they did his performances. As much as Mei’s onstage performances were praised for being authentically traditional, his offstage performances at political and social shindigs were depicted as entirely modern. He was the honored first-class passenger jaunting in a private plane to San Diego to dine with the mayor, and escorted on a motor parade through the city of San Francisco by Mayor James Rolph.20 He was the respected expert getting a peek at blueprints for a modern theater. Being the paragon of his art, he gained access to the most alluring amenities of modern Western living and the beaming trust of customs officials. Yet this path to modernity was terribly exclusive: the seventeen other actors with him were nearly invisible, riding on Mei’s coattails and in third-class compartments. Though subjected to a crash course in Western table manners, they invariably ate at an assigned Chinese restaurant while Mei and his managers rushed from formal receptions at the Plaza Hotel to dueling cocktail parties on Park Avenue, both unfortunately scheduled simultaneously in Mei’s honor.21 Clearly the red carpet rolled out for a cultural ambassador was only wide enough for one hero to tread. It is not surprising then, that Qi Rushan opens his Diary of Mei Lanfang’s United States Tour with a populist gesture: “This trip of Mr. Mei Lanfang to the United States altogether counts as a great success. This is not only Mei’s individual honor, but an honor every Chinese should appreciate, because this is an international honor.”22 In his generosity Qi is attempting to recruit an audience of Chinese spectators, an

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audience in a paradoxical position to the tour, for they are its secondhand witnesses as well as its hidden motor, invisibly present in the electric aura of fame which surrounds Mei even on the far side of the Pacific. Qi addresses his readers as Chinese nettled by issues of international esteem, and it is ultimately in their reception of Mei’s tour that he seeks justification and validation for his project of national theater reform and promotion. The United States tour entailed extraordinary logistics both offstage and onstage. Professor P. C. Chang of Columbia University and Qi Rushan served as tour managers. Among their tasks was tailoring Peking opera to fit Broadway. To avoid straining the foreign audience’s attention, each evening’s performance was to last no longer than two hours. Four scenes were performed, each from a different play, to provide variety as well as a sense of the breadth of China’s theatrical tradition and of Mei’s virtuosity. A bilingual Chinese American woman came on to summarize each forthcoming scene, supplementing the lengthy printed theater program, which was replete with essays by Hu Shi and others on the forms and history of Chinese theater, and with synopses of the fifteen plays and twelve dances from which each night’s potpourri of scenes was selected. The tasks involved in packaging Peking opera for Broadway read like a menu of standard Orientalist tropes. Getting foreigners hooked on Mei required extensive explanations of Chinese theater practices (the marshaling of knowledge), accentuation of the exotic, and a historicism that denied Peking opera’s contemporaneity with the modern West. Qi had already worked for over a decade on the “knowledge” project, generating volumes of definitions of Chinese theatrical forms, musical instruments, and props, all scientifically categorized and illustrated. He wrote four books and compiled illustrations for several more in preparation for the trip, also overseeing the transcription of Mei’s songs into Western five-line musical notation. Invaluable sources for drama historians, these books were aimed as much to facilitate understanding as to protest Western ignorance. Qi’s tomes were intended to stun Westerners with the richness of Chinese tradition through a kind of polemical empiricism.23 Qi also played on the Western fascination with the exotic: “Friends told me to completely mold it into Chinese style. . . . If they compare Chinese theater to Western theater there will be mutual misunderstanding. . . . They must use a new pair of eyes to see [Mei Lanfang]. . . . Since they use another spirit to study Chinese theater it will be much easier for them to get into it.”24 As we have seen, this type of essentialist logic was not new

Figure 16. Mei Lanfang riding with Mayor James Rolph in San Franscisco. From BHYB (Northern Pictorial), 10 June 1930.

Figure 17. Mei Lanfang at a reception in Hawaii. From Mei Shaowu, ed., Mei Lanfang (Beijing: Beijing chubanshe), 1997.

Figure 18. Mei Lanfang receiving honorary doctorate from Pomona College, near Los Angeles. From BYHB (Northern Pictorial), 28 June 1930.

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to Qi. In the special case of Broadway, sinisizing also entailed transforming the theater itself: ushers donned Chinese-style tunics, lanterns were hung in doorways and above the stage, and paired poetic scrolls hung on two prop pillars, simulating old-style Chinese stage architecture.25 Qi’s success on this count is reflected in all the rave reviews which say, in essence: “It is like nothing you have ever seen before!”26 Qi also marshaled history in order to explain elements of the performance that American audiences were likely to see as “primitive,” such as the scarcity of stage sets and props, the exaggerated moral stereotyping of characters, and, of course, men playing women’s roles. To forestall criticism, the educational playbills and press packets referred readers back to Elizabethan and Greek traditions. The San Francisco playbill opened with an article by Hu Shi, described as the “father of the Chinese Renaissance,” which begins: “The Chinese drama is historically an arrested growth . . . [making it] all the more interesting to the students of the history of the drama. For nowhere in this modern world are to be seen such vivid presentations of the irrevocably lost steps in the slow evolution of the dramatic art as are seen on the Chinese stage today.”27 Chinese theater was a living tradition; when Mei’s Western fans walked down the aisles, they entered another space and time. Such self-Orientalizing was undertaken in the interest of gaining international respect for Chinese culture respect that was expressed in dozens of curtain calls, rave reviews, and the red-carpet treatment reserved for modern dignitaries. Mei’s reviews were universal raves. J. Brooks Atkinson’s is typical in its exuberance: The drama of Peking, whence Mr. Mei and his actors come, has almost no point of similarity to the drama with which we are familiar; and the barrier of language is as nothing by comparison with the barrier of a completely exotic art. It is stylized, conventionalized and as old as the hills. It is, in fact, an arrested form of classical drama with virtually no striving after illusion and hardly a suggestion of realism. . . . If you can purge yourself of the sophomoric illusion that it is funny, merely because it is different, you can begin to appreciate something of exquisite loveliness. . . . [T]he chief impression is one of grace and beauty, stateliness and sobriety, of unalloyed imagination, and of living antiquity.28

Atkinson almost directly borrows the language of Hu Shi’s theory of arrested historical development and Qi Rushan’s theory of aestheticsm in this description. Somewhat ironically, while United States theater critics during Mei’s tour were all echoing Qi Rushan’s theories about the aestheticist essence of Chinese drama, Mei’s popularity in the United States

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hinged on the perception that in his stage makeup one could easily believe Mei was a “real” woman. George Warren of the San Francisco Chronicle attended several shows: “His hands are marvelously beautiful; his figure slender as a girl’s; . . . Mei’s acting [in Vengeance on the Bandit General (Ci hu)] had the greatness of [Charlotte] Cushman in the murder scene of Macbeth. . . . There were moments when his acting transcended the trammels of the foreign medium and became universal.”29 If making Mei Lanfang into a national icon involved the equation, seriatim, of national culture, national drama, and Peking opera with Mei Langfang, then the final proof of success lay in the forgetting of the equation itself. A symbol of national culture is only truly effective once it is naturalized, once the long, complicated equation is axiomatically intuited by a receptive audience in its simplified and reversed form: Mei Lanfang = Chinese national culture. This reversal of the equation is precisely the moment of essentialism, the moment when the particular icon is instantaneously (mis)taken as symbolic of the universal it supposedly embodies. We could describe Mei’s U.S. tour as an instance of tactical Orientalism, in that, through the tour, Mei tactically employed the Western Orientalist gaze to help achieve this essentializing flip. In this Orientalist gaze the particular and universal were one and the same; the equation was already naturalized. In the United States there was neither doubt nor tension over the idea that a particular Chinese person, Mei Lanfang, or a specific cultural form, Peking opera, could embody the Chinese essence, could represent China. Through his tour, Mei could receive acclaim for his art as well as lavish and respectful treatment for his person; under the Western gaze he could simultaneously embody traditional Chinese culture onstage and modern national citizenship offstage. The symptom had returned to its origin; those who had made Chinese national culture an urgent impossibility would be forced to concede, even praise, its existence as embodied by Mei Lanfang. For a brief moment Mei’s tour proved that it was possible for a Chinese national subject to overcome and master the almost insurmountable contradictions which colonial modernity imposed, to embody both authentic tradition and modern national citizenship simultaneously. Mei’s tour was a spectacle within a spectacle: the Chinese media watched American audiences and critics watch Mei. Winning international recognition and respect on his tour, turning the Western gaze into a spectacle itself, naturalized Mei as a national icon in a way that no merely domestic spectacle could. On the United States tour, Mei’s onstage

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and offstage images were both crucial; Mei’s performance of the supposedly traditional essence of Chinese culture became the vehicle that brought him recognition as a respected citizen of the modern world. In the final analysis, Mei could become an icon of national culture only when all these interpretive layers (offstage performances of modern, male citizenship; onstage performances of “traditional” femininity; and Qi’s essentialist packaging of Chinese aesthetics) converged in the production of Mei’s singularly bifurcated embodiment. The vast majority of the Chinese press coverage beamed with pride and congratulated Mei on his triumph.30 When he mounted the stage for the first time after his return home, at the grand opening of Beijing’s Haarfei Theater, the crowd erupted with a standing ovation that lasted more than ten minutes.31 Amid the roar of congratulations that followed, however, peeps of irony and grunts of protest were audible. The critic Wang Xiaoqing, in an article titled “Has the Artistic Position of Chinese Drama Really Been Firmly Established?” accused Mei of presenting to the United States “a China that is ultimately a musically dead nation.” The orchestra was moved offstage and the gongs intentionally underplayed so that “all the representative force of the Chinese music could not but vanish.”32 Wang concluded that Mei’s U.S. performances obliterated the essence of Peking opera, and thus Mei and his friends were betraying China in order to seek personal fame. Wang clearly disagreed with Qi Rushan’s argument that the essence of Peking opera was not the music but the movement; hence what Qi and P. C. Chang saw merely as a matter of accommodating American tastes, Wang saw as maiming Chinese culture beyond recognition. Another hostile shot was fired in a two-part article titled “Mei Lanfang Has Been Sold Out,” which accused Mei’s managers of mishandling his public relations: “In all the cities Mei has passed through, Chinese-American organizations have asked him to raise money for education, but he has refused everyone; this is not like Mei’s usual generous and charitable behavior. . . . All told, Mei will make no more than 56,000 yuan ($20,000 U.S.) which for Mei, if compared to his usual worth, really is not much money. But for those who are using Mei to advocate art, how much are they making? $90,000. . . . Yeah, advocating art!”33 The writer here is confusing several complex questions of accounting for which the actual documents are lost. According to Mei’s son, Mei Shaowu, the money did not go to line either Qi Rushan’s or P. C. Chang’s pockets but was embezzled by an accountant hired on Qi’s recommendation.34 But the correspondent goes on to list other objections

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to the way the tour was conducted: no one in the group spoke Cantonese; they neglected to visit the editors of Chinese newspapers in the United States; in San Francisco’s Chinatown, they played at a theater that had recently been closed down for obscenity and was the object of scandal; they ignored groups that had enthusiastically welcomed them; they neglected to hand out political pamphlets that had been printed for them to distribute; and P. C. Chang was said to treat Mei like a puppet, forcing him to perform for Westerners at cocktail and tea parties despite Mei’s evident squeamishness.35 Interestingly, these objections seem to have arisen out of Mei’s visit to San Francisco, the only city in which he specifically booked a second theater (the one mentioned above) especially to perform for a Chinese-American audience. As with the attacks on Mei during tours in cities like Hankou and Kaifeng, this one probably arose because a cog in Mei’s publicity machine received too little grease—most likely a San Franciscan named Wu Xianzi, the only person to whom Qi Rushan explicitly apologizes in his diary of Mei’s trip. Through Wu’s letting off of steam, deeper grievances were vented. Cantonese Americans, like Mei’s troupe of accompanists and actors, were a supporting cast, indispensable to the success of the tour both logistically and as spectacle, but conspicuously marginalized in order to focus attention on Mei and on the essentialized “East meets West” narrative, which their presence complicated. First, their presence as a segregated minority proved how exceptional the respect being shown Mei Lanfang actually was, thereby undermining claims that respect for Mei translated into respect for all Chinese. Second, the Cantonese presence demonstrated that Chinese culture was neither unified nor easily represented by Mei, for Cantonese Americans had been bringing actors from Canton and Hong Kong to perform in the United States for decades before Mei’s tour, yet these visits were never heralded as artistic events by the white American press.36 Cantonese Americans laid much of the groundwork for Mei’s tour, but the tour managers clearly felt that to maintain the air of exotic novelty around Mei’s visit, Cantonese opera and Cantonese American people had to remain marginalized, an attitude all the more offensive because it likely reflected the regional chauvinism of Mei and his friends. For Mei personally, the articles that stung worst were probably those poking fun at what he considered one of the greatest honors of his career: his receipt of two honorary doctorates from American colleges.37 Of all the events on Mei’s journey, these ceremonies received the most concentrated coverage in the Chinese press, and for years after his return the

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papers continued to refer to him as Dr. Mei. Though few articles directly ridiculed Mei’s new status as a scholar, many did take a defensive tone on his behalf, implying that the buzz in the street deemed Mei’s scholarly posing comical. One snide article reports that Mei’s acquaintances all say he has gotten a swelled head and quotes Mei as saying: “I am preparing, after my return home, in thanks for this undeserved praise, to apply myself in my free time to diligently studying Chinese and Western literature . . . and producing scholarly work.”38 Perhaps, the author smirks, Mei should have stayed in the United States, where his fantasies came true. To those who had labored for decades to recast Peking opera as an internationally respectable form of culture, Mei’s doctorates were a symbolic milestone; to many others, the figure of Mei posing as a scholaractor simply by virtue of receiving honorary degrees seemed forced. In fact, Mei did eventually take up the pen to write several highly influential essays on Peking opera acting, but not until the 1950s. If he had planned to do so on his return home in 1931, he might have found that the next act did not follow his script.

Cheng Yanqiu’s Challenge Of the Four Famous Dan, Mei was the oldest, Cheng Yanqiu the youngest. In fact Cheng had pledged Mei as a teacher in his youth, and Mei in turn had instructed Cheng in the performance of one of his signature plays, The Favorite Concubine Becomes Intoxicated, so that Cheng could serve as Mei’s emissary to the Nantong Acting Academy in 1921, when Mei was detained by other obligations. By 1930 their relationship had changed: Cheng had become Mei’s only potential rival. Cheng was not only popular but had powerful patrons as well, and he was even taking the lead over Mei in constructing that public image that had been so unthinkable in the Qing, that of the actor-scholar. Earnest about drama’s political importance, Cheng delivered speeches and published essays like “My Views on Drama” and “A Self-Examination” in which he elaborated on the actor’s social mission.39 At this peak in his career, Cheng produced two original, popular, and deeply moving plays, Tears on a Barren Mountain (1930) and Spring Chamber Dream (1931). Both were exceptional in their explicit denunciations of the suffering caused by war and their promotion of pacifism. This message was simultaneously politically powerful and profoundly ambivalent, for it admitted of two radically different interpretations in the context of Japan’s invasion of Manchuria. On the one hand, these

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plays could be seen as righteous condemnations of both the warlord brutality that had devastated China throughout the 1920s and Japanese imperialism in Manchuria; on the other, by promoting pacifism they could also be interpreted as supporting the GMD’s soft policy toward Japan, including the tremendously unpopular decision not to resist the Japanese invasion.40 The plays, along with Cheng’s earnest declarations dedicating his art to pacifism, elicited impassioned responses. “If [we] just perform a few new plays praying for peace and opposing war this just diminishes our resistance,” complained critics, one adding that at best Cheng’s plays elicited only hollow sympathy from imperialists: “The cat cries over the mouse—false mercy.”41 Such bitterness likely reflected less on the plays themselves than on the machinations of patronage to which they were tied, for these plays clearly ingratiated Cheng with the GMD’s culture czar, Li Shizeng, whose largesse toward Cheng became unabashedly heavy-handed in the 1930s.42 In 1929, when Li had “invited” Mei Lanfang to tour the United States on behalf of NOMI, it seemed inevitable that Mei would have an important position in the organization. But by the time Mei returned to Beijing in late 1930, the blueprint for NOMI had changed. In the NOMI hierarchy, Mei Lanfang and Cheng Yanqiu were equals: Mei was the president of NOMI’s Beijing branch, with Qi as vice president; Cheng headed the Nanjing branch, with his literatus collaborator Jin Huilu as assistant. Yet, by some peculiar logic, the National Drama Academy (NDA)—the heart of the project—though located in Beijing, was placed under the supervision of the Nanjing branch. Mei’s post was entirely hollow, with no programs under it, whereas Cheng had oversight of a museum, a publishing project that put out the Drama Studies Monthly (Juxue yuekan), and the NDA, at which Cheng frequently taught (he became its principal in 1935). Describing the NDA’s founding, Jiao Junyin, who served as its principal for the first four years, begins with an aside: “Of all the actors of pihuang plays, Mei Lanfang and Cheng Yanqiu are the most famous. They both compete with each other, which is a great pity, because the opposition between them prevents the art from reaching its consummate state.”43 Jiao describes the problem as just a battle between two actors’ egos, but he was certainly aware that the rivalry was also a battle within a powerful patronage network. Though Mei’s United States tour had been sanctioned as a cultural mission by the government, the funds financing his tour had been privately raised, primarily through Feng Gengguang, president of the Bank of China. On the other hand, Cheng was now supervising the govern-

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ment-sponsored NDA and, moreover, was preparing to take a one-year research trip to Europe, for which a subsidy of one hundred thousand yuan was to be supplied directly from the Boxer Indemnity Funds administered by Li Shizeng. Though he would give no public performances, Cheng would be hosted in Poland, France, and Switzerland by various colleges and drama institutes in his capacity as a state-endorsed scholar. It appeared, then, that Li Shizeng was playing favorites, and he certainly was, but the situation was also more complicated than that. An insider in many of these affairs, Zhang Bojun, in a short article written just before his death in 1982, notes other factors that were at work. In 1928, T. V. Soong, the GMD finance minister, raised government ownership in the Bank of China to 20 percent and was negotiating with the bank vice president, Zhang Jia’ao, over re-creating it as the Nationalist Central Bank.44 With the increased government ownership and the growing ties between T. V. Soong and Zhang, Feng Gengguang, Mei Lanfang’s most devoted and powerful patron, was nudged aside by Zhang.45 In 1930, Li Shizeng used part of the Boxer Indemnity Funds under his control to establish the Agriculture Bank, which had many interdependent deals with the Bank of China. Li was therefore beholden to Zhang Jia’ao, who was a great fan of Cheng Yanqiu’s. Zhang penged Cheng into his position as president of NOMI and was enthusiastic about his European research trip, and Li Shizeng was in no position to rebuff Zhang’s requests.46 With these forces of patronage behind the scenes, Cheng mounted his challenge to Mei’s dominance of the Peking opera world, not by trying to outdo Mei on the level of glamour and charisma but by laying claim to the title of internationally recognized dramaturge, teacher, and activist. Unlike Mei, who claimed to represent Chinese traditional culture—with all its Orientalist traps and trappings—Cheng, on his tour of Europe, played only the offstage role of modern Chinese scholar-actor, concerned with using drama to promote international peace and national reform. His letter to the Beijing Actors’ Guild described the aim of his trip: Eastern and Western cultures are clearly different, so Eastern and Western drama are also clearly different. But, looking at modern trends, everything is becoming part of one world system. The power of imperialism and capitalism reaching into every corner has already succeeded in making the economy into a world system. Furthermore, the League of Nations has achieved a global political system, Christianity has achieved a global religious organization, the Red Cross is a worldwide benevolent organization. . . . In the past Western drama existed in an atmosphere monopolized by realism. Compared with Chinese drama’s “waving a whip represents a horse,” “this chair represents a mountain,” it is as though the two stand at

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opposite extremes. But now the high tide of Western realism is past and a new symbolism is on the rise; the grand [realistic] sets which were once seen as crucial to the life of the play are being replaced by a few harmonious colored lines without any real mountains, real waters, or real buildings remaining.47

These were interesting thoughts, but they hardly clarified Cheng’s goals or satisfied the doubters. As one journalist described it: “Cheng’s upcoming trip to Europe to study (?)”48 The Northern Pictorial’s coverage of Cheng’s departure ranged from clammy to pointedly bitter: “Li Shizeng’s funding of Cheng Yanqiu’s trip West has aroused attacks from all quarters. Indeed, at this time of national crisis in educational funding, to bestow enormous sums on a single actor really deserves denouncing. . . . [A]nd Cheng is being invited abroad to do who knows what?”49 Reports on Cheng’s farewell banquets in Tianjin and Beiping were bland, cataloguing the number of diners and dishes at each expensive function and rating the keynote speeches as rather dull, and, in Cheng’s case, grandiose.50 Cheng spent two six-month periods in Europe, hosted by prominent playwrights and drama schools in various countries, and produced a two-part formal report on his return. The first half of his report is a diary of his travels. He visited the national theaters in Paris and Berlin, sang arias before scholarly gatherings, instructed a French woman in the sword dance, visited Chinese foreign students in their international dorms, attended German pacifist drama productions, collected more than two thousand scripts and dozens of theater blueprints to be shipped back to NOMI’s library, and taught a class in tai-ji-quan in a Swiss university.51 Unlike Mei’s United States tour, these events received little media attention either abroad or in China. The second half of Cheng’s report presented his recommendations for reforming Chinese drama. There was little here to surprise anyone. Cheng observed that European governments provided a much more thorough curriculum in both drama and music in their schools and universities, which was further supplemented by state support for companies that performed inexpensive, high-quality dramas which students frequently attended. Cheng strongly recommended that the Chinese government provide such education and fund drama companies in a similar fashion, something surely beyond the financial abilities of the current government. He urged that China adopt a standard form of musical notation to facilitate the interchange of musical styles both internationally and at home, while also bringing unity to dramatic instruction and performance across China. Lower theater ticket prices, government

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sponsorship for drama, building a national theater, expanding the role of the director in Peking opera productions, and improving backstage facilities, lighting, and stage design were among the reforms that required immediate attention.52 Though Cheng articulates these points clearly, none of them were new. Mei and Qi did not sit idly by as Cheng’s stock with the GMD steadily rose. In early 1931 they organized their own institute, the National Drama Study Society (Guoju Xuehui—NDSS). The board of directors included Yu Xuyan, Feng Gengguang, and Li Shizeng (apparently Mei had not held Li to blame for the NOMI debacle). The NDSS started its own small training school and unleashed a series of ceremonial lectures and banquets. Speeches and photographs of the festivities were lavishly reproduced in the National Drama Pictorial (Guoju huabao), published by the NDSS. It, like the other NDSS publication, The Drama Journal (Xiju congkan), a scholarly journal printed in old-style stitched volumes, were almost entirely the products of Qi Rushan’s writing and editing. These well-crafted volumes and pictorials have the air of vanity pressings, praising their patrons, singing their own scholarly virtues, and proclaiming the NDSS’s destiny to revive national drama into a viable tool for promoting national unity and traditional morality.53 The NDSS rapidly disintegrated, its most notable accomplishment being the consolidation of a fine collection of historical memorabilia and scripts. Mei had little involvement with the NDSS after the initial months and by 1933 had begun disassociating himself from Qi Rushan, eventually shifting his residence to Shanghai, where his patron Feng Gengguang was also relocating. The NDSS’s acting school quickly collapsed, while NOMI’s National Drama Academy thrived. As Zhang Bojun notes, there was no way that Qi and Mei, with only privately donated funds at their disposal, could compete with NOMI. Though Cheng Yanqiu had clearly left the pack of the Four Famous Dan behind and established himself securely in charge of the only viable state institution for the development of Peking opera, he never managed to outstrip Mei’s fame. Cheng’s research trip generated none of the spectacle, either in Europe or at home, that Mei’s Broadway hit created. Mei firmly retained his status as Peking opera’s icon—in both the popular and traditional senses. To this fact the astigmatic biases of historical memory certainly attest: today in China Cheng Yanqiu is a relatively obscure figure, whereas Mei Lanfang is indisputably a national icon, appearing on postage stamps and telephone cards, the subject of popular books and gorgeous volumes of photographs. But Mei’s victory is not

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just a distortion of historical hindsight; it was already perfectly clear in the Republican era, and if anyone had imagined otherwise, the events of 1934 and 1935 put all doubts to rest. In 1934 Mei received a telegram through the Soviet embassy in Nanjing inviting him on behalf of the Soviet Foreign Cultures Association to perform in the USSR. The Soviet Union covered all expenses for Mei and his troupe of actors, accompanists, and assistants, even sending a special train to collect them in Shanghai. Konstantin Stanislavski led the welcoming committee, and Sergei Eisenstein wrote essays on Mei’s performances (six in Moscow, eight in Leningrad, all sold out). It was not just another great moment of international respect for Mei and Peking opera; it was also an artistic encounter that has become nearly legendary in modern drama history, particularly for Mei’s chance meeting with Bertolt Brecht, who was in Moscow at the time. This moment demands a brief aside. Brecht reported experiencing an epiphany watching Mei perform. His theory of the alienation effect in theater—the need to puncture the illusion of the drama’s coherence, to maintain a distance between audience and the stage, and for actors to retain an objective distance from the characters they perform—in sum, the need to make audiences and actors think critically about the socially and economically constructed reality of the performance itself—was sparked by his brilliant (mis)interpretation of Mei Lanfang’s performance. A year later, in his essay “The Alienation Effect in Chinese Acting,” Brecht argued that to rattle the illusion of realism, dispel the audience’s suspension of disbelief, and awaken them to the fact that what they were watching was a representation, a performance—this and only this was truly “realism.” It is tempting to see this moment as ironic— that at the same time that Peking opera actors and theorists were adopting the split between reality and representation, sweeping the stage of obstacles that would disrupt the representational field of the drama, and incorporating theories of character interiority into their understanding of performance, Brecht would read it as doing just the reverse. But, as should be clear from chapter 4, the representational regime founded on splitting representation from reality was an inherently paradoxical construct of mutual impossibilities, enabling various (mis)interpretations befitting their situational context; Brecht’s misreading was no more or less ironic than those of Hu Shi or Qi Rushan. The importance of these theoretical nuances did not resonate through the Chinese drama world until long after Brecht’s essay was written. What resounded most clearly at the time was that Mei had again triumphed abroad, this time adding

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to his list of admirers not only adoring crowds, movie stars and Broadway critics, but some of Europe’s most respected intellectuals and artists.

Conclusion In hindsight it seems fairly obvious why Cheng never posed a serious challenge to Mei. Though Cheng, in many critics’ eyes, attained greater legitimacy as a scholar, teacher, reformer, and musical innovator, he could not rival Mei’s status as a cultural icon. While there are a number of angles from which to approach this comparison, three factors are crucial, all of which are interconnected: the tactical mobilization of Orientalism, the centrality of visuality, and the power of media networks relative to the weakness of government institutions in Republican China. For whatever reasons—fear of failure, lack of publicity networks and funds, or an aversion to the East/West aesthetic opposition that he seems to express in his writings—Cheng Yanqiu chose not to perform publicly in Europe, not to take on the role of representing Chinese drama to the West. As a result, his trip to Europe generated little attention and was far less of a success in generating publicity or national pride than Mei’s to the United States. But the fact that Cheng and Mei took such different approaches to their journeys abroad is probably not simply a historical contingency, for Mei consistently deployed technologies of visuality with far greater persistence and success than Cheng. Both were extraordinarily attractive dan actors, but at the peak of their careers Mei was most renowned for his visual innovativeness—his costumes, his sexiness, his dances, and his portrayals of goddesses and legendary beauties— whereas Cheng was noted for his unique singing style and his portrayals of tragic, defiant, commonplace women. Indeed, Cheng seems to have almost consciously neglected some of the physical attributes that were generally accepted as basic to performing dan roles. Already large for a dan, by 1935 Cheng, at only thirty-one years of age, was so overweight that he was known in the press as “Fatty,” though critics all marveled at how onstage he seemed to magically shrink into the figure of a demure woman. At the same age, Mei had had an allure that was not only an inexhaustible topic in the entertainment sections of newspapers and pictorials, it was also being disseminated throughout the nation through advertisements for eyeglasses, cigarettes, and beauty creams. This emphasis on visuality was clearly the key to Mei’s success abroad, for the other aspects of his artistry were mostly lost on foreign audiences. American audiences had no understanding of the poetic power of Mei’s lyrics

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or of the way he inflected those lyrical meanings through his singing style; and even Mei’s most enthusiastic foreign critics confessed to having no comprehension of Peking opera music and indeed to finding it rather hard to take. What captured the imagination of Mei’s American and Russian audiences and European theater colleagues were his movements, his hands, his face, and the uncanny femininity of his appearance. Another way of looking at Mei and Cheng’s rivalry might be to ask: Why did the mission of trying to construct a form of national culture turn into a personal rivalry? Was the mission to construct national drama, in the end, simply reducible to producing a cultural icon? Clearly not. Efforts to reform Peking opera into a viable national genre occurred at a host of institutional, economic, and discursive levels, and the production of stars was only one aspect of these processes. Most people in the drama world, across the spectrum of genres and styles, concurred that China needed a national drama—meaning that the Chinese public needed to have affordable access to educational and inspirational dramatic art that could help unify a diverse and threatened nation. The problem was that no institutions existed to fund or mobilize such an enormous undertaking. Peking opera as National Drama was attainable as a symbol, not as substance. Many hoped that somehow the Nationalist government could ameliorate some of the problems facing the Peking opera world by using its authority to curb the sort of profit-driven competition that seemed to be the crux of the problem. I think the best thing would be for the theaters to be nationalized, and the actors all nationally controlled. At the lowest level, the state should organize scholars in each locality into Drama Supervisory Offices. (At present our country has a Drama Censorship Commission, but the members have no learning, and the news is everywhere that they have no morals, and all the embezzling makes them even less effective.) Theater facilities and ticket prices, actors’ pay and wardrobe should all be controlled by these offices. Even the selecting of acting-school teachers and young actors’ training regimens should be supervised by them, and they should forbid actors from taking private disciples.54

Many advocated for such government intervention, or, even better, government funding on a national scale, but most were well aware that the government was corrupt and broke, and that drama took a back seat to problems like national defense and agricultural depression. The few dramaturges passionate enough about drama to feel unashamed in demanding that it become a government priority (Qi Rushan, Xiong Foxi, and

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the critic quoted above) were talking in their sleep and (usually) knew they were dreaming. NOMI was as close as the Peking opera world came in the Republican era to a successful reform program, but the institute was far too small and expensive to effect the massive, national-scale changes needed. Hence, to return to the rivalry between Cheng and Mei: Cheng lost out because, among other things, he threw in his lot with the weaker set of Republican-era institutions. Cheng made his bid for dominance through state-sponsored institutions, while Mei concentrated far more on using media networks. Though Mei’s NDSS never came close to accomplishing what Cheng and NOMI achieved in reforming the productive institutions of Peking opera, Mei was above all a master of his image. If making Peking opera into national drama is evaluated from the perspective of reforming the infrastructure of the drama world, then Mei did relatively little; then again, the realistic possibilities for such a transformation were, as we have seen, quite limited. What Mei did achieve— not through the resource-limited institutions of the state, but through the much more pervasive and diffuse power of national and international networks of mass media, his personal network, and capital—was an unparalleled construction of himself as an icon, and, through his iconic status, the shaping of Peking opera into a nationally and internationally recognized symbol of Chinese national culture. Such a symbolic identification of Peking opera as national drama was not a negligible feat; in many respects this symbolic construction had more lasting historical effects than many of the Republican-era institutional reforms, for it weathered the vast formal and institutional changes the genre was to undergo in the decades to come. With the advent of full-scale war with Japan in 1937, hundreds of Peking opera performers and dramatists left the major cities, following the GMD and CCP into the Western regions and rural hinterlands. There they worked with their spoken-word and regional-drama colleagues to produce new plays that addressed and represented directly the conditions of the war. Under these crisis conditions, all kinds of formal and theatrical conventions that had distinguished Peking opera since the early 1920s were blurred or disregarded to meet the demands of new material conditions and new audiences unversed in Peking opera’s formal language. In the GMD-dominated southwest, contemporary costumes and props were (re)introduced and spoken dialogue and “realistic” elements appropriated; in the CCP areas, Peking opera “newspaper” plays presented recent events from the Anti-Japanese War. And such formal reform and innovation of course continued with the reformed Peking operas of the

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1950s, culminating in the Cultural Revolution (1966–76) with the mammoth production of yangbanxi, dramas modeled on Peking opera, with communist heroes and heroines fighting revolutionary battles, armed with rifles and striking poses adapted from ballet to Westerninfluenced orchestral music. The association of Peking opera with national drama remained unwavering through all these waves of transformation and remains crucial today. Peking opera has essentially returned to the formal parameters of its Republican-era construction, crowned with the undisputed designation of guocui—national essence, treasure.

Epilogue

“And then, in July 1937, the Japanese launched their all-out invasion on China, and so my story ends.” We historians tend to be attracted to finding decisive moments to close our narratives. Periodization literally runs down our textual spines (“1870–1937” in my case) and conveniently bookends our work. This book ends in 1937 because the Japanese invasion marks an important shift in the contexts in which Peking opera was performed and reformed. The coastal and eastern cities that were the main centers of Peking opera were invaded and then held under puppet rule. Some stars retired from the stage in patriotic protest (Mei Lanfang growing his legendary mustache, Cheng Yanqiu becoming a peasant farmer); other dramatists fled to regions under CCP and GMD rule, where they performed under very different conditions and for very different audiences from those to which they had been accustomed. A decade later, the CCP’s 1949 victory in the civil war led to a complete restructuring of Peking opera’s productive institutions, placing schools, troupes, and theaters under the direct financial and political management of the CCP. These party-led institutions recast the genre yet again, culminating in the production of “model revolutionary Peking operas” (yangbanxi) under the artistic management of Jiang Qing (Madame Mao) during the Cultural Revolution (1966–76). More recently, the dramatic market-oriented reforms of the 1980s and 90s have reshaped the institutions of Peking opera production yet again, with the genre being reinvented in the form of a traditional national treasure (guocui) very much along the lines 291

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traced in this book. Each of these episodes in the history of Peking opera could easily serve as topics for other crisply periodized cultural histories. This book has argued that the complex of performances that constituted Peking opera in the early twentieth century was shaped by colonialmodern discursive and institutional forces. These conditions interpellated the construction of Peking opera as an identifiable genre within national and international contexts. The exclusion of contemporary or “foreign” elements, the parameters of gender representation, the institutions of training and community self-governance, and the ways in which plays and star performers were marketed and circulated both within China and abroad were all powerfully shaped by (and in turn shaped) Peking opera’s construction as a pillar of national culture in the Republican era. But there is also a more far-reaching claim being made here that is harder to substantiate between this book’s front and back covers: that the molding of the genre during the Republican era had longer-term ramifications, that, despite the many radical formal and institutional changes that Peking opera underwent from 1937 onward, its construction as a paragon of national traditional culture continues to shape the genre today. Or, to be more abstract but perhaps also more precise, Peking opera’s recoding in an epistemological system that enforced a clear distinction and separation between reality and representation led to a reconceptualizing of Peking opera as pure aestheticism, a form that was positioned as the antithetical opposite of mimetic realism and which within the discursive context of Republican-era China was universalized Western modernity’s necessary Other.1 From the 1950s until the 1970s, Peking opera’s positioning in this epistemological system was challenged by the thundering counterdiscourse of international proletarian revolutionary culture. Since the 1980s, the genre’s positioning as aestheticism has been facing a second challenge, this time from the epistemological system’s deconstructing itself from within, the postmodern turn that has called dichotomies like representation versus reality into question (a turn by which my own perspective is obviously deeply informed). Despite these challenges, however, the Republican era’s defining impact on the genre remains the most decisive influence on the performance and reception of Peking opera. So I want to close with a note on the longevity of this construct, despite the radical waves of change over the last seven decades, for the staying power of this construct also speaks more generally to the relationship between the modern and postmodern, or perhaps I should say between the colonial modern and the post-colonial-modern. This assertion requires a very brief overview of the truly radical trans-

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Figure 19. Set of stamps from 1962 in commemoration of Mei Lanfang after his death in 1961. The signature plays illustrated include: Farewell, My Concubine (Bawang bie ji); The Goddess Scatters Flowers (Tiannu san hua); Eternal Regret (Shengsi hen); Beauty Defies Tyranny (Yuzhou feng); Mu Guiying Takes Command (Mu Guiying gua shuai); Battling the Jin (Zhan Jin bing); and Peony Pavilion (Mudan ting).

formations of the genre from the 1940s to the 1970s. During the AntiJapanese War (1937–45), many of the actors and dramatists who had been most strongly committed to promoting Peking opera as a formally distinct national genre found themselves performing under very different circumstances:touring hinterland towns and performing on crude stages with limited props and costumes, for crowds with very different stylistic tastes and speaking very different regional dialects. Sticklers for the conventions of the genre had to give way to practical and patriotic impera-

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tives, mixing Peking opera with other regional styles and enacting contemporary tales of the anti-Japanese struggle. Only months after Japan’s all-out invasion, huaju dramatists (including Guo Morou and Tian Han) and Peking opera actors (including Mei Lanfang, Zhou Xinfang, and Lin Shusen) began to meet in Shanghai to discuss how best to use drama to mobilize resistance. Throughout the war, conferences and performances that mixed the entire spectrum of dramatic genres were held in Wuhan, Kunming, and Guilin. In the CCP base area of Yan’an, the Lu Xun Academy Peking Opera Troupe and the Yan’an Peking Opera Study Society staged both revised classics (stories adapted from Water Margin were particularly apposite for the CCP struggle and extremely popular with Mao) and contemporary plays (portraying the lives of Henan famine refugees and midnight raids on enemy air bases). If the heat of the anti-Japanese struggle melted the rigid barriers between Peking opera and other regional and spoken genres of drama, the Mao years (1949–76) witnessed a different but equally fundamental transformation originating within the genre itself. In the 1950s an effort began to collect, parse, and revise the entire corpus of Peking opera scripts. Feudal elements were excised when possible; several plays were “retired” for lack of proper nationalistic or class consciousness (the classic and popular Si Lang Visits His Mother (Si Lang tan mu) is the most famously debated example). Moreover, the genre needed to be reconceived to fit the party mandate for socialist realism. When the critic Wu Zuguang suggested in 1954 that Peking opera’s reforms should be guided by the essential principle of aestheticism, he was rebuked by the culture minister, Ma Shaobo, as needing “enlightening” and “education.” Ma insisted that the conventions of Peking opera had always developed to reflect the realities of their times and should continue to develop toward a politically conscious realism.2 The realignment of Peking opera with realism helped bolster formal changes exemplified most notably by the yangbanxi of the 1960s and 70s. All the yangbanxi were set during the anti-Japanese and civil wars and performed in stylized peasant and soldier garb with props like rifles and handguns; they featured Western strings in the orchestra and even ballet-inspired dance sequences. Yet these plays were clearly promoted as Peking operas, were performed by Peking opera troupes and actors, and featured music and gestures strongly inspired by Peking opera conventions. Obviously many of the trends of these decades radically revised and even directly attacked principles central to Peking opera’s construction as a genre during the Republican period. Why then, do I insist that the his-

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tory I am tracing here was a decisive moment in the genre’s construction? First, Peking opera is a constantly changing cultural form that interacts with its social and historical context; I do not intend my discussion of the importance of the epistemological bifurcation of reality and representation to stand in for aestheticism, or melodic purity, or realism as the essence of Peking opera. The radical changes to the ways Peking opera was performed and defined from the 1940s to the 1970s offer more evidence (if any were needed) that genres are fungible constructs, constantly negotiating changes in dominant ideologies and political and economic realities. Since the 1980s, however, Peking opera has again become marked as aestheticist, conventional, and traditional. In part this change has come about because China has resumed interacting with global capitalism (that is, post-colonial-modernity). But even in the Mao years, Peking opera debates invariably revolved around the polarities that had become decisive in the Republican era: aestheticism versus realism, “traditional” conventions versus contemporary innovations, jingpai versus haipai. Moreover, the post–May Fourth historical narrative of Peking opera as a genre of remarkable historical consistency remained dominant. For example, when a collection of stamps commemorating Mei Lanfang’s greatest contributions to the stage was issued in 1962, after his death, a stamp illustrating his ground-breaking contemporary-costume plays was conspicuously missing from the set. I submit that the reason for the persistence of this understanding of Peking opera as a genre is that, despite the radical political and economic shifts and regime changes China has experienced over the past century, the technologies that framed the construction of Peking opera as a genre in the Republic have become more and more pervasive in daily life.The techniques and institutions of enframing; proscenium theaters with increasingly disciplined audiences; mass media; the productive institutions of troupe management and actor training that market stars and plays, schedule tours and performances, and are self-consciously crafted to map Peking opera as a national genre for consumption throughout all of China’s provinces; and biological and social frameworks of gender construction that enforce heterosexuality as a public norm—all these saw continual expansion and development over the intervening decades. The surfeit of such technologies and their associated discourses has made us increasingly aware of the role that representation plays in shaping our realities—hence the linguistic turn and postmodernism—but this awareness does not change the fact that our material practices become every day more entangled in technologies that reinforce the epistemological categories of modernity.

Notes

The following abbreviations are used throughout the notes and bibliography: BYHB

Beiyang hua bao (Northern Pictorial). Tianjin, 1926–37.

JBCK

Ju bu cong kan (Chrysanthemum Registry collection). Min guo cong shu (Collected book of the Republic), series 2, vol. 69. Edited by Zhou Jianyun. Shanghai: Shanghai shu dian, 1990.

JJGGDXQ

Jingju gaige de xianqu (Pioneers of Peking opera reform). Edited by Nantong shi wen lian. Nanjing: Jiangsu renmin chubanshe, 1982.

JJTWL

Jingju tan wang lu (Record of recollections of Peking opera). Beijing: Zhongguo xiqu chubanshe, 1990.

LYGB

Li yuan gong bao (Pear Garden News, aka Player). Shanghai, 1929–31.

PJSLCK

Ping ju shiliao cong kan (Collection of Peking opera materials). Taiwan, 1977.

QDYD

Qingdai yandu liyuan shiliao (Qing-era materials on Beijing’s Pear Garden). Edited by Zhang Cixi. Beijing: Zhongguo xiqu chubanshe, 1988.

QRSQJ

Qi Rushan quan ji (The complete writings of Qi Rushan). 8 vols. Edited by Cheng Cheng. Taibei: Chongguang wenyi chubanshe, 1964.

SHWSZL

Shanghai wenshi ziliao xuanji (Selected materials on Shanghai culture and history). Edited by Shanghai shi weiyuanhui wenshi ziliao weiyuanhui. Shanghai: Shanghai renmin chubanshe. Ongoing series.

XJXK

Xiju xunkan (Drama Biweekly). Shanghai, 1935–37. 297

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XJYK

Xiju yuekan (Drama Monthly). Shanghai, 1928–31.

ZGJJS

Zhongguo jingju shi (A history of Chinese Peking Opera), ed. Art Research Institutes of Beijing and Shanghai. Beijing: Zhongguo xiqu chubanshe, 1990.

Introduction 1. Peking opera is extremely rich in its antecedents, but not uniquely so: many so-called regional forms also have complicated histories in which migration and melodic cross-pollination figure prominently. 2. Qi Rushan, Guoju mantan, vol. 1, in QRSQJ 3: 171. All translations are mine unless otherwise noted. 3. The gist of Qi’s claim—that the term jingju first appears in Shanghai and does not become pervasive until the twentieth century—is correct. Though the terms pihuang, erhuang, and jingxi remain much more common than jingju before the twentieth century, the term was occasionally used much earlier in the Shanghai context. Its first recorded use is in an 1876 article in the Shanghai newspaper Shenbao: “Jingju most emphasizes the laosheng. Every cast must have one or two laosheng who can sing well, the so-called ‘stage pillars’ [taizhu] if they are to start a troupe.” Quoted in Zhongguo xiqu zhi, Shanghai juan (Beijing: Zhongguo ISBN Zhongxin, 1996), 108. Peking opera, on its introduction into Shanghai, was closely identified with the laosheng; see chapter 1. 4. Ibid., 172. 5. Nancy A. Guy’s essay “Peking Opera as ‘National Opera’ in Taiwan: What’s in a Name?” (Asian Theatre Journal 12, no. 1 [1995]) provides an excellent argument for using this commonly accepted English term. The main Chinese terms for the genre—jingju, pingju, and guoju—all became common during the Republican era (1912–49), but today they tend to be strongly associated with post-1949 political stances. Jingju is the term used in the People’s Republic. Because jing means capital, jingju implies that the city of Beijing is the true capital of China. Pingju was a common term between 1928 and 1949 when the GMD (Guomindang, or Nationalist Party) moved China’s capital to Nanjing and changed Beijing’s name to Beiping. Guoju became the official term for Peking opera in Taiwan from the 1950s through the 1980s as part of the GMD’s promotion of cultural nationalism. However, the debate over what to call Peking opera is not just a relic of the cold war. As soon as Nanjing became China’s capital in 1928, critics began debating whether Peking opera should likewise be demoted from jingju to pingju. The implications of the term guoju (national drama) are more complex. The term first appears in comparative studies of Chinese and Western dramatic forms around the turn of the century. Through the following decades, it ambiguously signifies all genres of Chinese drama collectively (as opposed to foreign or Western drama) and Peking opera in particular (as contrasted with regional dramatic forms). 6. Eric Hobsbawm, “Introduction: Inventing Traditions,” in The Invention of Tradition, ed. E. Hobsbawm and T. Ranger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 7–8.

Notes to Pages 5–17

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7. Tani E. Barlow, “Introduction: On ‘Colonial Modernity,’ ” in Formations of Colonial Modernity in East Asia, ed. Tani E. Barlow (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), 6. 8. Bernard S. Cohn, Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 4. 9. Nicholas Dirks, “Foreword,” in Cohn, Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge, ix. 10. Jean-Christophe Agnew, Worlds Apart: The Market and the Theater in Anglo-American Thought, 1550–1750 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986); Jeffrey Ravel, The Contested Parterre: Public Theater and French Political Culture, 1680–1791 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999); James H. Johnson, Listening in Paris: A Cultural History (Berkeley: University of California, 1995); Lawrence Levine, Highbrow, Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988). 11. Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt (Berkeley: University of California, 1991), 44. 12. For a useful discussion of the making of celebrity culture, see Richard Schickel,. Intimate Strangers: The Culture of Celebrity (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1985). 13. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990); Eve Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: University of California, 1990); Faye Dudden, Women in the American Theater: Actresses and Audiences, 1790–1870 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994). 14. Such discursive parallels are lucidly explored in chapters 1 and 2 of Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse? (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993). 15. The following summary is general background that can be found in numerous books and articles on Peking opera. The source used here, unless otherwise noted, is Zhang Faying, Zhongguo xiban shi (Beijing: Xueyan chubanshe, 2004), 138–93, 264–308. 16. One kunqu troupe in Suzhou around the mid-Qing did begin performing martial plays, for which its members were banned from worshipping at the guild temples. ZGJJS 1: 33. 17. From Xiaotiedidaoren, Ri xia kan hua ji, QDYD 1: 103. 18. Pan Xiafeng, The Stagecraft of Peking Opera (Beijing: New World Press, 1995), 72. 19. Qi Rushan, Jingju zhi bianyao in QRSQJ 2: 6. The initial response from critics was mixed, and it took several years before Tan’s adaptations were broadly accepted and Tan acclaimed as the greatest laosheng of his day. 20. Wu Xiaoru, Wu Xiaoru xiju wen lu (Beijing: Beijing Daxue chubanshe, 1995), 223.

1. Late Qing Institutions of Peking Opera 1. Liu Qiang and Yang Hongying, Cheng Changgeng zhuan (Shijiazhuang: Hebei jiaoyu chubanshe, 1996), 81.

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2. William Dolby, A History of Chinese Drama (London: Paul Elek, 1976), 170. 3. Guo Zhanxiang, “Chu lun Jingju chuangshiren Cheng Changgeng,” in Luntan ge tai chang ju shen, ed. Cheng Changgeng research group (Beijing: Zhongguo xiju chubanshe, 1992), 27–41. 4. Xu Muyun, Liyuan ying shi (Shanghai: Dadong shuju, 1933), 35. 5. “Crude” styles were also known as luantan, huatan, or huabu. These included bangzi, erhuang, handiao, and essentially all genres except kunqu and its close cousin yiqiang. 6. The period from 1845 to 1910 is generally divided by Peking opera historians into two generations. The first generation was led by the Three Outstanding Laosheng: Cheng Changgeng, Zhang Erfen (1814–60), and Yu Sansheng (1802–66). The second generation, the Later Three Outstanding Laosheng, included Tan Xinpei, Wang Guifen (1860–1906), and Sun Juxian (1841–1931). 7. Zhao Yi, Yan pu za ji quoted in Liao Ben, Zhongguo gudai juchang shi (Zhengzhou: Zhongzhou guji chubanshe, 1997), 152. 8. Niu Chuanhai, Qianlong shiqi juchang huodong zhi yanjiu (Taibei: Huagang chubanshe, 1977), 47–50. 9. Zhou Huabin, Jingdu gu xilou (Beijing: Haiyang chubanshe, 1993), 79. The two most famous and frequently used of these theaters were located in the imperial gardens: the Qingyinge in Yuanmingyuan (destroyed in 1860) and the Deheyuan in the Summer Palace, commissioned by Cixi in 1891. 10. Zhang Faying, Zhongguo xiban shi (Beijing: Xueyuan chubanshe), 5. The quote is originally from a Ming text, Wei tan by Zhu Yunming. 11. Zhou Zhifu, Jin bai nian de Jingju (Hong Kong: n.p., 1962), 84. 12. Ibid., 70. 13. Colin Mackerras, The Rise of the Peking Opera (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), 117. 14. Dolby, 157. 15. ZGJJS 1: 211. Shengping is derived from the phrase gewu shengping, meaning a time of prosperous rule that the people enjoy through singing and dancing. 16. ZGJJS 1: 220. Though the court was probably already infected by these luantan styles, archival records up to 1825 show no indication that xipi or erhuang had been performed inside the palace gates. Indeed, the first recorded breach of a xipi play through the palace walls, on the sixteenth of the sixth month of Daoguang 5 [1825], was greeted by an edict from one of Daoguang’s functionaries declaring, “Henceforth princes and ministers listening to plays are forbidden from requesting the performance of kuaqiang [another term for luantan] dramas.” Archival evidence indicates that on a few occasions over the next thirty-five years luantan plays did find their way onto the stages of the court (once in 1826, again in 1827, and again in 1843). 17. Wang Zhizhang, “Qingchao guanli xiqu de yamen he Liyuan gonghui, xiban, xiyuan de guanxi,” JJTWL 1: 522. 18. Also known as the Jingzhongmiao (lit. [the guild of] the Pure Loyalty Temple). 19. Colin Mackerras, The Chinese Theater in Modern Times (London: Thames and Hudson, 1975), 76.

Notes to Pages 22–31

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20. Ma Tongjun, “Mantan xiqu houtai gongzuo ji qita,” in Tianjin wenshi ziliao, vol. 51 (Tianjin: Wenshiziliao chubanshe, 1990), 183–85. 21. Zhang Cixi, ed., Beijing liyuan jinshi wenxi lu, QDYD 2: 911. 22. Jing Guxue, “Jingzhongmiao shou suo tan,” JJTWL 1: 525. 23. Xu Jiulin, Liyuan yiwen, QDYD 2: 842. 24. This brief relaxation of the ban was justified by the fact that Xianfeng was gravely ill, and it was hoped the plays would lift his spirits and improve his health. The ban was firmly reinstated after his death. 25. Liu Qiang and Yang Hongying, 305–6. 26. As the ban on outside actors was revived under the Tongzhi emperor (1862–75), pihuang performances at court from 1863 to 1883 were given by the Inner School actors. 27. Ibid. The Shengpingshu increasingly concentrated on coordinating the invitation of outside performers; by the end of the Qing dynasty there were only about sixty palace actors remaining in the Neixue. 28. ZGJJS 1: 215. 29. For a more detailed discussion of the court invitation procedures and the Shanghai and Beijing theater business, see Catherine Vance Yeh, “Where is the Center of Cultural Production? The Rise of the Actor to National Stardom and the Peking/Shanghai Challenge, 1860–1912,” Late Imperial China 25, no. 2 (2004): 74–118. 30. Zhou Chuanjia, Tan Xinpei zhuan (Shijiazhuang: Hebei jiaoyu chubanshe, 1996), 270–80. 31. Mackerras, The Chinese Theater, 47. 32. Fang Wenxi, Liyuan hua (Beijing: Zhonghua yinshuguan, 1931), 53. 33. Ma Tongjun, 185. 34. Qi Rushan, Jingju zhi bianqian, QRSQJ 2: 52. 35. Mei Lanfang and Xu Jichuan, Wutai shenghuo sishi nian (Beijing: Zhonghua xiju chubanshe, 1987), 19. 36. Qi Rushan, Xiban, in Zhongguo xi zhi zuzhi, QRSQJ 1: 6 – 8. The dragon train was a line of paired actors who followed a main character onto the stage like the tail of a kite, typically a group of attendants or soldiers. 37. Yang Mojian, Menghua suo bu (1843), in QDYD 1: 354. 38. A fourth set, the pressure set (yazhou), was often inserted just before the final play and often featured a troupe’s second most-popular performer. 39. Sun Yusheng, “Shanghai xiyuan bianqian zhi, no. 6” in XJYK 1, no. 6. 40. ZGJJS 1:181, 149. 41. Qi Rushan, Jingju zhi bianqian, 11. 42. Mackerras, The Rise of the Peking Opera, 182. The stage on which Tan was to perform was probably a raised-platform type that was often constructed outdoors, hence the description of locking him “under the stage pillar.” 43. ZGJJS 1: 105. 44. Ibid., 101. 45. Xu Ke, ed., Qing bai lei chao (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1986), 11: 5044. 46. Prior to the late nineteenth century, most ads were red and gold paper wall posters in black calligraphy that were occasionally pasted up near the Qian and other city gates. Such ads usually proclaimed the appearance of a newly writ-

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Notes to Pages 31–34

ten play or new opera troupe, and the practice seems directly linked to the requirement that all new scripts and troupes obtain government and guild approval before taking the stage. Zhang Faying, 372–73. Posters were also used in special instances; for example, because the star dan Yu Ziyun was in very fragile health and did not perform regularly, his appearances were often widely advertised by posters. Tuhua ri bao (Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1999), 8: 642. 47. Ding Bingsui, Beijing, Tianjin, ji qita (Taibei: Rongtain yinshuguan, 1977), 108. 48. Zhou Zhifu, 30–31. Most Manchu princes were explicitly barred from meddling in state politics and so had a lot of free time on their hands; patronizing and practicing drama became a favorite pastime. 49. Zhang Erkui and Yu Sansheng, the other two Great Laosheng in addition to Cheng Changgeng, flourished in the 1840s, but from 1860 to 1880 Cheng was unrivaled, as described in this 1864 poem translated by William Dolby: Now Erkui has sunk to perdition and Sansheng’s fortunes wavered long, Who reigns in the world of song, you may ask— Why, all yield place to Cheng Changgeng.

Dolby, 169. Another poem translated by Dolby reads: The Titan of Luantan, hand it to Changgeng, and flawless in Kunqu, perfect every word, So capturing those fine young peacock players that they all revere him as teacher and as lord. (Ibid., 170)

50. The integration of pihuang with Peking dialect was initially called the zhangpai (Zhang style) or jingpai (capital style). 51. Xu Muyun, 38. 52. ZGJJS 1: 203–6. It was difficult to scrape together funds to start an independent keban. For instance, the Xiaorongchun school, despite having nine start-up investors, survived for only six years (1882–88). Most keban were started with the support of a rich and powerful donor. For example, the Deshengfen school was begun by the eunuch Huang San in the 1850s, but it trained only two classes of students before collapsing in 1877. 53. Wu Tongbin ed., Jingju zhishi shouce (Tianjin: Tianjin jiaoyu chubanshe, 1995), 347. 54. Shen Mugong, “Tantan Beiping Fuliancheng keban,” XJYK 2, no. 8. 55. Hou Xiduan, “Xue xi he yan xi,” Zhonghua wenshi ziliao wenku 15 (Beijing: Zhongguo wenshi ziliao chubanshe, 1996), 539. 56. Wang Shuyang, “Jingjuban jiu zhi xisu bai ti,” in Wenshi ziliao xuanbian 45 (Beijing: Zhongguo wenshi chubanshe, 1992), 150. 57. Xie Hongwen and An Zhiqiang, Zhang Junqiu (Changsha: Hunan renmin chubanshe, 1985), 15. 58. Ye Shengchang, Liyuan yi ye (Beijing: Zhongguo xiju chubanshe, 1990), 305.

Notes to Pages 34–40

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59. Li Hongchun, Jingju changtan (Beijing: Zhongguo xiju chubanshe, 1982), 17. 60. Ye Shengchang, 313. 61. Zhang Xiaocang, “Tan keban,” XJYK 1, no. 4. This rule seems to have changed when Ye’s son took over the school. 62. Shen Mugong. 63. Hou Xiduan, 540. 64. Though students often studied with special instructors, they were not permitted to pledge these instructors as masters; until graduating, a student was supposed to be exclusively pledged to the keban. As chapter 6 shows, this rule was bent and broken in the 1930s, another sign of the community’s weakening solidarity. 65. Shang Changchun, “Shang Xiaoyun yu Rongchunshe,” JJTWL 2: 1–8. 66. Ma Shaobo, “Gang yang bu a, yi ru qi ren,” in Jingju yishu dashi Shang Xiaoyun (Xian: Shanxi renmin chubanshe, 1990), 7. 67. Ibid., 8–12. 68. Ye Shengchang, 299. 69. Ibid., 325. 70. The word xianggong, meaning “young man of the house,” originated in Jiangnan. Beijing folk used it for these boy courtesans because many of them hailed from Jiangnan. 71. Bret Hinsch, Passions of the Cut Sleeve (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 152. 72. Shuxiqiaoye, Yan tai hua shi lu, in QDYD 1: 545. 73. Xu Ke, 11: 5094. 74. Matthew Sommer, Sex, Law, and Society in Late Imperial China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 212–13. 75. Sophie Volpp, “The Literary Circulation of Actors in SeventeenthCentury China,” Journal of Asian Studies 61, no. 3 (August 2002): 949. 76. Ibid., 979. 77. Chen Sen, Pin hua baojian (Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1994), 1. 78. Despite their abuse by such sexual predators, the novel’s extraordinary dan manage to retain their sexual purity, and they approach finding sublime (and thus necessarily physically unconsummated) love with a group of young and sensitive literati lovers. Keith McMahon provides an excellent reading on this subject in “Sublime Love and the Ethics of Equality in a Homoerotic Novel of the Nineteenth Century: Precious Mirror of Boy Actresses,” in Nan Nu: Men, Women, and Gender in Early and Imperial China 4, no. 1 (2002): 70–109. The question of whether male love in the Qing admitted of the possibility of equal status between lovers or was firmly entrenched in relations of inequality (the statusdominant penetrator and the subservient penetrated) has been raised by several scholars of Qing sexuality. Michael Szonyi’s essay on the religious cult of Hu Tianbao, a local god in Fujian seen as sympathetic to male homosexual relations, argues that male lovers in the Qing could be equals (“The Cult of Hu Tianbao and the Eighteenth-Century Discourse of Homosexuality,” Late Imperial China 19, no.1 [1998]: 1–25). McMahon also finds hints of such interchangeability among literati characters in Precious Mirror. I tend to agree that within late Qing

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homosexual subculture, some status boundaries may well have been blurred, but by far the greater tendency was for literati-actor relations to reinscribe status difference. The fantasy of the literati that their appreciation of young boys fostered relationships of zhiji, or soulmates, was very much a fantasy of literati desire, and I agree with Sophie Volpp that these fantasies tell us little about the subjectivity of the young actors. The scene at the end of Precious Mirror, where the dan all burn their costumes and are “liberated” from their subservient status, is perhaps a gesture toward equality, but one that, as McMahon implies, is part and parcel of the impossible logic of the literati fantasy of the dan as unattainable, perfect love object. 79. In addition to being subjected to the harsh qiao practice, Xun was beaten black and blue, and one of Xun’s teachers nearly crippled him by wrenching his back. Zhang Weijun, “Xun Huisheng zhuanlue,” in JJTWL 1: 295. 80. Ibid., 288–306. 81. Cheng Peizhong and Hu Shijun, Cheng Yanqiu zhuan (Shijiazhuang: Hebei jiaoyu chubanshe, 1996), 1–23. 82. Mei Lanfang and Xu Jichuan, 34. 83. Zhou Jianyun, “Ping baoyin yi,” Ju xue lun tan, in JBCK, 17. 84. “Bainian lai Shanghai Liyuan de yange,” in Shanghai chunqiu, ed. Tu Shipin (Hong Kong: Zhongguo tu shu bian yi guan, 1968), part 3, 44–53. The first Peking opera keban in Shanghai was started in 1900 by Zhao Dianchen, owner of the Heavenly Immortal Teahouse (Tianxian Chayuan). 85. Zhongguo xiqu zhi bianji weiyuan hui, ed., Zhongguo xiqu zhi, Shanghai juan (Beijing: Zhongguo ISBN Zhongxin, 1996), 108. 86. There was in fact a law in Beijing that troupes could not own theaters and vice versa. Zhang Faying, 280–81. 87. Yang was accused in a courtroom drama of abducting the girl, a story which, through Shenbao’s coverage, gained national attention. The incident layered scandal upon scandal. What was an upright young woman doing in a theater? What was a lowly actor doing marrying a girl from a respectable family? Moreover, in the context of colonial modernity, why did Chinese courts apply torture to extract confessions? How could China ever convince the Western colonial powers to do away with the humiliating policy of extraterritoriality if such unjust practices were commonplace? See Natascha Vittinghoff, “Readers, Publishers, and Officials in the Contest for a Public Voice and the Rise of a Modern Press in Late Qing China (1860–80),” T’oung Pao 87 (2001):393–453. 88. Qi Rushan, Jingju zhi bianqian,2: 48. 89. Qi Rushan, Xiban, 1: 34. 90. Zhou Chuanjia, 258. 91. Weixinggezhu, “Beiping liyuan bianqian ji,” XJYK 2, no. 12. 92. Hou Xisan, Beijing lao xiyuanzi (Beijing: Zhongguo chengshi chubanshe, 1996), 100–103. 93. For example, see Lee Ou-fan Lee, Shanghai Modern: The Flowering of a New Urban Culture in China, 1930–1945 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999). 94. As I argue in later chapters, tradition and modernity were shifting dis-

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cursive constructs that shaped Peking opera as a genre, not unchanging historical forces located in particular regions. 95. Huan Tu, “Xiangcun ju tan,” XJYK 1, no. 1. 96. Ibid. 97. Peking opera troupes in Shanghai were on a similar pay scale in the late 1800s. The total salary for a Shanghai troupe (consisting of thirty to sixty people) was less than one thousand yuan per month. The actors took their meals of unpolished rice, pickles, and tofu together at the playhouse. Sun Yusheng, “Shanghai xiyuan bianqian zhi, 4,” XJYK 1, no. 4. 98. In Beijing, pay was measured in strings of coppers, not in silver yuan, so, to be precise, Cheng made six hundred strings of one thousand coppers per year. Cheng would also have received sixty coppers a day for “cart money,” ostensibly for transportation to and from the theater, which over a year would add up to an extra twenty-one strings of coppers. Zhou Jianyun, 17. 99. ZGJJS 1: 151. 100. Mai Mai, “Tan Xinpei lai Hu zhi huisu,” in Li yuan zhang gu, JBCK, 11–12. 101. Zhou Jianyun, 18. 102. Aililaoren, “Xiao Jiaotian lai Shen dianmo,” Xiaoshuo xinbao 2, no. 5 (1916): 11. Tan’s efforts to maximize his pay and prestige on this tour resulted in his performing at three different theaters, breaking contracts, provoking lawsuits, and angering many Shanghai fans. 103. Mei Lanfang and Xu Jichuan, 125. Mei was so popular that he was given a large raise during this first tour. 104. Meihuaguanzhu, “Ju bu cuo zhi, 5,” XJYK 2, no. 2. 105. Sun Yusheng, “Shanghai xiyuan bianqian zhi, 8,” XJYK 1, no. 10. 106. Qing Lin, “Jinmen ju shi,” XJYK 1, no. 10. 107. Zhang Cixi, Yandu mingling zhuan, in QDYD 2: 1187. 108. Zhang Faying, 300; Zhou Jianyun, 125. 109. Zhang Faying, 161. 110. ZGJJS 1: 390. Zhang Fei, an imposing general, and Mi Heng, an outspoken scholar, are both fearless heroes from the Romance of the Three Kingdoms (third century); Wu Zixu was a legendarily brave and self-sacrificing official of the sixth century b.c.e. 111. “Kong cheng ji,” in Jingju liu pai jumu huicui, vol. 8 (Beijing: Wenhua yishu chubanshe, 1996), 54. 112. Ouyang Yuqian, Ouyang Yuqian xiju lun wen ji (Shanghai: Shanghai wen yi chubanshe, 1984), 115. 113. Shen Taimou, Xuan nan ling meng lu, in QDYD 2: 809. Tan’s father having been called Jiaotian (lit. Call to Heaven), Tan was called Xiao Jiaotian, or “little” Jiaotian. 114. Mei Lanfang and Xu Jichuan, 54. 115. Chen Yanheng, Jiu ju cong tan, in QDYD 2: 870. 116. Xiao Lin, “Lingjie Dawang Mei Lanfang xiao shi,” XJYK 1, no. 6. 117. Mei Lanfang and Xu Jichuan, 594. 118. The title “King of Actors” was not official and was not associated with

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Cixi’s patronage or Tan’s stint as head of the Actors’ Guild. The title—dawang (Great King) proceeded by the words lingjie (Actor World) or liyuan (Pear Garden)—was first coined by Huang Chujiu, the manager of Shanghai’s New New Stage Theater (Xin Xin Wutai) as an advertising slogan for Tan’s 1912 Shanghai tour. The title was instantly adopted by opera fans throughout China as befitting Tan’s status and became Tan’s nickname and popular title. Ma Er Xiansheng, “Guan Lingjie dawang,” in Ju xue lun tan, JBCK, 21–23. For more details see chapter 3. 119. The insightful notion that Chinese masculinity could be fruitfully analyzed as involving a tension and unity between wen (civil) and wu (military) was developed by Kam Louie and Louise Edwards in “Chinese Masculinity: Theorizing Wen and Wu,” East Asian History 8 (1994): 135–48. The two categories certainly work nicely for analyzing Chinese drama, which is also divided into wen and wu plays and role types.

2. From Teahouse to Playhouse 1. R. Kent Guy, The Emperor’s Four Treasuries (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), 92. 2. Colin Mackerras, The Rise of the Peking Opera (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), 37. 3. Liao Ben, Zhongguo gudai juchang shi (Zhengzhou: Zhongguo guji chubanshe, 1997), 80. 4. To give just a few general examples of how the imperial Qing polity was based on variegated differences: scholar-officials, bannermen, commoners, and many other status groups had explicitly different social roles and legal expectations; regions like Xinjiang, Manchuria, Mongolia, and Tibet were governed by clearly differentiated political structures, and different ethnic groups were discouraged from intermarriage; and spheres of male and female activity were clearly differentiated both by custom and law. In sum, governance of the polity greatly depended on the legibility and adherence to these differentiated identities. 5. Zhou Huabin, Jingdu gu xilou (Beijing: Haiyang chubanshe, 1993), 80. 6. Ibid., 79. 7. Ibid. 8. Mackerras, The Rise of the Peking Opera, 213. 9. Zhou Huabin, 81. 10. Ibid., 87. 11. Mackerras, The Rise of the Peking Opera, 217. 12. Commercial drama had been performed from at least the Tang dynasty, but sources typically describe the stage as a peng (shed) and often indicate that they are temporary structures. Remains of permanent stone and wood stages also exist throughout China, but almost all such structures before the Qing were either temples or parts of a private residence. Zhou Yibai, Zhongguo juchang shi (Shanghai: Shangwu yinshuguan, 1933), 1–8. 13. Ibid,. 7. 14. This first line is essentially describing tanghui, which at this time were dominated by kunqu. For a description of the range of temple and popular the-

Notes to Pages 60–69

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ater entertainments in Qing Beijing, see Susan Naquin, Peking Temples and City Life, 1400–1900 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 632–38. 15. Yang Mojian, Menghua suo bu, QDYD 1: 348. 16. ZGJJS 1: 189. 17. Zheng Lishui, “Tianjin de xiyuan,” in Tianjin wenshi ziliao, vol. 51 (Tianjin: Wenshiziliao chubanshe, 1990), 189. 18. All the famous teahouses involved in Beijing’s rotation system were located in the entertainment district called Dashalar (see chapter 1). It was a rowdy and vibrant area peppered with snack stalls and flanked by a luxury shopping street and the grain and fish markets. Only established troupes could perform in Dashalar theaters, and no respectable troupe would deign to perform south of Dashalar’s southern border, Pearl Market Street. This area (including Tianqiao) was consigned to lower-class troupes and vagrant performers. “Neither North nor South cross the line” remained a cogent axiom among Beijing actors through the 1920s. Li Hongchun, Jingju chang tan (Beijing: Zhongguo xiju chubanshe), 1982, 24. 19. One silver yuan was equal to approximately one thousand coppers. 20. Zheng Lishui, 152. 21. Chu Yuan, “Shanghai xiyuan sanshi nian cangsang lu,” LYGB, 24 January 1931. 22. Li Ciming, Yueman tang ju hua, in QDYD 2: 704. 23. Sun Yusheng, “Shanghai xiyuan bianqian zhi, 2,” XJYK 1, no. 6. 24. Liao Ben, 27. 25. The more colorful term for langzuo was diaoyutai, “the fishing platform,” because they were raised just slightly above the pond. 26. Ding Bingsui, Beijing, Tianjin, ji qita (Taibei: Rongtain yinshuguan, 1977), 78–80. 27. Xu Ke, ed., Qing bai lei chao (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1986), 11: 5044. 28. Hou Xisan, Beijing lao xiyuanzi (Beijing: Zhongguo chengshi chubanshe, 1996), 86. 29. Zhang Jiliang, Jin tai can lei ji, in QDYD 1: 249. 30. Shen Taimou, Xuannan ling meng lu, in QDYD 2: 809. 31. Zhang Jiliang, 1: 248. 32. Mackerras, The Rise of the Peking Opera, 214. 33. Xu Ke, 11: 5066. 34. Sun Yusheng, “Shanghai xiyuan bianqian zhi, no. 10,” XJYK 2, no. 2. 35. For a detailed account and analysis of the case, see Natascha Vittinghoff, “Readers, Publishers and Officials in the Contest for a Public Voice and the Rise of a Modern Press in Late Qing China (1860–80),” T’oung Pao 87 (2001): 395–453. 36. Untangling all the specifics regarding women’s involvement on- and offstage in Shanghai is somewhat confusing because of the many different municipal administrations in the city. For example, mixed-sex troupes were banned in the English concession until 1930, but apparently not in Chinese-run areas. Qi Rushan, Guoju man tan, vol. 1, in QRSQJ 3: 166–70. 37. Jean-Christophe Agnew, Worlds Apart: The Market and the Theater in Anglo-American Thought, 1550–1750 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986).

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Notes to Pages 69–81

38. Mei Lanfang and Xu Jichuan, Wutai Shenghuo sishi nian (Beijing: Zhonghua xiju chubanshe, 1987), 684. 39. Ibid., 145. 40. Ding Bingsui, 111. 41. Ibid., 83. 42. Sun Yusheng, “Shanghai xiyuan bianqian zhi, 1,” XJYK 1, no. 1. 43. Mei Lanfang and Xu Jichuan, 535. 44. Qi Rushan., Xi jie xiao zhang gu, in QRSQJ 4: 100. 45. Sun Yusheng, “Shanghai xiyuan bianqian zhi, 2,” XJYK 1, no. 2. 46. The sum expected of them was quite high, so, despite swimming in a sea of money, the table tenders were economically vulnerable and were often the first ones tightening their belts when business took a downturn. Mei Lanfang and Xu Jichuan, 146. 47. Li Fusheng, Zhonghua Guoju shi (Taibei: Tianyi chubanshe, 1977), 133. 48. Huang Shang, “Jiao Hao,” in Huang Shang lun ju zawen (Chongqing: Sichuan renmin chubanshe, 1984), 24–26. 49. Zheng Jianxi, “Hao!” XJYK 3, no. 5. 50. Huang Shang, 26. 51. Mei Lanfang and Xu Jichuan, 137. 52. Zheng Jianxi. 53. Jeffrey Ravel, “Seating the Public: Spheres and Loathing in Paris Theaters, 1777–1788,” French Historical Studies 18, no. 1 (1993): 192. 54. Qi Rushan, Guoju man tan, 1: 117–25. 55. Ibid., 1: 122. 56. Tai Weng, “Wutai shang zhi qingjie yundong,” XJYK 3, no. 9. 57. Ibid.; Qi Rushan, Xi jie xiao zhang gu, 460. 58. Qi Rushan, Mei Lanfang you Mei ji, in QRSQJ 2, part 2, 49. 59. ZGJJS 1: 452. 60. Ouyang Yuqian, Zi wo yan xi yi lai (Taibei: Longwen chubanshe, 1990), 83. 61. Not only were dan actors expected to act like courtesans and show deference, but performers at tanghui were treated as servants in other respects as well: performing plays to order, interrupting plays to perform short dances of greeting whenever honored guests arrived, and so on. 62. The term xizi can be translated simply as “player,” but it had a very negative connotation, almost like “plaything.” Likewise, lingren means simply “actor” but had unavoidably denigrating associations. 63. ZGJJS 1: 341–49. 64. Li Fusheng, 131. 65. Zhongguo xiqu zhi bianji weiyuan hui, ed., Zhongguo xiqu zhi, Shanghai juan (Beijing: Zhongguo ISBN Zhongxin, 1996), 3: 1, 84. 66. Xiong Foxi, Xie ju yuanli (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1932), 119–24. 67. Hou Xisan, 123. 68. Jiao Juyin, Jiao Juyin xiju sanlun (Beijing: Zhongguo xiju chubanshe, 1985), 424. 69. Li Fusheng, 158. 70. Xing Nong, “Shuo jianchang,” LYGB, 8 March 1930. 71. Guiyanqizhu, “Gu wu ji,” XJYK 3, no. 4 (1931).

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72. Zhang Jian, “Gengsu juchang yu shehui jiaoyu zhi guanxi,” 20 October 1919, in JJGGDXQ, 127–28. 73. “Gengsu juchang guiyue,” in JJGGDXQ, 132. 74. Xu Haiping, “Cong Xigongyuan juchang dao Gengsu juchang,” in JJGGDXQ, 105. 75. Wu Wojun, “Gengsu juchang Yu run zhu yuan zhi hao chengji,” in JJGGDXQ, 50. 76. Ouyang Yuqian, Zi wo yan xi yi lai, 104. 77. Zhang Boling, from Dagong Bao, 17 March 1906, as translated in Cheng Weikun, “The Challenge of the Actress: Female Performers and Cultural Alternatives in Early Twentieth Century Beijing and Tianjin,” Modern China 22, no. 2 (1996): 218. 78. Qi Rushan, Guoju man tan, vol. 3, in QRSQJ 3: 166–70. 79. For an analysis of how similar shifts in seating arrangements in eighteenthcentury Parisian theaters reflected changing concepts of class dispositions, see Jeffrey Ravel, The Contested Parterre: Public Theater and French Political Culture, 1680–1791 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999). 80. Timothy Mitchell, Colonizing Egypt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 176. 81. Chow Tse-tsung, The May Fourth Movement: Intellectual Revolution in Modern China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960), 272–73. 82. Marston Anderson, The Limits of Realism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 61.

3. The Experimental Stage 1. Xu Banmei claimed that Peking operas on current events were common by the 1890s, with plays like Ren Shunfu (about a murder and arson case that made the headlines) drawing huge crowds in Shanghai. Xu Banmei, Huaju chuang shi qi hui yi lu (Beijing: Zhongguo xiju chubanshe, 1957), 1. 2. Zhou Chuanjia, Tan Xinpei zhuan (Shijiazhuang: Hebei jiaoyu chubanshe, 1996), 288. 3. Shen Hongxin and He Guodong, Zhou Xinfang zhuan (Shijiazhuang: Hebei jiaoyu chubanshe, 1996), 27. 4. For example, Kang Youwei roused his fellow provincials to support the 1898 reform movement from the dais of the Yuedong guild. Richard Belsky, “Placing the Hundred Days Reforms: Native Place Ties and Urban Space,” in Rethinking the 1898 Reform Period: Political and Cultural Change in Late Qing China, ed. P. Zarrow and R. Karl (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 141–46. 5. Under this system, virtuosity through variation was something that could be guaranteed; the production of a predictable commodity that could be fittingly labeled as “new” could not. 6. Xu Xiaoting, “Jingpai xinxi he Haipai xinxi de fenxi,” XJYK 1, no. 3. One might add: when in Beijing, an everyday fixture; outside Beijing, a novelty. 7. A few of Shanghai’s Peking opera theater companies (like the Dangui teahouse troupe led by Xia Kuizhang) began training a dozen or so young actors

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Notes to Pages 92–96

who performed in the first plays of the day and in small supporting roles, but such training was on a very limited scale. Xu Xingjie and Cai Shicheng, eds., Shanghai Jingju zhi (Shanghai: Shanghai wenhua chubanshe, 1999), 58–61. From 1900 to 1937, only around half a dozen Peking opera keban formed in Shanghai, and these had limited success in producing star actors. The Jingju zhishi shouce lists sixty famous actors who received training before 1940. Of these, none were trained in a Shanghai keban; seven trained privately under tutors or their parents in Shanghai, and, of these, three went to Beijing or Tianjin at some point specifically for training; ten trained in Tianjin (four in keban, six privately); fourteen trained privately in Beijing; nine trained at the Beijing National Opera School, founded in 1930; eighteen trained at the Fuliancheng; one trained in Beijing’s Rongchunshe keban; two were piaoyou; and one trained privately in Nanjing. Wu Tongbing, ed., Jingju zhishi shouce (Tianjin: Tianjin jiaoyu chubanshe, 1995), 527–68. 8. If successful, these engagements could extend for months or even a year, but the first month was crucial. 9. Alexander Des Forges, “Street Talk and Alley Stories: Tangled Narratives of Shanghai from ‘Lives of Shanghai Flowers’ (1892) to ‘Midnight’ (1933)” (PhD diss., Princeton University, 1998), 33. 10. Ibid., 44. 11. Zhang Guyu, “Shanghai Jingju yiwang” SHWSZL 61 (1989): 213. 12. For instance, the magazine Xin xiaoshuo regularly featured Peking opera play scripts and criticism. Xiaoshuo had not yet come to mean strictly “novel” and was still a broad term that extended to drama. 13. Liang Qichao, Yin bing shi he ji, vol. 4 (Shanghai: Shanghai Zhonghua shuju, 1941), part 10, 6–7. As discussions of literature, drama, and the nation developed, the distinction between the solitary activity of reading and the collective experience of performed drama became an important factor in political and aesthetic debates. 14. William Dolby, A History of Chinese Drama (London: Paul Elek, 1976), 199–201. 15. Tian Benxiang and Jiao Shangzhi, Zhongguo huaju shi yanjiu gai shu (Tianjin: Tianjin gu xiang chubanshe, 1993), 23. 16. Dietrich Tschanz, “The New Drama before the New Drama: Drama Journals and Drama Reform in Shanghai before the May Fourth Movement,” Theater Insight 10, no. 1 (Spring 1999): 49–59. 17. ZGJJS 1: 333. 18. Zhang Cixi, “Wang Xiaonong zhuan,” XJYK 2, no. 3. 19. ZGJJS 1: 334. A literal translation of the title would be something like “Planting the Melon, Cause of the Orchid,” but, as Rebecca Karl notes, each word has double meanings, rendering a full translation impossible. See Rebecca Karl, Staging the World: Chinese Nationalism at the Turn of the Twentieth Century (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), chapter 2 and the appendix, which includes a full translation of act 1. 20. Ge Yihong ed., Zhongguo huaju tongshi (Beijing: Wenhua yishu chubanshe, 1997), 5.

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21. Karl, 215. 22. Kang Baocheng, Zhongguo jindai xiju xingshi lun (Guangxi: Lijiang chubanshe, 1991), 171. 23. Ouyang Yuqian, “Tan wenmingxi,” in Ouyang Yuqian quanji 6 (Shanghai: Shanghai wenyi chubanshe, 1990), 186. 24. At some theaters, before the performance, actors were required to stand onstage for the audience’s inspection and ridicule. No matter how lascivious or offensive the audience’s treatment, the actors were expected to bear it in silence. Zhou Chuanjia, 289. 25. ZGJJS 1: 354. 26. Zhang Cixi,”Wang Xiaonong zhuan.” 27. Gong Yijiang, “Nanfang Jingju dan jiao gaige de xianquzhe Feng Zihe,” in SHWSZL 61: 165. 28. Ibid., 170. 29. Chen Qubing, “Ershi shiji da wutai jianzhang,” in Ershi shiji da wutai 1, October 1904. 30. Chen Qubing, “Lun xiju zhi youyi,” Ershi shiji da wutai 1, October 1904. 31. See also the discussion in chapter 4 on creating a “community of qing.” 32. Liu Yazi, “Ershi shiji da wutai fakan ci,” in Wan Qing wenxue congchao, xiaoshuo xiqu yanju juan, ed. A Ying (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1960), 175. 33. ZGJJS 1: 310. 34. Xu Banmei, 6–7. 35. Ibid., 9. 36. New drama troupes, though mostly based in Shanghai, traveled extensively in the Jiangnan region, to cities including Wuxi, Nanjing, Hangzhou, Hankou, and Changsha. 37. Ouyang Yuqian maintained that Spring Willow were the first Chinese ever to perform spoken drama, which is certainly not true if one considers student shows in missionary schools. 38. Ouyang Yuqian, Zi wo yan xi yi lai (Taibei: Longwen chubanshe, 1990), 14. Ouyang himself admits that this scene was everyone’s favourite part of the show, even though it had no bearing on the plot. 39. Wenmingxi was initially a nickname. At the time a new form of “civilized wedding” (wenming jiehun) ceremony was becoming popular, one that eschewed the customary drums or gongs; as many new plays were spoken in vernacular and had little or no orchestra, they were called wenmingxi. Xu Banmei, 124. 40. Zheng Zhengqiu, “Xinju jingyan tan, 2,” in Ju xue lun tan, JBCK, 90–91. 41. Xu Banmei, 90. 42. Kang Baocheng, 43. 43. Participation in new drama performances was by no means confined to the Shanghai-Jiangnan region. In addition to actors mentioned elsewhere in this chapter, Beijing and Tianjin actors who participated in these trends included Sun Juxian, Gao Qingfen, Cheng Jixian, and Zhang Wenbin. In 1911 Xun Huisheng worked with Wang Zhongsheng in Tianjin on plays including A Black Slave’s Hatred and A Revolutionary Family.

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44. ZGJJS 1: 361–62. 45. The play was first published under the name You Daoren in Xin shuo wan bao in 1906. 46. Ding Baochen, Yuenan wangguo can (Beijing: Aiguo baoguan, 1912), 37–38. 47. Gong Yijiang, 168. 48. Ibid., 165–69. 49. ZGJJS 1: 505. 50. Ouyang Yuqian, “Tan wenmingxi,” in Ouyang Yuqian quan ji 6: 186. 51. Other stage practices, like yinchang (described in chapter 2), further indicate that the stage was still functioning as a social space as well. 52. Weng Ouhong, Hao Shouchen zhuan (Beijing: Zhongguo xiju chubanshe, 1985), 17. 53. Ono Kazuko, Chinese Women in a Century of Revolution, ed. Joshua A. Fogel (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989), 83. 54. Joseph Esherick, Reform and Revolution in China: The 1911 Revolution in Hunan and Hubei (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976). 55. Weikun Cheng, “The Challenge of the Actress: Female Performers and Cultural Alternatives in Early Twentieth Century Beijing and Tianjin,” in Modern China 22, no. 2 (April 1996): 204. 56. ZGJJS 1: 242. 57. Qi Rushan, Jingju zhi bianqian, in QRSQJ 2: 49. 58. The name change was a matter of public image, but within the acting world religious observance remained extremely important. 59. ZGJJS 1: 243. 60. San Ai (Chen Duxiu), “Lun Xiqu,” in Wan Qing wenxue congchao: Xiaoshou xiqu yanjiu juan, 52–55. 61. ZGJJS 1: 244. 62. Susan Mann, Precious Records: Women in China’s Long Eigtheenth Century (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 205. 63. Faye Dudden, Women in the American Theater: Actresses and Audiences, 1790–1870 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994), 3. 64. Catherine Chou Huiling coined this wonderful translation of the term. See “Representing the New Woman: Actresses, Realism, and the Xin Nuxing Movement in Chinese Spoken Drama and Film, 1919–1949” (PhD diss., Tisch School of the Arts/New York University, 1997), 6. 65. Luo Suwen, “Gender on Stage: Actresses in an Actor’s World, 1895– 1930,” in Gender in Motion: Divisions of Labor and Cultural Change in Late Imperial and Early Modern China, ed. B. Goodman and W. Larsen (Lanham, MD: Rowan and Littlefield, 2005). Lin Daiyu, probably the most glamorous courtesan and actress of the day, became the Qunxian’s lead performer. 66. Hou Xisan, Beijing lao xiyuanzi (Beijing: Zhongguo chengshi chubanshe, 1996), 121. 67. ZGJJS 1: 289. 68. Wei Chun, “Kunling xingshuai shi,” XJYK 1, no. 5. 69. Ibid. In his memoir Xu Banmei recalls this law as discriminatory, for it was common knowledge that Western and Japanese men and women were per-

Notes to Pages 110–116

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mitted to, and typically did, perform on stage together. Xu Banmei, 58–60. Of course there were several instances when new drama or other acting companies staged mixed-sex performances, but these did not become regular events until the 1920s. 70. Luo Yinggong, Ju bu congtan, in QDYD 2: 798. 71. Wei Chun. 72. Xing Shi, “Kunling kaishi zhi Ping zhi lueshi,” XJYK 3, no. 1. 73. Qi Rushan, “Kunjuer zai Beiping,” in Xi jie xiao zhanggu, QRSQJ 8: 110. 74. Wei Chun. 75. Yu Zou, “After Patriarchy: Masculinity and Representation in Modern Chinese Drama,” (PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley, 2000), 33–34. 76. I use the phrase biological sex here realizing that its usage is problematic. Western biology did not become part of Chinese popular urban discourse until around the 1920s, around the same time that the word nuxing (lit. female sex) emerged as a common word for woman. Around 1911 a profusion of new character compounds emerged, representing various concepts related to women (for example, nuzi, funu quanli, and nuxuesheng), but no single word was used consistently in public discourse to represent woman as a universal category. Still, the profusion of these new characters suggests that people were searching for new ways of articulating concepts of gender and sex. In the early Republic, the multiple, graded hierarchical identities of the empire were being replaced by a public imagined as made up of more or less equal people whose primary difference was one of sex. Hence I use the phrase biological sex to highlight the binary and fixed nature of the opposition between male and female, in contrast to the more graduated, multiple, and performative gender roles that were more prominent in the Qing. 77. Ibid, 206. 78. Madeleine Yue Dong, Republican Beijing: The City and Its Histories (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 232. Thirty percent of the Beijing City Board’s tax income in the 1910s came from the prostitution tax. 79. Chou Huiling, 28; Ju Yuan, “Nu xinjujia zhi,” in Paiyou yishi, JBCK, 23–24. 80. Cheng Weikun, 217. 81. Ouyang Yuqian, Zi wo yan xi yi lai, 25, 34. 82. Ibid., 80. 83. Ibid., 123–25. 84. Shi Zhengquan, “Liantaibenxi zai Shanghai,” in SHWSZL 61: 203. 85. Zhou Jianyun, “Wanjin xinju lun,” in Ju xue lun tan, JBCK, 57–58. 86. The wealthy and educated women who desired to fill such prestigious patronage roles had to confine themselves to looking after actresses. Yihongguanzhu, “Wuchen kunjuer tan,” XJYK 1, no. 1. 87. Mei Lanfang and Xu Jichuan, Wutai Shenghuo sishi nian (Beijing: Zhonghua xiju chubanshe, 1987), 132. 88. Qi Rushan, Qi Rushan huiyi lu, in QRSQJ 8: 86. After one of these lectures, Tan Xinpei, the imperious reigning “King of Actors,” asked for Qi’s forgiveness for not living up to the standards expected of him.

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89. ZGJJS, vol. 2. 90. The neologism xijuhua raises several different issues worth exploring, both in denotation and connotation. First, why would Chinese dramaturges need to “dramatify” their dramas? What does dramatify denote? This idea will become clearer after the discussion in chapter 4, which shows that as far as many Republican-era literary scholars were concerned (particularly those allied with New Youth), Chinese opera was not really drama at all but “mere” circus acts. The essence of drama, according to their Eurocentric definition, was to tell a story, while Chinese opera, in their view, was just about singing, dancing, and acrobatics. Dramatifying, therefore, meant focusing on those aspects of performance that conveyed the story (plot, script, character motivation), thus making the opera more “dramatic.” Thus the term xijuhua actually combines two tendencies often thought of as oppositional to one another in the Republican-era intellectual context: the application of Western dramatic precedents to methods of plot development, including an increased emphasis on the contribution of playwrights and directors, and a literati “tradition” of refining the unruly language and improvisational nature of popular opera. 91. Feng Xiaoyin, “Lun xingxingquan wuyi yu lingren,” in Ju xue lun tan, JBCK, 48. 92. Zhou Jianyun, “Huang Runqing yu Tiannu sanhua,” in Ju xue lun tan, JBCK, 44. 93. Qi Rushan, Wushi nian lai de Guoju, in QRSQJ 5: 81. 94. Mei Lanfang and Xu Jichuan, 556. 95. Ibid. 96. Mei Shaowu, “Mei Lanfang as Seen by His Foreign Audiences and Critics,” in Peking Opera and Mei Lanfang, ed. Wu Zuguang, Huang Zuolin, and Mei Shaowu (Beijing: New World Press, 1984), 47. 97. See chapter 7 for more on the huashan. 98. Mei Lanfang, “Reflections on My Stage Life,” in Wu Zuguang, Huang Zuolin, and Mei Shaowu, 32. 99. Xu Zhihao and Ling Shanqing, eds., Xi xue quan shu (Shanghai: Shanghai shudian, 1926) vol. 2, part 3, 1–20. 100. Mei Lanfang, 33. 101. Colin Mackerras, The Rise of the Peking Opera, 1770–1870 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), 93–94. 102. Ibid., 96. 103. Miriam Hansen, Babel in Babylon (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 2; Xu Chengbei, 168. 104. Qi Song, “Tan Mei Lanfang,” in Zhu Quanye, ed., Mei Lanfang zhuanji ziliao (Taibei, Tianyi chubanshe, 1978) 1: 34. Xipi manban is a specific, rather slow type of xipi melody. 105. The “King of Actresses” was Liu Xifen, the “King of Child Actors” Shang Xiaoyun: all three were performers of dan roles. 106. Ma Er Xiansheng, “Guan Lingjie Dawang,” in Xiju luntan, JBCK, 21–23. 107. Feng Xiaoyin, “Ju xuan chuyi” (My humble opinions on the actor election), in Ju xue lun tan, JBCK, 23–26; Zhou Jianyun, “Yu zhi lingjie xuanju guan,” in Ju xue lun tan, JBCK, 18–20.

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108. Ma Er Xiansheng, 22. 109. Zhou Jianyun, “Yu zhi lingjie xuanju guan,” 19. 110. Ma Er Xiansheng, 23. 111. Zhou Jianyun, “Ping baoyin yi,” in Ju xue lun tan, JBCK, 17. 112. Joan Judge, Print and Politics: Shibao and the Culture of Reform in Late Qing China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 21. The key cities that appear in most of these periodicals on a regular basis are Shanghai, Beijing, Tianjin, and Wuhan. Chun Liu (Spring Willow), a magazine distributed in Shanghai, Tianjin, and Beijing, regularly featured a chart reviewing the past month’s performances in Beijing by half a dozen of the nation’s most famous Peking opera stars. 113. Chen Dabei, quoted in Kang Baocheng, 242. 114. Xu Banmei, 31–33. 115. Fu Sinian, “Xiju gailiang ge mian guan,” Xin Qingnian 5, no. 4 (October 1918): 332. 116. Mei Lanfang and Xu Jichuan, 415. 117. The only contemporary-costume drama I know of performed by a famous Peking opera actor after 1921 is Shang Xiaoyun’s Modengjia nu (The Maiden of the Modeng Family), performed in 1928 and set in India. See chapter 4. 118. The one exception to this wave of extinctions was ancient-costume new dramas. The following chapters explain why this self-consciously invented tradition, with its colored lights and translucent gowns, was able to survive.

4. May Fourth Realism and Qi Rushan’s Theory of National Drama 1. Ouyang Yuqian, Zi wo yan xi yi lai (Taibei: Longwen chubanshe, 1990), 50–51. Jiating enyuan ji was predominantly a spoken-word play with a highly emotional plot and fairly elaborate sets. Ouyang squeezed in a Peking opera aria from Yubei ting during a carousing scene that was extremely popular. 2. Mei Lanfang and Xu Jichuan, Wutai Shenghuo sishi nian (Beijing: Zhonghua xiju chubanshe, 1987), 557. 3. Qian Xuantong, “Jin zhi suowei ‘pingjujia,’ ” Xin Qingnian 5, no. 2 (1918). Qian describes these traditionalists as “gumming” their objections to heighten the impression that they are old and feeble. 4. Song Chunfang, Chunfang lun ju (Shanghai: Zhonghua shuju, 1923), 265. 5. For example, here are two excerpts from articles printed in New Youth magazine. Wang Shaoqing: “New and Old are absolutely incompatible; the words of the compromisers prove that they don’t understand either the New or the Old. There are the criminals of the New World and the petty thieves of the Old. All problems of the present stem from the fact that the banners of New and Old are unclear.” Li Dazhao: “Contradictions in the life of present-day China are due to the fact that people who differ greatly in their awareness of the New and the Old have to live their lives as close neighbors. In other words, the distance between New and Old is vertically too far and horizontally too close. In terms of time, they are separated too much. In terms of space, they are too close.” Translated in Vera Schwartz,

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The Chinese Enlightenment: Intellectuals and the Legacy of the May Fourth Movement of 1919 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 28, 58. 6. Rey Chow, Women and Chinese Modernity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991); Wendy Larson, Literary Authority and the Modern Chinese Author (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991). 7. David Der-wei Wang, Fin-de-Siècle Splendor: Repressed Modernities of Late Qing Fiction, 1849–1911 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997); Leo Ou-fan Lee, Shanghai Modern: The Flowering of a New Urban Culture in China, 1930–1945 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999). 8. Kirk Denton, ed. Modern Chinese Literary Thought: Writings on Literature, 1893–1945 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996); Marston Anderson, The Limits of Realism: Chinese Fiction in the Revolutionary Period (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990). 9. Joey Bonner, Wang Kuo-Wei: An Intellectual Biography (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), 130. 10. While the Yuan dynasty is usually dated as beginning in 1279 to mark the conquest of Song, Yuan zaju originated in northern territories formerly under the Jin dynasty, which was conquered in 1234, and much of the history of Yuan zaju ranges over this period. William Dolby, A History of Chinese Drama (London: Paul Elek, 1976), 42. 11. Wang Guowei, Wang Guowei xiqu lun wen ji (Beijing: Zhongguo xiju chubanshe, 1984), 85; Faye Chunfang Fei, Chinese Theories of Theater and Performance from Confucius to the Present (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999), 107–8. 12. Feng Liping, “Democracy and Elitism: The May Fourth Ideal of Literature,” Modern China 22, no. 2 (April 1996): 177. 13. Fei, 64. 14. Ibid., 121. 15. Wu Mei, Zhongguo xiqu gai lun (Taibei: Guangwen shuju, 1971), 65–66. 16. Ye Changhai, Zhongguo xiju xue shi gao (Shanghai: Shanghai wenyi chubanshe, 1986), 382, 384. 17. Chun-shu Chang and Shelley Hsueh-lun Chang, Crisis and Transformation in Seventeenth-Century China: Society, Culture and Modernity in Li Yu’s World (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992), 172–73. 18. Fei, 82. 19. Anderson, 29. 20. San Ai (Chen Duxiu) “Lun xiqu,” in Wan Qing wenxue congchao, xiaoshuo xiqu yanjiu juan, ed. A Ying (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1960), 52. 21. Lee Ou-fan Lee, The Romantic Generation of Modern Chinese Writers (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1973), 262–63. 22. Similarly, Marston Anderson emphasizes that even for those writers most attached to the realist moniker, emotion remained a central concern, citing, among others, Zhou Zuoren: “[The writer of fiction] must offer up his own passion, his very viscera”; and Ye Shaojun: “True literature [must] originate in the author’s deep feelings.” Anderson, 39–40. 23. Hu Shi, “Yibusen zhuyi,” in Hu Shi wen cun, vol. 1 (Taibei: Yuandong tushu gongsi, 1953), 634.

Notes to Pages 142–149

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24. Anderson, 42. 25. This key pitfall of realism, the alienation of the individual reader or audience member from society, is a new concern over which May Fourth intellectuals and authors express much anxiety. In earlier drama criticism, the playwright’s or actor’s very act of putting emotions into words, expressing qing outwardly, is described as the greatest challenge, while the audience’s collective reception and resonance with these emotions is often taken for granted as natural and unproblematic. In other words, when qing is successfully expressed it naturally creates a “community of qing.” Practitioners of realism, on the other hand, increasingly note the grave danger that an individual who experiences the emotion conveyed in a novel or play will feel utterly isolated and separated from any sense of community. Realism as a form conceives of a society in which qing and community are often dangerously at odds. 26. Paul Pickowicz, “Qu Qiubai’s Critique of the May Fourth Generation: Early Chinese Marxist Literary Criticism,” in Modern Chinese Literature in the May Fourth Era, ed. Merle Goldman (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977), 372. 27. From Chenbao, 1 November 1920, as quoted in Tian Benxiang and Jiao Shangzhi, Zhongguo huaju shi yanjiu gaishu (Tianjin: Tianjin guji chubanshe, 1993), 79. 28. The reality that the common folk were “not ready for enlightenment” and did not find their messages engaging, even when expressed in the supposedly accessible vernacular, was a dilemma May Fourth intellectuals recognized from the outset. In 1919 the Beijing University Commoners’ Education Lecture Society, for instance, found that no one came to listen to their lectures, and New Tide printed a letter to the editor in May 1919 saying, in part: “The poor women of our country have no idea what you mean by such new terms as ‘world-view’ and ‘family reform.’ No wonder that fewer and fewer people are able to or care to read New Tide.” Schwartz, 139. 29. Andrew F. Jones, Yellow Music: Media Culture and Colonial Modernity in the Chinese Jazz Age (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001), 28. 30. Fu Sinian, “Xiju gailiang ge mian guan,” Xin Qingnian 5, no. 4 (1918): 324. 31. Kang Baocheng, Zhongguo jindai xiju xingshi lun (Guangxi: Lijiang chubanshe, 1991), 56. 32. Ibid. 33. Hu Shi, “Wenxue jinhua guannian yu xiju gailiang,” Xin Qingnian 5, no. 4 (1918): 311–12. 34. Ibid., 312–13. 35. Ibid., 319. 36. Fu Sinian, “Xiju gailiang ge mian guan,” 326. 37. Ibid., 333. 38. Ibid., 335–36. 39. Ouyang Yuqian, “Yu zhi xiju gailiang guan,” Xin Qingnian 5, no. 4 (1918): 141–43. 40. Many May Fourth intellectuals were well aware that modernist movements in Europe were already attacking realism as outdated, yet they still asserted

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that it was the most advanced and universal form of aesthetic development. For example, in the “Manifesto for the Reform of the Short Story Monthly,” the Association of Literary Studies collectively stated: “The literature of realism has recently already showed signs of decline. Its worldview perhaps needs no further introduction, but the situation in literary circles in our country is such that there is hardly any trace of the true spirit and true masterworks of realism. Therefore, we hold that at present it is still crucially important to introduce realism.” (Wang Xiaoming, “A Journal and a “Society”: On the “May Fourth” Literary Tradition,” in Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 11, no. 2 [Fall 1999]: 27). In other words, even if realism was not the end of aesthetic history, it at least needed to be completely integrated into a national literature before that literature could move onto the next stage. I agree with Wang Xiaoming that realism occupies this central place in the thinking of May Fourth intellectuals for weightier reasons than mere historical accidents; realism was central not only in literary discourse but also in discourses of politics, ethics, and science, for its epistemological implications. 41. Hong Shen, “Xiju xueshe pianduan,” in Zhongguo huaju yundong wushi nian shi liao ji, 1907–1957, ed. Tian Han (Hong Kong: Wenhua ziliao gongyingshe, 1978), 109–12. 42. Ayako Kano, Acting Like a Woman in Modern Japan: Theater, Gender, and Nationalism (New York: Palgrave, 2001), 152–53. 43. Ibid., 172. 44. Wang Guowei, 85. The idea that tragedy was the highest form of drama was strongly voiced in the first decade of the twentieth century by other scholars as well, including Jiang Guangyun in “Zhongguo zhi yan ju jie,” in Wan qing wenxue congchao, 50–51. 45. Wu Mei, 105. 46. Ibid., 105–6. 47. Wu Mei’s insistence that Chinese opera’s evolution be seen as wholly separate from that of Western drama distinguishes his account from those of both Wang Guowei and the May Fourth radicals, whose narratives of Chinese and Western drama emphasize convergence. Qi Rushan’s history shares with Wu Mei’s this sense of separate trajectories. 48. Zhang Houzai, “Wo de Zhongguo jiu xi guan,” Xin Qingnian 5, no. 4 (1918): 343–48. 49. Zhang Houzai, 348. 50. Fu Sinian, “Zai lun xiju gailiang,” in Xin Qingnian 5, no. 4 (1918): 355. 51. Indeed, Qi’s terms and arguments echo those of a great many scholars in the late 1910s and the 1920s. For instance, Yu Shangyuan (see chapter 5) stressed a very similar opposition between Western “realism” (xieshi) and Chinese “symbolism or impressionism” (xieyi). But Qi’s corpus of writings on drama is by far the most elaborate and insistent articulation of this opposition. 52. Qi Rushan, Guoju gai lun, in QRSQJ 3: 29. 53. Literally, “No movement that is not dancified, no sound that is not musicalized.” 54. Drinking tea and wine is a common action in several plays, including Farewell, My Concubine and Yang Guifei Becomes Intoxicated.

Notes to Pages 154–164

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55. Qi, Rushan, Mei Lanfang you Mei ji, in QRSQJ 2, part 2, 49. 56. Qi Rushan, Guoju gai lun, 3: 8. 57. Qi Rushan, Wushi nian lai de guoju, in QRSQJ 5: 12. At one point Qi even makes the far-fetched suggestion that the Peking opera pronunciation system could become the basis of a national dialect. Qi Rushan, “Lun xiju zhi Zhongzhouyun you tongyi yuyan zhi nengli yi jieli baocunzhi,” XJYK 1, no. 3. 58. Qi’s advocacy of xijuhua performs this shift subconsciously as well, because it involves substituting the characters xiju for xiqu, the character for music (qu) disappearing under the new emphasis on narrative. 59. Qi Rushan, Mei Lanfang you Mei ji 2, part 2, 49. Qi’s definition of the essence of Chinese theater is commonly used in Chinese and Western comparative theater studies today. See for instance the critical writings of Huang Zuolin and Lan Fan’s Zhong Xi xiju bijiao lungao (Shanghai: Xuelin chubanshe, 1992). 60. This does not mean that visual excitement had been negligible. The plays that attracted the largest crowds in the nineteenth century were the spectacular acrobatic military plays, not those featuring the elegant singing of dan soloists. The phrase ting xi, while part of common parlance, was still tinged with a sense of expertise. 61. Qi Rushan, Guoju man tan, vol. 3, in QRSQJ 3: 89. 62. Qi Rushan, Guoju gai lun, 3: 3–4. 63. Kang Baocheng, 73. 64. ZGJJS 1: 185. 65. Zhang Cixi, “Xiju manhua,” XJYK 3, no. 4. 66. Anderson, 10, 16. 67. Victor Shklovsky, “Art as Technique,” in Modern Criticism and Theory: A Reader, ed. David Lodge (London: Longmans, 1988), 16–30. 68. Anderson, 200–201. 69. Fei, 66. 70. Stephen Owen, Traditional Chinese Poetry and Poetics: Omen of the World (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), 20. 71. Qi Rushan, Wushi nian lai de guoju, 5: 28–29. 72. Liu Xie, The Literary Mind and the Carving of Dragons (Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 1983), 15. 73. Ouyang Yuqian, “Yueju beijuhua de yanjiu,” Xiju 1 (1930): 331. 74. Feng Aonong, “Gailiang jiuju zhi wo jian,” XJYK 1, no. 6. 75. Su Shaoying, “Zhongguo ju zhi tese,” XJYK 2, no. 5. 76. Ibid. Xuni fa is a difficult idea to translate. Xuni can mean false, fictitious, or suppositional. It is used throughout twentieth-century Peking opera criticism in opposition to shishi, xieshi, and other terms for realism. Xuni fa encompasses the use of mime, symbolic props (like the baton used to symbolize a horse), and conventions like walking in a circle to represent taking a journey. 77. Rather than see them as woefully out of step with their times, I think these critics have something in common with punk-rock fans who get skeptical or angry when their favorite bands make deals with major record companies. In other words, they are perceptively reacting to a contradiction inherent to art under capitalism, that commercial success can often radically alter art’s social meaning and the direction of artists’ future aesthetic decisions.

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Notes to Pages 165–182

78. XJYK 1, no. 8. 79. Earle Ernst, The Kabuki Theater (New York: Grove Press, 1956), 18–19. 80. Qi Rushan, Mei Lanfang you Mei ji, part 2, 36–48.

5. Landscape and Figure, Nation and Character 1. Yu Shangyuan, “Guoju,” in Chenbao, 17 April 1935. 2. John Yu Zou points out, however, that, especially with regard to plot structures and tropes, the Guoju Yundong authors’ works often echoed those found in wenmingxi. “After Patriarchy: Masculinity and Representation in Modern Chinese Drama” (PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley, 2000), 109. 3. Yu Shangyuan, quoted in Hu Xingliang, Zhongguo xiqu yu Zhongguo huaju, (Shanghai: Xuelin chubanshe, 2000), 91. The goal of establishing spoken drama’s Chineseness in no way died out with the movement; the most effective experiments in the genre were by Xiong Foxi in his peasant theater in Ding county, which by the 1930s was producing popular and propagandistic plays that were received enthusiastically by peasant audiences. 4. The Ming-Qing novel was the only possible exception, many critics seeing it as the protorealist ancestor of twentieth-century Chinese fiction. 5. “Minzhong xiju she xuanyan” Xiju 1, no. 1 (1921): 95. 6. Zhou Jianyun, “Xiju gailiang lun,” in Ju xue lun tan, JBCK, 3. 7. ZGJJS 1: 381. 8. Qi Rushan, “Lun xiju zhi Zhongzhouyun you tongyi yuyan zhi nengli yi jieli baocunzhi,” XJYK 1, no. 3. 9. Ouyang Yuqian, “Xiju gaige zhi lilun yu shiji” in Ouyang Yuqian yanjiu ziliao, ed. Su Guanjin (Beijing: Zhongguo xiju chubanshe, 1989), 222. Ten years earlier, in New Youth, Ouyang had condemned Peking opera as beyond salvaging. This is not as great a contradiction as it might seem, for in both instances he argued that Peking opera was entrenched in tradition and resistant to the pressures of Westernization. Ouyang at times condemned this recalcitrance, especially with regard to the general mentality of the acting community, but at others saw it as a positive attribute, particularly with regard to aesthetic coherence. 10. Jiao Juyin, Jiao Juyin xiju sanlun (Beijing: Zhongguo xiju chubanshe, 1985), 322. 11. Barbara E. Ward, “Regional Operas and Their Audiences: Evidence from Hong Kong,” in Popular Culture in Late Imperial China , ed. D. Johnson, A. Nathan, and E. Rawski (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 171. 12. He Shixi, “Liyuan jiu wen,” JJTWL 3: 566. The year was 1929. 13. Qi Rushan, Guoju man tan er ji, in QRSQJ 3: 131–39. 14. Ouyang Yuqian, “Xiju gaige zhi lilun yu shiji,” 222. 15. Ouyang Yuqian, “Pan Jinlian zi xu,” in Ouyang Yuqian yanjiu ziliao, 54. 16. Ouyang Yuqian, “Zeyang wancheng women de xiju yundong,” in Ouyang Yuqian yanjiu zilaio, 237. 17. Ouyang Yuqian, “Xiju gaige zhi lilun yu shiji,” 224. 18. Bai Xue, “Xiju yundong zhong zhi juben huang,” LYGB, 17 March 1931. 19. Jiang Jin, “Women and Public Culture: Poetics and Politics of Women’s

Notes to Pages 182–192

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Yue Opera in Republican Shanghai,1930s–1940s” (PhD diss., Stanford University, 1998), 120–22. 20. Zhou Yibai, “Zhongguo xiqu de wutai meishu,” in Zhongguo xiqu lun ji (Beijing: Zhongguo xiju chubanshe, 1960), 169–90. 21. Jo Riley, Chinese Theater and the Actor in Performance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 86–87. 22. Karatani Kojin, Origins of Modern Japanese Literature (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), 53. 23. Ibid., 62. 24. Ibid. 25. Mei Lanfang and Xu Jichuan, Wutai Shenghuo sishi nian (Beijing: Zhonghua xiju chubanshe, 1987), 458. 26. Xu Chengbei, Mei Lanfang yu ershi shiji (Beijing: Sanlian shudian, 1994), 178. 27. Qi Rushan, Qi Rushan huiyi lu, in QRSQJ 8: 103. 28. At a charity performance some weeks later, Mei performed this role, with Tan Xinpei in the lead role as the husband. After the play, a flabbergasted Tan told his friend, “At the wicket scene, I had just sung a few lines, and had not reached the place where people shout ‘Hao,’ but how come everyone was shouting ‘Hao!’? I glanced over, and by gum it was Mei over there making gestures!” Ibid.,106. 29. Mei Lanfang and Xu Jichuan, 150–51. 30. Lu Minghui, “Shanghai de xiju jie,” Xiju 1, no. 3 (1931): 1–4. 31. Xu Xiaoting, “Jingpai xinxi he Haipai xinxi de fenxi,” XJYK 1, no. 3. 32. Luo Suwen, “Lun jindai xiqu yu dushi jumin,” in Shanghai yanjiu lun cong, ed. Shanghai shi difangzhi bangongshi (Shanghai: Shehui kexue chubanshe, 1993), 9: 221. 33. In the Peking opera world, haipai first appears in the late 1870s and seems derived from the term waijiangpai (beyond-the-river style) that dates to the Qianlong era. Beijing’s pihuang actors, who mostly came from the Jiangsu-Anhui region, disparaged as waijiangpai performers not trained to their standards. 34. Ouyang Yuqian, Zi wo yan xi yi lai, 85. 35. Cheng Zhi, “Yiban wutai de chushi,” XJYK 1, no. 7. The first reason given is typical of attacks on jingpai. 36. Shi Zhengxuan, “Liantai benxi zai Shanghai,” in SHWSZL 61: 205. 37. Xu Xiaoting. 38. Lu Minghui, 6–8. 39. A primary difference was that Beijing was neither an industrial nor a trading center, and so coped with these pressures in different ways, through economic and cultural practices that Dong has termed “recycling.” The recoding of Peking opera into a national genre can be seen in many respects as a process of recycling in Dong’s specific sense. Madeleine Yue Dong, Republican Beijing: the City and Its Histories (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 11, 15, 135 – 41. For an excellent critique and alternative theorization of the jingpai/haipai rivalry, see Shih Shumei, The Lure of the Modern (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001). 40. For an explanation of such path dependence in the geography of eco-

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nomic development, see Paul Krugman, Geography and Trade (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991). 41. Lead performers had an average repertoire of more than 150 plays. Although they often had only a few primary masters, they trained with dozens of older actors, each of whom was the acknowledged master of a few specific roles. Short of a mass migration of the acting community, no other city could offer the breadth and intensity of training available in Beijing. 42. From 1900 to 1937 Shanghai had only five fairly small keban (Xu Xingjie and Cai Shicheng, eds., Shanghai Jingju zhi [Shanghai: Shanghai wenhua chubanshe, 1999], 59–61), while over those same decades Beijing saw dozens of training schools with similar or longer lifespans rise and fall. 43. Jingpai could, these critics argued, go just as overboard as haipai: “As to absurd costumes, jingpai and haipai have the same flaw.” Ye Muqiu, “Xianhua haipai yu jingchaopai zhi xinxi,” XJXK 16: 9. 44. Ibid.; Xu Weichun, “Lun Pingju zhi guoqu yu jianglai,” XJYK 3, no. 3. 45. Tan Zhixiang, Xun Huisheng zhuan (Shijiazhuang: Hebei jiaoyu chubanshe, 1996), 125–35. 46. Chen Hongxin and He Guodong, Zhou Xinfang zhuan (Shijiazhuang: Hebei jiaoyu chubanshe, 1996), 110–20. 47. Qian Xuantong, “Suigan lu, 18,” in Xin Qingnian 5, no. 1 (1919). 48. Xiong Foxi , Foxi lun ju (Beijing: n.p., 1928), 76–78. 49. Yang Guzhong, “Ouyang Yuqian zao qi de chuangzuo shijian,” in JJGGDXQ, 127. 50. Kang Baocheng, Zhongguo jindai xiju xingshi lun (Guangxi: Lijiang chubanshe, 1991), 162, 177. 51. Ibid., 163. 52. Guo Liang, “Xiqu yanyuan de wutai ziwo ganjue,” in Xiju meixue lun ji, ed. Shanghai wenyi chubanshe (Shanghai: Shanghai wenyi chubanshe, 1960), 241. 53. Xun Huisheng, “Yan xi, yan renwu” in Xun Huisheng yanju sanlun (Shanghai: Xiju chubanshe, 1980), 25. 54. Huang Zuolin, “Mei Lanfang, Stanislavsky, Brecht: A Study in Contrasts,” in Peking Opera and Mei Lanfang (Beijing: New World Press, 1984), 27; Zhang Jinliang, “Yi Cheng Yanqiu xiansheng tong Zhonghua xiqu zhuanke zhiye xuexiao,” Yu Shuang shi lu (Beijing: Wenshi ziliao chubanshe, 1982), 200. 55. Xi Chan, “Liyong baike chingjiu de bushi chu,” LYGB, 14 February 1930. 56. Xu Xiaoting, “Ma Lianliang lai Hu ji,” BYHB, 5 September 1928. 57. Xu Chengbei, 175. 58. “Ling nan Mei xun,” BYHB, 27 December 1928. 59. Zhang Senceng, “Jiuju zai Beiping,” XJXK 14: 5. 60. Isabelle Duchesne, “The Chinese Opera Star: Roles and Identity,” in Boundaries in China, ed. John Hay (London: Reaktion Books, 1994), 234. 61. Sun Danguang, “Fandui lingren ‘baike’ he ‘yanke,’ ” XJXK 32, 4. 62. Liu Huogong, “Juan touyu,” XJYK 1, no. 6. There were plenty of good reasons for publishing such a special issue: the public was fascinated by Mei, so the issue was sure to sell well; Mei was also a national figure and provided a good

Notes to Pages 200–205

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springboard from which critics could voice their opinions on a wide range of issues. Moreover, several of the articles in the issue were quite critical of Mei. 63. Zhang Senceng, 5. The article continues: “The most famous of [the pengjuer] is a certain X who penged a certain Great King [i.e., Mei Lanfang, Mr. X being Qi Rushan]. Because X had a difference of opinion with the Great King, and the Great King moved to Shanghai, making it difficult for them to meet up, X has gradually switched to penging the so-called Little Great King [Li Shifan]. Without any thought to his sacrifice in money or time, he treats the Little Great King to meals three days a week, and gives him private instruction on posture and movement [shenduan] at his private home five days a week.” 64. Such gifts not only worked as indirect investments, saving actors thousands of yuan; they were also public displays of intimate influence. 65. Zhang Eyun, Zhang Eyun zizhuan (Taibei: Dadi chubanshe, 1985), 49. 66. Si Qian, “Shiliu shiqi ri Mingxing guan Cheng ji,” BYHB, 13 March 1928. 67. Sun Yusheng, “Shanghai xiyuan bianqian zhi, 10,” XJYK 2, no. 2. 68. Xiao Lin, “Jin xi Liyuan la za tan,” XJYK 1, no. 6. 69. “Mei Cheng jin xun hui zhi,” Beijing wanbao, 11 September 1922; Xiao Lin; “Ju Xun,” BYHB, 13 April 1935. 70. Mei Lanfang and Xu Jichuan, 127. 71. Zhang Eyun, 47. 72. Cheng Zhi, “Yiban wutai de chushi,” XJYK 1, no. 7. 73. Zhang Kai, “Beiping ju shi baogao” in XJYK 2, no. 6. 74. Mei was certainly aware of the cigarette ads because Mei Lanfang cigarettes were a product of the Nanyang Tabacco Company of which he was a board member. A typical eyelgass ad in Xi zazhi is disguised as an article titled “Mei Lanfang Does Not Come to Shanghai Every Day.” The pitch is finally delivered in last few lines: If you want to get the most out of seeing Mei Lanfang, you will want to see him clearly, so buy our glasses. “Mei Lanfang bu ri lai Hu,” Xi zazhi 1, no. 2. 75. Jiao Juyin, 422. Shoujiu literally means “preserve the old.” The idea of a backdrop had not existed before the twentieth century, so the term for this “traditional” setup was developed only after modern, changeable backdrops were introduced. 76. “Shang Xiaoyun zhong zhi lai Jin zhi neimu,” BYHB, 23 May 1928. 77. Hua Yan, “Da dao wuchi de mingshi ji pingjujia,” BYHB, 11 August 1928. 78. Hong E, “Jinshi youyi zhi xiankuang,” BYHB, 13 July 1935. 79. Mo Nong, “Shang Xiaoyun dongpo haiwai zhi yao,” BYHB, 21 September 1935. 80. Zhang Kai, “Beiping jubu dashi ji,” XJYK 3, no. 10. 81. “Linglianhui zhi aiguo re,” LYGB, 26 October 1931. 82. Zhi Zhi, “Ji waijiao hou yuan hui yiwuxi zhi mo,” BYHB, 23 November 1929. After another similar article was published, enough pressure was exerted that Mei and several other actors agreed to perform. 83. Chu Sheng, “Jin xi baoyin diaomen zhi xiaozhang,” XJYK 1, no. 1. 84. Hu Qingping, “Cheng Yanqiu zai Chongqing,” XJXK 28: 6–7.

324 85. 86. 87. 88. 89. 90.

Notes to Pages 206–214 Tian Zhengdai, “Yuan Mei Lang tichang pinminhua,” XJYK 1, no. 6. Dong Lihan, “Ju Mei ying Mei he wan Mei,” XJXK 17, 9. Li Wenzhe, “Ju Mei yundong zai Kaifeng,” XJXK 28: 7. Chiyuanjiuzhu, “Mingling zhi shuhua re,” BYHB, 12 August 1933. Zhang Shunjiu, “Liyuan cong hua,” XJYK 1, no. 9. Meihuaguanzhu, “Ju bu cuo zhi, 2,” XJYK 1, no. 11.

6. The Limits of Reform 1. Sun Yusheng, “Shanghai xiyuan bianqian zhi, 3,” XJYK 1, no. 3. 2. Hou Xisan, Beijing lao xiyuanzi (Beijing: Zhongguo chengshi chubanshe, 1996), 159. 3. Wotou are hefty cornmeal cakes eaten by itinerant peasants in north China. Actors’ Guild charity performances were given this name because the money raised went to actors who were so poor that they regularly ate wotou to survive. 4. Hou Xisan, 158–74. 5. Ding Bingsui, Beijing, Tianjin, ji qita (Taibei: Rongtain yinshuguan, 1977), 78. 6. Wei Xingge, “Beiping liyuan bianqian ji,” XJYK 2, no. 12. 7. Ye Longzhang, “Beijing xiyuan kao,” in Wenshi ziliao xuanbian (Beijing: Wenshi ziliao chubanshe, 1991) 21: 234. 8. Hou Xisan, 83–120. 9. Ibid., 158. 10. Zheng Lishui, “Tianjin de xiyuan,” in Tianjin wenshi ziliao, vol. 51 (Tianjin: Wenshiziliao chubanshe,1990), 156. 11. In 1931 the Shanghai municipal government tallied only three Peking opera houses among twenty local drama theaters, two spoken drama theaters, and thirty-seven cinemas, according to the Shanghai shi tongji (Shanghai: Shanghai shi difang xiehui, 1933), 19. This number was likely based on very rigid criteria, because 1930 alone witnessed the opening of four theaters that featured Peking opera with some frequency (Zhongguo xiqu zhi bianji weiyuan hui, ed., Zhongguo xiqu zhi, Shanghai juan [Beijing: Zhongguo ISBN Zhongxin, 1996], 681–82). Moreover, in 1930 Drama Monthly listed five top-flight Peking opera theaters. (Xiao Zhilan, “Shanghai xiyuan bianqian kao,” XJYK 2, no.12 [August 1930]). And statistics for 1938 claim twelve Peking opera theaters. In sum, because the kinds of shows featured in theaters changed with some regularity, providing an exact number of Peking opera theaters in Shanghai is very difficult. 12. Zhongguo xiqu zhi bianji weiyuan hui, 639–50. 13. Zhang Qingshuang, “Jin men ju shi,” XJYK 1, no. 10. 14. Hou Shen, “Gaige juchang zhi wo jian,” LYGB, 23 February 1930. 15. Zhang Guyu, “Tantan Huang Jin,” XJXK 18: 1. 16. As one author put it, their only tips were the odd article a careless customer might leave in the hatbox beneath the seat. Hou Xisan, 264. 17. Jiao Juyin, Jiao Juyin xiju sanlun (Beijing: Zhongguo xiju chubanshe, 1985), 400. 18. Xiong Foxi, Xie juyuanli (Shanghai: Zhonghua shuju, 1927), 123. Foreigners were more generous in their descriptions. A Japanese theater critic writing

Notes to Pages 214–223

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in the 1920s noted: “In the middle of a Chinese theater, the audience could be roaring with laughter and kids screaming, and none of it would be the slightest inconvenience. It is really the most relaxed place.” This same author also wrote whimsically about sharing his seat with a giant roach and finding snot in his face towel. Chen Yunguan, “Riren muguang kan zhi Zhongguo ju,” XJYK 3, no. 4. 19. Hou Xisan, 201. 20. Ibid., 202. 21. Ibid., 204. 22. “Juchang yingxu gailiang zhi yaodian,” Shenbao, 29 June–14 July 1923. 23. Sun Yusheng, “Shanghai xiyuan bianqian zhi, 5,” XJYK 1, no. 5. 24. Xu Wenyu and Wu Zonggu, “Xidan juchang de yange,” in Wenshi xiliao xuanbian (Beijing: Wenshi ziliao chubanshe, 1990), 40: 233. 25. Luo Zhenkai, “Si da jie hao zhi Yan Cijia,” XJXK 16: 16. 26. Zhen Jianxi, “Hao!” XJYK 3, no. 5. 27. Mei Lanfang and Xu Jichuan, Wutai shenghuo sishi nian (Beijing: Zhongguo xiju chubanshe, 1987), 137. 28. Jiao Juyin, 424. 29. Gui Yanqi, “Gu wu ji,” XJYK 3, no. 4. This solution was first developed for Mei Lanfang’s United States tour. Qi Rushan predictably claimed that the arrangement was a revival of an ancient design used in the imperial palace. 30. Lawrence W. Levine, Highbrow, Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 206. 31. Ibid., 179. 32. Hou Xisan., 124–25. Needless to say, the Civilized Teahouse’s business suffered, the female audience reportedly falling off by 80 percent. 33. Xin Fengxia, “You nian xue yi ji,” in Zhonghua wenshi ziliao wen ku (Beijing: Zhongguo wenshi chubanshe, 1996) 15, 706. 34. Mei Lanfang and Xu Jichuan, 260–63. 35. You Bankuang, “Duifu bu liao,” XJYK 2, no. 1. 36. Mei Lanfang and Xu Jichuan, 548. 37. Tan Zhixiang, Xun Huisheng zhuan (Hebei: Hebei jiaoyu chubanshe, 1996), 141–43. 38. Ding Bingsui, 84. 39. Wei Zhongsu, “Yan li xin yu,” XJYK 1, no. 5. 40. Li Fusheng, Zhonghua Guoju shi (Taibei: Tianyi chubanshe, 1977), 133. 41. He Shixi, “Du Yuesheng yu Jingju,” SHWSZL 43: 234. 42. Zhou Enzhu, “Du Yuesheng yu Mei Lanfang neimu,” in Shanghai wenshi no. 2 (1990): 42. 43. “Lilianhui gong song Du si bei e,” LYGB, 26 May 1931. 44. He Shixi, “Yu Shuyan jujue lai Hu wei Du Yuesheng yan xi zhen xiang,” Shanghai wenshi 2 (1990): 45. 45. Neiwaihang, “Guan ju yu anmu zhi aoman,” LYGB, 3 March 1931. 46. Peng Ming, “Kanxi de ‘zikan’ yu ‘beikan,’ ” LYGB, 23 March 1933. 47. For proposals to shorten programs, see “Juchang yingxu gailiang zhi yaodian, 5,” Shenbao, 4 July 1923; Xue Hua, “Juchang nei gailiang wenti,” LYGB, 14 January 1930. In their reviews, critics typically describe arriving at the playhouse during the middle acts of the program.

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48. Bai Xue, “Zenyang qu jianduan yanju shijian,” LYGB, 11 March. 1931. 49. Zhang Faying, Zhongguo xiban shi (Shenyang: Shenyang chubanshe, 1991), 423. 50. Zhang Faying, 421. 51. Zhang Liaogong, Ting ge xiang ying lu (Tianjin: Tinajin shuju, 1941), 118. 52. Zhang Cixi, “Ling yuan,” XJYK 2, no. 7. 53. Zhongguo xiqu zhi bianji weiyuan hui, ed. Zhongguo xiqu zhi, Tianjin juan (Beijing: Wenhua yishu chubanshe, 1990), 309–10. 54. “Ju jie xiaoxi,” BYHB, 21 November 1931. 55. Zhang Senceng, “Jiuju zai Beiping,” XJXK 14: 5. 56. Yu Weng, “Zenyang cai neng wanjiu xianzai pingju de weiji,” XJXK 13: 5. 57. Sun Yusheng, “Fa kan ci,” LYGB, 5 September 1928. 58. Yong Ling, “Liyuan Gongbao chuban gan yan,” LYGB, 5 September 1928. 59. “Lai jian,” LYGB, 20 February 1929. 60. Li Lang, “Ben hui ying zushe tushuguan,” LYGB, 3 March 1931. 61. Li Hongchun, Jingju chang tan (Beijing: Zhongguo xiju chubanshe, 1982), 7. 62. These constant financial pressures toppled almost every keban of the Republican era; even the few that were briefly prosperous, like the Yucheng, Sanle, and Binqing, did not survive much longer than a decade. Jiao Juyin, 381. 63. Zhang Cixi, “Ju xue manhua, 3” XJYK 2, no. 7. 64. Sha Huang, “Fuliancheng suo shi,” BYHB, 18 November 1933. 65. Shang Changchun, “Shang Xiaoyun yu Rongchushe,” in JJTWL 2: 19. 66. Ye Longzhang, “Xi(Fu)liancheng keban de shimo,” in JJTWL 1: 13. 67. Qi Rushan, Za zhu, in QRSQJ 8: 53. Several actors had their stage careers ruined in this way, Wang Yaoqing being perhaps the most famous. 68. Though Peking opera usually led the way in such opera reforms, one exception was the Yisushe (Transform Customs Society), a Shaanxi bangzi school with a completely reformed curriculum that was founded in 1912 in Xi’an. Hsiao-t’i Li, “Opera, Society, and Politics: Chinese Intellectuals and Popular Culture, 1901–1937” (PhD diss., Harvard University, 1996), 335. 69. Ouyang Yuqian, Zi wo yan xi yi lai (Taibei: Longwen chubanshe, 1990), 100. 70. Ibid. 71. Xu Haiping, “Nantong ling gong xueshe jianshi,” in JJGGDXQ, 65–75. 72. Ouyang Yuqian, Zi wo yan xi yi lai, 102–10. 73. Ibid., 100. 74. Qin Shao, “The Mismatch: Ouyang Yuqian and Theater Reform in Nantong, 1919–1922” in CHINOPERL, Papers 19 (1996): 39–59. The result was poor acting, and within a few years after Ouyang left Nantong, both the school and the theater had lost their vaunted national reputations. In 1926 the theater no longer bore any resemblance to its moralizing name, “Reforming Customs,” and was renamed simply Nantong Theater. 75. Qin Shao, 51. 76. Xu Haiping, 73. 77. Xu Ceceng, “Nantong Jingju jie zhuangkuang,” XJYK 1, no. 7.

Notes to Pages 231–240

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78. Su Shaoying, “Yi Mei,” XJYK 1, no. 6. 79. “Beiping Zhonghua xiqu xueyuan chengli,” LYGB, 29 May 1931. 80. Zhang Kai, “Beiping jubu dashi ji,” XJYK 3, no. 1. 81. Zhang Kai, “Beiping jubu dashi ji,” XJYK 2, no. 12. 82. “You Beiping tong xuan tan dao tongling,” XJXK 26: 8. The exception was in the dan category, with Mao Shilai and Li Shifang (popularly known as “Little Mei Lanfang”) from the Fuliancheng winning more than twice as many votes as their competitors. 83. Li Hongchun, of the Changchun keban, tells a story about sneaking off with some classmates to see the Xiliancheng perform. The boys could not resist the opportunity to hiss and boo at their rivals, even though they knew they would be recognized and there would be hell to pay for their truancy. Li Hongchun, 21. 84. Bai Yuwei, “Wo zai Zhonghua xi xiao de qianqian houhou,” in JJTWL 3: 73. 85. Wang Jinlu, “Huiyi Zhonghua xiqu xuexiao,” in JJTWL 1: 68. 86. Ibid., 74. 87. Bai Yuwei, 77. 88. Wang Jinlu, 69. 89. Ibid., 81. 90. Zhang Jinliang, “Yi Cheng Yanqiu xiansheng zai Zhonghua xiqu zhuanke zhiye xuexiao,” Yushuang shi lu: hui yi Cheng Yanqiu xiansheng (Beijing: Wenshi ziliao chubanshe, 1982), 201. 91. Jiao Juyin, 385. These events became inundated by press coverage: for example, when two NDA students pledged Yang Xiaolou, the Beiyang Huabao journalist covering the ceremony remarked, “The details have already been reported in all the papers, I won’t repeat them here.” Yu Cun, “Yang Xiaolou san ci shou tu,” BYHB, 16 March 1935. 92. Ye Longzhang, “Xi(Fu)liancheng keban de shimo,” 16. 93. The GMD “culture clique” comprised Li Shizeng, Wu Zhihui, and Zhang Renjie. In 1930 they used part of the Boxer indemnity to establish the Agricultural Bank, and at the same time Li declared that all the Boxer money directed through France would be used for cultural activities. For this announcement he earned the nickname wenhua gaoyao (cultural propagandist), which I have paraphrased as “Culture Czar.” 94. Shou Sheng, “Xizhuan xuexiao zhi shihua,” BYHB, 2 December 1933.

7. The Gendering of National Culture 1. “Xitai shang de Ruan Lingyu yiwu,” BYHB, 11 May 1935. 2. Michael Chang, “The Good, the Bad, and the Beautiful: Movie Actresses and Public Discourse in Shanghai, 1920s–1930s,” in Cinema and Urban Culture in Shanghai, 1922–1943, ed. Zhang Yingjin (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), 128–59. 3. Faye Dudden, Women in the American Theater: Actresses and Audiences, 1790–1870 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994), 3. 4. Liu Jiulu, “Ni shang yan ying lu,” XJYK 1 no. 9–2, no. 2. 5. Cheng Weikun, “The Challenge of the Actress: Female Performers and

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Cultural Alternatives in Early Twentieth Century Beijing and Tianjin,” Modern China 22, no. 2 (1996): 210. 6. Liu Jiulu, “Ni shang yan ying lu,” 1, no. 11. 7. Zhang Beijiang, “Pingjujia ying you san zhong zhishi,” XJYK 1, no. 2. 8. Wang Congming, “Pengjuer,” XJYK 1, no. 11. 9. Liu Jiulu, “Ni shang yan ying lu,” 2, no. 2. 10. Chantou more literally means turban. This metaphorical use of the word is probably derived from a stereotype of Arabs lavishing gifts on women to entice them into their harems. 11. Liu Jiulu, “Ni shang yan ying lu,” 1, nos. 9 and 11. 12. Ibid. Refusal, at times, was out of the question, as in the case of the actress Wang Yuhua (aka Xin Yanqiu), who was abducted and married against her will in 1935. ZGJJS 2: 716. 13. Liu Jiulu, “Ni shang yan ying lu,” 1, no. 11. 14. This was true regardless of what sort of roles an actress performed. Even Zhang Wenyan, who was best known for performing huadan roles quite salaciously, retired from the stage on her marriage. ZGJJS 2: 697. 15. Ao Weng, “Meng Xiaodong wei zaoyaojia de mudiwu,” BYHB, 21 July 1926. 16. Even after Meng reappeared, the gossip continued. Mei’s mother took ill, and supposedly her deathbed request was that Mei divorce his wife, Fu Zhifang, and marry Meng. Ao Weng, “Guan yu Mei Meng liang ling hun shi zhi yaoyan,” BYHB, 28 August 1926. That too was a false alarm; Mei’s mother recovered, dying in 1930, while he was touring the US. 17. Ibid. 18. Shushi, “Shanghai zhi nan nu heyan,” LYGB, 20 January 1928. 19. Wang Xiaoyin, “Yige jihui tantan jiuxi,” BYHB, 23 April 1927. At the very least, wrote one critic, actors like Mei Lanfang should refrain from making films, a medium that was internationally a preserve of gender-straight acting. Bai Xue, “Fandui Mei Lanfang she you sheng dianying,” LYGB, 23 Apr 1931. 20. Bai Xue, “Zenme yang shixian nan ban nan, nu ban nu,” LYGB, 5 May 1931. 21. Cai Yuying, translated in Jiang Jin, “Women and Public Culture: Poetics and Politics of Women’s Yue Opera in Republican Shanghai, 1930s–1940s” (PhD diss., Stanford University, 1998), 76. Women’s yue opera developed into a genre of romance for primarily female audiences. Jiang’s explanation for the direction of this development is crisp and convincing. Yue opera was a form of “minor” opera in the 1920s, a regional genre enjoyed almost exclusively by denizens of Shaoxing and performed by peasant girls for primarily working-class audiences. As it became more successful commercially, actresses directed their aspirations toward cleaning up the genre, transforming what had been obscene material into “pure” romantic material, expressively acted. This shift not only made yue actresses more publicly respected but also caused their female audience to grow enormously. 22. Although it would be a mistake to label Peking opera’s messages and reception as entirely misogynist, blatant examples of a misogynist imagination are not hard to find. In one of its dimmest moments, Drama Monthly carried a

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tedious satire titled “The Drama PhD’s Success,” set during the May Fourth era. The Drama PhD has just returned from Europe, degree in hand. Aghast at what he now believes to be the idiocy of Chinese drama, he takes to writing long articles on drama reform and preaching in the streets about the need to totally abandon the old, ignorant, superstitious cacophony that passes for theater in China. He vows that he, the Drama Doctor, will single-handedly create a new Chinese theater worthy of global admiration. He gathers funds and begins rehearsals for his masterpiece: “In the play there was the part of a romantic girl. Accordingly, she was to be completely naked.” The Doctor eventually finds a woman who will disrobe for his art, and finally presents his show to the public. By the third performance the audience is packed with lewd schoolboys who sleep or talk through the entire play until the naked woman emerges, at which point they applaud until their hands are sore. The utter lack of wit in this caricature aside, it does show how closely related were the ideas of Western realism, wenmingxi, and pornography in the imagination of a segment of the Peking opera community. You Bankuang, “Xiju boshi de chenggong,” XJYK 2, no. 4. 23. Mei Lanfang did not take a female disciple until late in his career, and Cheng Yanqiu refused to do so until after 1949. 24. Bai Xue, “Cong Zhenzhu ta guancha dao shehui xinli,” LYGB, 5 March 1931. 25. Pian Yu, “Guangzhou nulang zhi Mei Lanfang zhuang,” LYGB, 11 May 1931; Zhang Qinshaung, “Wo zhi zuiyan,” XJYK 1, no. 11. The Mei Lanfang style is described as “narrow sleeves / covering knees.” 26. Qing Lin, “Jin men ju shi,” XJYK 1, no. 10. 27. Ren Mingyao, Jingju qi pa: Si da ming dan (Nanjing: Dongnan daxue chubanshe), 1994), 81. 28. Zhang Eyun, Zhang Eyun zizhuan (Taibei: Dadi chubansh, 1985), 25. 29. ZGJJS 2: 717. 30. Su Shaoying, Zhang Xiaocang, and Su Laocan, “Xiandai si da ming dan zhi bijiao,” XJYK 3, no. 4. 31. Jiazi, “Tan danjuer banxiang,” in XJXK 23: 19. 32. Huo Gong, “Cong Mei Lanfang shuo dao guanzhong xinli de bianyao,” in XJYK 3, no. 6. 33. Erlang, “Daihe suo yu,” BYHB, 27 August 1929. 34. See BYHB: Qu, “Xi hu dai Mei ji,” 7 January 1930; “Fu Zhifang shi Mei Lanfang jia de ‘zhongtang,’ ” 11 June 1929; Bi Gong, “Mei Lanfang de nianling wenti,” 30 April 1927; Wang Xiaoyin, “Yige jihui tantan jiuxi,” 23 Apr 1927. 35. Miu Gong, “Zhongyuan guang Mei ji,” BYHB, 7 March 1928. 36. Wang Pingling, “Guoju de ‘nan ban nu’ wenti,” Ju xue yue kan 3, no. 12 (1934). Not every critic who argued for the artistic superiority of the male dan did so in these terms. Various critics arrived at similar conclusions through different arguments. For instance, women could never sing dan melodies as well as men because those melodies had been developed specifically for the male voice: women singing dan parts sounded shrill or screechy. (Guo Yi, “Wei jiaoshou kunlingzhe jin yi yan,” XJYK 1, no. 4. Wei Chun, “Wang yun lou ju tan,” XJYK 2, no. 2.). Another critic argued that because women were unaware of their inherent mysteriousness, only men could truly appreciate and impart that mystery on

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Notes to Pages 250–257

the stage. (Bing Qin, “Danjuer de xingbie jingzhen,” LYGB, 14 November 1930.) Most such arguments, though not formulated explicitly in terms of reality versus representation, are, on closer analysis, just alternative versions of that argument: the dan’s voice is not a real woman’s voice; the dan’s mystery is not that of a real woman, but for that reason it is a better representation of that mystery. 37. For a more complete elaboration of the relationship between epistemological structures and homosexuality, see Eve Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet. 38. I am proposing that the opposition of gender and sex parallels and corresponds to that of representation and reality. By the 1930s, then, the confusions and shifts in gender relations and identities that were so controversial and unsettled around 1911, while not completely divested of their radical or subversive possibilities, were now much more clearly contained within a pervasive epistemology that differentiated the “reality” of biology from the “representation” of culture. The work of Judith Butler and others on gender as performative obviously has a bearing on this issue. 39. Such censorship was both more strict and less strenuously resisted in Peking opera than in other genres because of its high social and economic profile and the continuous efforts among Peking opera promoters to improve that standing still further. 40. Zheng Negong, “Huadan rencai jinxi zhi yiqu,” XJYK 1, no. 2. Xun Huisheng and Xiao Cuihua were seen as the last stalwarts of the role. Xiao performed huadan roles exclusively and never really gained a reputation as a vocalist. 41. Shun Jiu, “Yan di yu tan,” XJYK 3, no. 6. Mei Lanfang never again performed several such plays taught him by the great actor Chen Delin. 42. Zhang Cixi, “Ling Yuan,” XJYK 3, no. 10. 43. Feng Xiaoyin, “Guqu sui bi,” in XJYK 3, no. 5. 44. Liu Qiujiang, “Xun Huisheng zhi san xinxi,” XJYK 2, no. 4. The shift from qiao to other footwear and hence a different walking and performing style began with Wang Yaoqing, but again Mei was even more daring and gave up wearing qiao entirely. 45. “Huadan de shiming,” LYGB, 2 July 1930. 46. Zhan Wan cheng, in in Jingju cong kan, ed. Zhongguo xiqu yanjiuyuan, vol. 40 (Beijing: Zhongguo xiqu chubanshe, 1959), 13. 47. Tan Zhixiang, Xun Huisheng zhuan, 236. The revised death scene involved three spear thrusts instead of one, which also gave Zhang Xiu time to express complex emotions of remorse and understanding; his final thrust was dealt with his face turned away, unable to bear killing someone dear to him. 48. Yi Weng , “Xun Huisheng zhi mianmian guan,” XJYK 3, no. 8. 49. In the post-1949 revision of the play, Chun Lan’s marriage to Bian Ji is omitted because of the feudal nature of a story involving a man having two wives. 50. Xun Huisheng, Hua Tian cuo, in Xun Huisheng yanchu juben xuanji (Shanghai: Shanghai wenyi chubanshe, 1962), 15–19. 51. Ibid., 33–35. 52. Two of the three prize-winning essays rating the Four Famous Dan in

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Drama Monthly also included a specific section on moral and personal qualities, with Shang rating the lowest, as “average.” 53. It was said that Shang’s bright and vigorous voice was unsuited to tragedy and that gentle mournfulness was outside his range. Indeed, his most famous tragic play, Qian kun fu shou jing (about a mother who loses her infant son) involved his character not sadly lamenting, but rather becoming histrionically insane, hallucinating and expressing her distress through a chaotic and beautiful volley of water-sleeve gestures. 54. Huang Yufu, Jingju, qiao he Zhongguo de xingbie guanxi 1902–1937 (Beijing: San lian shudian, 1998), 79–85. 55. Ren Mingyao, Jingju qi pa, 115. 56. Cang Xiaozhang, “Xiandai si da ming dan zhi bijiao,” XJYK 3 no. 4. 57. Wang Qinxian, “Duocai duoyi zhi Cheng Yushuang,” XJYK 3, no. 2. 58. Cheng Yanqiu, “Jianyue wo ziji,” in Yushuang shi lu, huiyi Cheng Yanqiu xiansheng (Beijing: Wenyi ziliao chubanshe, 1982), 223. 59. Jin Zhongsun, Chun gui meng (Beijing: Beijing bao wen tang shu dian, 195.

8. Nationalization through Iconification 1. Ban Ma, “Mei Lanfang zhi yanshuo wei yanshuo de mofan,” BYHB, 5 July 1930. 2. This pronouncement has been attributed to Pomona College’s professor of public speaking, Benjamin D. Scott. See “Mei Lanfang Receives Degree from Pomona College,” China Weekly Review, 5 July 1930, 187. 3. Paul K. Whang, “Mei Lan-Fang and His Trip to the United States,” China Weekly Review, 11 January 1930. 4. K.K.K., “Ping Yi kuai qian yu Shen seng,” Yingxi chunqiu 9 (1925). 5. “Mei Lanfang Niu Yue de shengkuang,” BYHB, 19 April 1930. 6. Cai Shuang, “Mei Lang fu dong wenti,” Jing bao, 9 March 1919, 2. Mei’s performance at the Imperial Theater in Tokyo was a success, but the timing could not have been worse, with Mei performing for Japanese audiences on the eve of May Fourth while students back in Beijing stormed the streets to protest Japanese imperialism. After the 1923 Kanto earthquake, Mei organized a charity performance to aid the earthquake victims, raising more than ten thousand yuan, in return for which he was again invited with great warmth to Tokyo in 1924. 7. Wang Zhangfa and Liu Hua, Mei Lanfang nianpu (Nanjing: Hehai daxue chubanshe, 1994), 97–106. 8. Qi Rushan, Mei Lanfang you Mei ji, in QRSQJ 2, part 1, 9–10. 9. Ibid., 16. 10. “Mei xun,” Shenbao, 19–28 December 1928, describes several offers made by Southeast Asian businessmen. 11. Mei Shaowu, “Mei Lanfang as Seen by His Foreign Audiences and Critics,” in Peking Opera and Mei Lanfang, ed. Wu Zuguang, Huang Zuolin, and Mei Shaowu (Beijing: New World Press, 1984), 47. 12. Qi Rushan, Mei Lanfang you Mei ji, part 1, 13.

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13. Xu Xiaoting, “Jingpai xinxi he Haipai xinxi de fenxi,” XJYK 1, no. 3. 14. Xiong Foxi, Foxi lun ju (Beijing: n.p., 1928), 107–17. 15. In U.S. coverage, when journalists mention Mei’s offstage persona, they often mention his elegant hands and gentle demeanor as evidence of his gentlemanly character: implications of effeminacy were typical of Western stereotypes of the feminine, overly civilized Eastern male. 16. Rey Chow, Women and Chinese Modernity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991); Joseph Levenson, Confucian China and Its Modern Fate (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968). 17. “Mei hua xiaoxi,” Shenbao 4, 5, 10, and 14 January 1930; “Mei Lanfang zuo yan baojie,” Shenbao, 7 January 1930; “Mei Lanfang huansonghui jui sheng,” Shenbao, 17 January 1930. 18. Qu, “Xiju dai Mei ji,” BYHB, 7 January 1930. 19. “Haiwai Mei xun,” Shenbao, 15 March 1930. 20. “Chinese Actor Welcomed by City Officials,” San Francisco Chronicle, 21 April 1930. 21. “Large Receptions for Mei Lang-fang,” New York Times, 21 February 1930. 22. Qi Rushan, Mei Lanfang you Mei ji, part 1, 1. 23. For example, Zhongguo ju zhi zuzhi is a seventy-thousand-character book describing forms of dialogue, props, and movements. Qi cataloged hundreds of musical instruments, face paintings, dance forms, and prop weapons, only a fraction of which ever appeared on the American stage. 24. Qi Rushan, Mei Lanfang you Mei ji, part 1, 37. 25. Ibid., part 2, 16. 26. Advertisements for the show at the San Francisco Capital Theaters claimed it was, precisely, “Like Nothing You’ve Ever Seen.” 27. Hu Shi, “Mei Lanfang and the Chinese Drama,” The Pacific Coast Tour of Mei Lan-fang, ed. Ernest Moy (New York: China Institute of America, 1930), 1. 28. J. Brooks Atkinson, “China’s Idol Actor Reveals His Art,” New York Times, 17 February 1930. 29. George Warren, “Mei Lan-Fang Delights with Dramatic Skill,” San Francisco Chronicle, 24 April 1930. 30. The article “Jiuju you shijie de jiazhi” (Old drama has global value), LYGB, 26 August 1930, is typical of the triumphant reports. 31. Hou Xisan, Beijing lao xiyuanzi (Beijing: Zhongguo chengshi chubanshe, 1996), 232. 32. Wang Xiaoqing, “Zhongguo ju zhi yishu diwei yi queding hu?” BYHB, 30 August 1930. 33. “Mei Lanfang wei ren suo mai,” in BYHB, 10 June 1930. 34. Personal conversation with Mei Shaowu, June 1995. The affair was mostly kept out of the press, though it did contribute to growing tensions between Mei and Qi, which came to a head in 1936 when Mei chose to move his family permanently to Shanghai, following Feng Gengguan. 35. “Mei Lanfang wei ren suo mai.” 36. As Ronald Riddle points out, despite all the pretensions of promoting Chinese culture, “there was no observable carryover from the enthusiasm for

Notes to Pages 279–283

333

Mei to Chinatown theaters.” Flying Dragons, Flowing Streams: Music in the Life of San Francisco’s Chinese (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1983), 148. 37. Liu Yanjun, Mei Lanfang zhuan (Shijiazhuang: Hebei jiaoyu chubanshe, 1996), 213. 38. Li Li, “Mei Lanfang zhi meng,” BYHB, 21 June 1930. 39. Cheng Yanqiu, “Jianyue wo ziji,” in Yushuang shi lu, huiyi Cheng Yanqiu xiansheng (Beijing: Wenyi ziliao chubanshe, 1982); “Wo zhi xiju guan,” in Cheng Yanqiu wen ji (Beijing: Zhongguo xiju chubanshe, 1957), 15–18. 40. Nor do Cheng’s own actions clarify this ambivalence. Both plays were written prior to the actual invasion of Manchuria, so accusations that they were wholesale endorsements of the GMD’s response are improbable. When Cheng wrote about them in “A Self-Examination” in December 1931—two months after the invasion—he remained vague. He states that his main aim was to denounce the militarism rife in China since 1911 and to promote pacifism in consonance with the ideals of his mentors, Luo Yinggong and Jin Huilu, and with the European antiwar movement. But Cheng goes on to express an enormous debt to the GMD’s Li Shizeng, whom he describes as his third great mentor: “In recent years Mr. Li Shizeng has made me more knowledgeable about humanism, international affairs, and our nationality’s survival (minzu chulu), leading to my resolute decision to dedicate my life to the spirit of peace. “Jianyue wo ziji,” 226. Such statements could certainly be construed as endorsing the GMD’s line of nonresistance. Yet in 1933 Cheng responded to such accusations with the play Wang shu jian, which was banned by the government after just three performances because of its explicit message that invaders must be resisted. ZGJJS 2: 655. 41. “Tan yi tan Beiping Guoju wei shenmo you xie bu jingqi de xianxiang,” Yanhua huabao (Beijing, 1936) 1: 5. Bing Qin, “Yi bei xiangei heping shizhe Cheng Yanqiu,” LYBG, 29 December 1931. 42. This seems clear, first because the plays were extremely popular, becoming signature plays for Cheng at the height of his career and now preserved as modern classics, and, second, because the CCP supported the performance of both plays throughout the 1950s and 1960s, a position which would have been unthinkable if they clearly advocated passivity in the face of imperialist aggression. The context of patronage and the Japanese occupation of Manchuria were clearly crucial to the way the plays were being interpreted at the time. 43. Jiao Juyin, Jiao Juyin xiju sanlun (Beijing: Zhongguo xiju chubanshe, 1985), 404. 44. Brett Sheehan, “The Currency of Legitimation: Banks, Bank Money and State-Society Relations in Tianjin, China, 1916–1938” (PhD diss., University of California, 1997), 325. 45. Under Zhang, the bank’s central office was shifted to Shanghai; hence Feng’s move there, followed shortly thereafter by Mei’s. 46. Zhang Bojun, “Beijing Guoju xuehui chengli zhi yuanqi,” in JJTWL 1: 128–31. 47. Cheng Yanqiu, “Zhi Liyuan gong yi hui tong ren shu,” Cheng Yanqiu wen ji (Beijing: Zhongguo xiju chubanshe, 1957), 178. 48. Wu Tian, “Shi sheng dou fa hua Mei Cheng,” BYHB, 23 January 1931. The question mark in parentheses is in the original.

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Notes to Pages 283–295

49. Yue Tian, “Cheng Yanqiu chu yang feiyong kao,” BYHB, 28 August 1932. 50. Shu Yun, “Ji Gu shang jian Cheng zhi yan,” and Que, “Ji Beiping jian Cheng zhi yan,” BYHB, 16 January 1932. 51. Cheng Yanqiu, Cheng Yanqiu fu Ou kaocha xiqu yinyue baogao shu (Beiping: Shijie bianyi guan, 1933). 52. Ibid. 53. Guoju huabao (Beijing: n.p., 1932), vols. 1–25; Wu Tian, “Shi sheng dou fa hua Mei Cheng,” BYHB, 23 January 1932. 54. Yu Weng, “Zenyang cai neng wanjiu xianzai pingju de weiji,” XJXK 13: 5.

Epilogue 1. Jacques Derrida’s idea of the necessary “supplement” is apt for describing Peking opera’s relationship to Western modern realism, primarily because it stresses how the supplement both is outside and precedes the dominant central discourse (in this case Western modernity). Such a view implies, I believe correctly, that all modernity must be thought of in the context of colonial modernity. 2. Wu Zuguang, “Tantan xiqu gaige de jige shiji wenti,” and Ma Shaobo, “Guanyu Jingju yishu jin yi bu gaige de zai shangque,” in Jingju congtan bainian lu, xia, ed. Weng Sizai (Shijiazhuang: Hebei Jiaoyu chubanshe, 1999), 2: 250–59, 260–73.

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Index

acrobatics, 11, 12, 43, 123, 186–87, 319n60 actors: amateur (piaoyou), 31–32, 197– 98; autobiographies of, 37; character development by, 186–89, 193; contracts of, 30, 46; deprecating terms for, 77, 308n62; disciplinary standards for, 216; employment crisis, 223–24, 225; intimidation of, 219–20; Jiangnan, 21; jingpai verus haipai, 191–92; in the Ming, 20; Outside School (Waixue), 21, 24, 25, 301n24, 301n26; proficiency in calligraphy and painting, 206–7; public image of, 198–99; in the Qing, 17–26, 106–9; ranks of, 27–28; roles of, 27, 33–34; salaries of, 27, 28, 30, 43, 44, 46, 48, 129, 182, 201–2, 205, 223–25, 226, 305n97, 305n98; in Shanghai, 43, 190; status of, 22–24, 27, 77, 106–7, 108, 206, 226. See also actresses; dan actors; laosheng actors; stardom; opera troupes Actors Academy (Ling Gong Xue She), 81 actors’ etiquette (xide), 27, 52 Actors’ Guild (Liyuan Gonghui): changed its name after the Qing, 108, 312n58; charity performances, 211, 324n3; effort to improve literacy, 226; heads of, 17, 50; and the National Drama Academy, 233; and poor actors, 324n3, 225; regulation of private performances, 29; role of 22–23; in Tianjin and Shanghai, 108, 226; and training institutions, 91; use of dues, 108 actresses: ascendance of, 90, 106–7, 110– 11; and the “body problem,” 109–10,

114, 130, 251, 239, 242; and limits of representation, 238, 239; and male dan, 250–51, 252, 329–30n36; male patronage of, 216, 240–41; marriage and retirement of, 241–42, 328n14; and the media, 237–38, 242; in the Ming and Qing, 20, 21; movie, 237; and prostitution, 114, 239–40; sex segregation and, 110–11, 243; status of, 242–43; training of, 110, 111 advertising: and decline of the rotation system, 46; in the nineteenth century, 30–31, 301–2n46; opera stars used in, 202, 203; posters, 46, 302n46; and reform, 209; in Shanghai, 44, 92 aestheticism, 178, 292, 294–95; theory of Qi Rushan, 150, 153–55, 156, 158, 159, 161–63, 170, 276 Agnew, Jean-Christophe, 7, 69 Agriculture Bank, 282 Ai Xia, 237 Aiming Tuan (Wailing Society), 100 Alarm Daily (Jingzhong ribao), 99 alienation effect (Brecht), 285 ancient-costume new drama (guzhuang xin xi), 89–90, 103, 122–23, 12, 315n118; performed by Mei Lanfang, 103, 122–23, 124, 125 Anderson, Marston, 161, 316n22 Anhui drama troupes, 3, 12, 20, 21. See also Four Delights troupe; Three Celebrations troupe Anti-Japanese War, 288, 293–94 anti-Manchu nationalism, 99 apprenticeships, 233–34. See also training schools

355

356 assigned seating, 83, 218, 220, 223. See also playhouse theaters; table tenders Association of American Teachers in Northern China, 122 Atkinson, J. Brooks, 276 Attacking Changsha (Zhan Changsha), 18 audiences: discipline of, 181, 214–15, 216, 218–19; female, 8, 35, 68, 122, 127, 244–45; mixed-sex seating, 83– 84, 110, 243; Shanghai, 189–90; in the United States, 218 Autumn in the Han Palace (Han gong qiu), 151 Ba da chu (Eight great hammers), 31 Bai Mudan, 41. See also Xun Huisheng Bai Yuwei, 232 bai shi (apprenticeships), 233–34 baihua movement. See vernacular language movement bangzi (“clapper” operas), 2, 13, 107, 177, 326n68; Xun Huisheng and, 251– 52. See also qinqiang Bank of China, 268, 282 banquets, 57, 60, 199 baoyin system, 27, 44, 205, 223 Barlow, Tani, 5, 6 Battle of Wan City (Zhan Wan cheng), 254 Battling the Jin (Zhan Jin bing), 293 Bawang bieji. See Farewell, My Concubine beatings. See corporal punishment Beauty Defies Tyranny (Yuzhou feng),188, 293 Beijing dialect, 177 Beijing National Opera School, 310n7 Beijing University Commoners’ Education Lecture Society, 327n18 Beiyang huabao (Tianjin pictorial), 198 Bend of Fen River (Fenhe wan), 187–88, 321n28 benefit performances (yiwu xi), 204–5, 206, 211, 225, 324n3 bengbeng opera, 107, 133 Binqingshe, 228, 326n62 Black Record of Wronged Spirits (Hei ji yuan hun), 102 Black Slave’s Hatred, 311n43 Blood of Wuhan (Ezhou xue), 102 Bludgeon of Romance (Feng liu bang), 261 body: in the early twentieth century, 168– 69; “problem,” 109–10, 114, 130, 251, 239 Boxer Indemnity Fund, 231, 268, 282, 327n93

Index Boxer uprising, 46 brawls, 59, 59, 219 Brecht, Bertolt, 285 Bright Spring Pavilion (Yanyang lou), 31 Bureau of Imperial Household Affairs (Neiwu fu), 21 Bureau of Rising Peace (Shengpingshu), 21–22, 23, 24, 25, 45, 300n15 burial grounds, 22–23 Butler, Judith, 9, 330n38 Cai Yuanpei, 231 caizi jiaren (talent and beauty) stories, 180 cannon-firing shows (dapao xi), 92 Cantonese opera, 133, 279. See also yue opera Cao Cao, 194, 254 CCTV, 1 censorship, 252, 287, 330n39 Central Bank, 282 Chandler, Norman, 272 Chang, Michael, 238 Chang, P. C., 267, 273, 278, 279 Chang E Escapes to the Moon (Chang E ben yue), 122, 269 Changchun keban, 227, 327n83 chantou (gifts, lit. “turban”), 241, 328n9 Chatterjee, Partha, 5, 6 Chen Dabei, 100, 131 Chen Delin, 129, 190, 247, 330n41 Chen Duxiu, 108, 141–42 Chen Moxiang, 117, 178, 236 Chen Qimei, 97 Chen Qubing, 98–99, 101 Chen Sen, Precious Mirror for Appraising Flowers, 40, 67, 303–4n78 Cheng Changgeng: admired by Xianfeng emperor, 24; biography of, 3, 17–18; as head of Actors’ Guild and Three Celebrations Troupe, 17, 44; personal conduct of, 50, 52; roles of, 17, 18, 50–51; most impressive laosheng of his day, 13, 17, 19, 54, 302n49; salary of, 43, 48, 305n98; style and innovations of, 50, 118; and troupe loyalty, 29–30, 51; yinchang of, 75, 154 Cheng Jixian, 49, 119, 311n43 Cheng Yanqiu: as actor-scholar, 207, 280, 282; advisers to, 117, 260; compared to Mei Lanfang, 269, 284, 286; demanded convincing portrayal of characters, 195–96; and Du Yuesheng, 222; early career as huashan, 260; and Li Shizeng, 281–84; relationship with Mei Lanfang, 9, 260, 280–84, 287, 288; and the National Drama Acad-

Index emy, 235–36, 281–82; political messages of, 260–62, 280–81, 333n40, 333n42; patrons of, 200; performances at Zhonghe theater, 212; physical attributes of, 286; in ranking of the Four Famous Dan, 246; recommendations for drama reform, 283–84; research trip to Europe, 265, 282–83; singing technique of, 193, 246, 260, 286; in Spring Chamber Dream, 180, 280–81, 333n40; in Tears on Barren Mountain, 261, 280–81, 333n40; salary and ticket prices of, 201; as touring opera star, 49; training of, 41– 42, 229; under Japanese occupation, 205, 291. See also Four Famous Dan chess, 27 Chinese Americans, 278–79 Chinese Communist Party, 235, 288–89, 291, 294, 333n42 Chinese Exclusion Act, 266 Chongqing, 205 chou (clown), 22 Chow, Rey, 135–36, 271 Chrysanthemum Registry (jubu), 67 chuanqi, 140, 146, 151 Chun gui meng (Spring chamber dream), 180, 280–81, 333n40 Chun liu (Spring Willow) magazine, 315n112 Chunhe Theater (Tianjin), 203 Chunliushe (Spring Willow Society), 77, 100, 101, 131 Chunyang She (Spring Sun Society), 100 civil service exams, 96, 107 civil war, 235 civilized new drama. See wenmingxi Civilized Teahouse (Wenming Chayuan), 80, 110, 119, 325n32 Cixi, Empress Dowager: commissioned Summer Palace, 300n9; patronage of Peking opera, 10, 25–26, 45, 146; patronage of Tan Xinpei, 51, 306n118; sponsored Changchun keban, 227 Cohn, Bernard, 5 colonial modernity, 3, 4–5, 334n1; and Chinese culture, 271, 277; enframing and, 136; and Peking opera, 3, 4–5; Shanghai and, 46–47, 192, 321n29 colonialism, 5–6. See also imperialism Comedic Stage (Xiao Wutai), 100 commercial theaters. See playhouse theaters; teahouse theaters; theater reform; theaters commercialization, 18, 19, 27 community of qing, 139–40, 142, 156, 158, 159, 160–61, 317n25

357 Confucian values, 179, 180, 245 contemporary-costume new drama (shizhuang xin xi), 89, 94, 99–100, 102; Mei Lanfang in, 119–22, 120, 121, 132, 133, 134 convention (chengshi), 193–94 corporal punishment, 32, 35–37, 233 costumes, 45, 155, 183, 200, 228. See also ancient-costume new drama; contemporary-costume new drama; qiao court patronage, 10, 19–22. See also Cixi, Empress Dowager courtesans, 20, 21, 38, 68–69. See also prostitution; xianggong creative rights (xingxingquan), 118 cross-dressing, 112 cross-gender acting, 243–44, 259–60 Cry of the Opium Ghost (Yan gui han), 102 Cry of the People Society (Min Ming She), 100 Cui, Mayor, 271 cultural nationalism, 175 “cultural professions” (Levine), 218 Cultural Revolution, 289, 291 curtain, 103–4 Cushman, Charlotte, 277 Da Fenguan, 205 Da yu sha jia (Fisherman’s revenge), 179 dagu (big drum song), 13 dan actors: and the “body problem,” 109– 10, 251; careers of, 18 39, 53; characters portrayed by, 247, 248; compared to actresses, 250–51, 329–30n36; as courtesans, 21, 38, 77, 308n61; described in novel Pinhua baojian, 40; in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, 18; gifts to, 200–201; hairstyles of, 126; and homosexuality, 127, 251, 270; mingled with teahouse patrons, 65, 66–67, 73; physical appearance of, 246–47; recruited from the south, 38–39; in the Republican period, 8, 9, 50, 90, 113; relationships with women, 114–15, 270; roles played by, 123–25, 247, 248, 250–52; social status of, 24, 53, 129; use of qiao, 247. See also Chen Delin; Cheng Yanqiu; Feng Zihe; Li Shifang; Mei Lanfang; Shang Xiaoyun; Wang Yaoqing; Wei Changsheng; Xun Huisheng; Zhang Eyun dan subtypes, 123–25, 247, 248. See also daomadan role; huadan; huashan; laodan role; qingyi dance, 125–26, 153, 157, 193

358 Dangui Teahouse troupe (Shanghai), 309–10n7 Dangui Theater (Shanghai), 43, 61 Dao gui ling (Stealing the ghost bell), 186 daocang, 228–29 Daoguang emperor, 21, 24 daomadan role, 123, 258 daxi (beating plays), 32, 233 daxiachu (large courtyard compounds), 26, 224 Dashalar district: decline of teahouse theaters in, 211–12; home to best teahouses, 29, 63, 307n18; female performers in, 107, 111; mentioned, 66, 133 Deheyuan, 300n9 Deng Xiagu (Miss Deng Xia), 112, 119, 120 Denton, Kirk, 136 Derrida, Jacques, 149, 334n1 Deshengfen school, 302n52 Di Pingzi, 198 dialect, 100, 156, 177, 319n57 Dian Langxian, 210–11 Diary of a Family’s Grievances (Jiating enyuan ji), 134, 315n1 Ding Baochen, The Tragic Demise of Vietnam, 102–3 Ding Bingsui, 63 Dingjun Mountain (Dingjun Shan), 25 disciples, 27, 33, 244, 328n23 Dong, Madeline Yue, 192, 321n29 Dou E yuan (Injustice to Dou E; Guan Hanqing), 151 dragon train (longtao), 28, 301n36 drama: histories of, 145, 152–53, 155– 56, 318n47; musicality in, 128, 141, 151, 152, 156; old and new, 149; representational and presentational theater, 167–68; tragedy, 151, 318n44; viewed as threat during the Qing, 58– 59; Western, 90, 145, 147, 149; as Western category, 144–45. See also May Fourth intellectuals; theater reform; Wang Guowei; Wu Mei Drama Journal (Xiju congkan), 284 Drama (Xiju) magazine, 131, 163 Drama Monthly (Xiju yuekan): on actors’ employment crisis, 225; anecdotes of male patronage of actresses, 240, 241; “The Drama PhD’s Success,” 328– 29n22; essays rating the Four Famous Dan, 246, 330–31n52; issue on Mei Lanfang, 199, 206, 322–23n62; opera gossip in, 204; Peking opera boosters in, 164; satire of the Shanghai scene, 219–20

Index Drama Studies Forum (Juxue luntan), 118, 128 Drama Studies Monthly, 281 Dream of the Red Chamber (Hong lou meng), 101, 131, 162 Du Liniang, 141 Du the Tenth (Dushiniang), 103 Du Yuesheng, 200, 221–22, 242 Dudden, Faye, 9, 109, 239 economic depression, 225–26 Egypt, 85 Ehu cun (Evil-Tiger village), 31 Eight Great Hammers (Ba da chui), 31 Eisenstein, Sergei, 285 Elias, Norbert, 7 emotion, 138–39, 141. See also community of qing Empty City Ruse (Kong cheng ji), 51–52, 118 “enframing” (Mitchell), 7, 9, 85–86, 87, 136, 217, 238 Enlightenment Society (Kaiming She), 100, 101 entrances and exits, 104 equality of the sexes, 112 Ernu yingxiong zhuan (Story of heroic sons and daughters), 258 erhuang (melodic mode), 2, 12, 13, 53, 300n16. See also pihuang Ernst, Earle, 167–68 Ershi shiji da wutai (The Great Stage of the Twentieth Century), 98–99 Escape from Zhao Pass (Wen zhao guan), 17 Esherick, Joseph, 106 Eternal Regret (Shengsi hen), 293 ethnic nationalism, 96 eunuchs, 21 Evil-Tiger Village (Ehu cun), 31 evolutionary histories of drama, 145, 152–53, 155–56 extraterritoriality, 271 Ezhou xue (Blood of Wuhan), 102 Fairbanks, Douglas, 272 Farewell, My Concubine (Bawang bieji), 125, 193, 293, 318n54 fashion, 112, 245 The Fate of Hong and Bi (Hong Bi yuan), 189, 190 Favorite Concubine Becomes Intoxicated (Guifei zuijiu), 125–26, 183–84, 249, 280, 318n54 Feng Gengguang: and the Bank of China, 282; and the National Drama Study

Index Society, 284; patron of Mei Lanfang, 43, 222, 268, 281, 332n34 Feng Zihe: created school for actors, 98; female admirer of, 115; in new ancientcostume dramas, 103, 122; in plays about contemporary political problems, 89, 97–98; raised in Shanghai, 97–98; rivaly with Jia Biyun, 113; wrote new operas, 98, 103; and Xia brothers’ New Stage, 103, 133 Feng liu bang (Bludgeon of romance), 261 Fenhe wan (The bend of Fen River), 187– 88, 321n28 fiction, 93, 141, 310n12, 320n4. See also Liang Qichao figure and ground, 184–85 film: actresses, 237; competition with opera, 215–16; and gender-straight acting, 243, 328n19; theaters, 212, 213; ticket prices, 182 First Three Outstandings (qian san jie), 19, 300n6. See also Cheng Changgeng; Yu Sansheng Fisherman’s Revenge (Da yu sha jia), 179 Flower-boat Fate (Huafang yuan), 261 Flower of Rose Village (Meiguihua), 98 flutes, 11, 13 footbinding, 168–69. See also qiao Forbidden City, 169 Foucault, Michel, 5, 7, 85 Four Delights troupe, 20, 24, 27, 28, 45 Four Famous Dan: and disjunction between representation and reality, 238; distinctive styles of, 246; dominant during the Republic, 8, 50; female following of, 245; as innovators, 193; kunqu repertoire of, 119; in the print media, 42,199–200; range of characters and plots played by, 245–46; ranking of, 246, 257, 330–31n52; writer-advisers to, 117. See also Cheng Yanqiu; Mei Lanfang; Shang Xiaoyun; Xun Huisheng Four Great Anhui Companies, 12, 20. See also Four Delights troupe; Spring Stage troupe; Three Celebrations troupe Four Happiness troupe, 42 fourth wall, 218 Fragrance in an Empty Valley (Kong gu xiang), 257 free marriage (hunyin ziyou), 112 Fu Sinian, 132, 137, 139, 145–46, 148, 153 Fu Zhifang, 122 Fuhe teahouse, brawl at, 59, 59 Fuliancheng keban: actors trained at, 42,

359 310n7; afternoon performances at Guanghelou theater, 34–35, 212; community solidarity, 34; corporal punishment at, 35–36; costume collection, 228; financing, 227; founding, 33; master of, 35–36; in the 1930s, 228; rivalry with National Drama Academy, 232, 327n82; typical training at, 34–35 Gai Jiaotian, 192, 193, 230 gailiang xin xi (reformed new drama), 89. See also new drama; theater reform Gao Langting, 12 Gao Qingfen, 311n43 genbun itchi (unification of speech and writing), 149–50 gender: and biological sex, 113, 313n76; representation of, in Peking opera, 50; in the Republican period, 9, 112–13, 130, 238, 259–60. See also dan actors Gengsu Theater (Reform Customs Theater; Nantong), 81–83, 82, 200, 229, 230, 326n74 Gengxin Wutai Theater (Shanghai), 213 Gentle Spring troupe, 20 Goddess Scatters Flowers (Tiannu san hua), 118, 124, 193, 269, 293 gongfeng neiting (attendants of the inner court), 25–26 Great China Theater (Tianjin), 83, 222 Great New Light Theater (Xin Ming Da Xiyuan; Tianjin), 212 Great Stage of the Twentieth Century (Ershi shiji da wutai), 98–99 Great World, 182, 221 Green Gang, 219, 220, 221–22 Guan Hanqing, 151 Guan Yu, (aka Guan Gong, Guandi) 17, 18, 51, 193; Guan Yu’s birthday 22, 30 Guangde Lou, 29 Guanghelou Theater, 29, 33, 34–35, 212, 232 Guangong Day, 22, 30 Guazhong lanyin, 96 guest performers (kechuan), 44, 45, 49, 92 Guifei zuijiu (Favorite concubine becomes intoxicated), 125–26, 183–84, 249, 280, 318n54 Guixian Chayuan (Precious Immortal Teahouse), 79 Guo Moruo, 294 Guohua Xiqu Yinyue Yuan. See National Opera Music Institute guoju (national drama), 135, 298n5. See also national drama

360 Guoju Xuehui (National Drama Study Society), 284 Guoju Yundong (National Drama Movement), 175–76, 320n2 Guomindang: and the National Drama Academy, 231, 234; and Peking opera in the southwest, 10, 288; soft policy toward Japan, 281, 333n40; and state support for Peking opera, 265. See also Li Shizeng guoxue (national learning), 137 Guy, Nancy A., 298n5 guzhuang xin xi. See ancient-costume new drama Haerfei theater, 215–16, 278 haipai (Shanghai style): compared to jingpai, 156–57, 189–96, 295, 322n43; derived from waijiangpai, 321n33; serial plays and special effects, 191 hairstyles, 116 Han gong qiu (Autumn in the Han palace), 151 Han ming fei,258 handiao style, 12 Hankou, 3, 206 Hansen, Miriam, 127 Hao Shouchen, 105 Hei ji yuan hun (Black record of wronged spirits), 102 Heshen, 126 History of Chinese Peking Opera, 177 Hobsbawm, Eric, 4 homosexuality, 112, 113, 127, 251, 270, 303–4n78. See also xianggong Hong Bi yuan (The Fate of Hong and Bi), 189, 190 Hong Fo zhuan (Legend of the red buddha), 261 Hong lou meng (Dream of the red chamber), 101, 131, 162 Hong Shen, 94–95, 100, 149 Hu Shi: on drama, 145, 146–47, 148, 152, 171; essays featured in programs for Mei’s U.S. tour, 273, 276; The Greatest Event in Life, 112; on Ibsen, 142; mentioned, 137, 139; and the vernacular language movement, 86, 139 Hu Tianbao, 303n78 Hua Mulan, 180, 259 Hua Rui furen (Lady Hua Rui), 258 Hua Tian cuo (Mistakes in flower field garden), 255–56, 330n49 huabu (flower registers), 11, 300n5 huadan: compared to huashan, 126; compared to qingyi, 123–25; decline

Index of, 252–54, 330n40; Feng Zihe as, 103; innovations of Wei Changsheng, 126; performed by actresses, 252, 328n14; qiaogong of, 41; sleeves of, 123; stage walk of, 34; Xun Huisheng as, 252–53, 253. See also qiao Huafang yuan (Flower-boat fate), 261 huaju (spoken drama): associated with realism, 176; Chineseness in, 176, 320n3; in drama debates of the 1920s, 149; People’s Theater Society and, 131; precursors of, 100, 101; strict division from Chinese opera, 133, 135, 151, 154; and the vernacular, 149–50 Huang Chujiu, 306n118 Huang Jinrong, 220, 221 Huang Runqing, 118 Huang San, 302n52 Huang Xing, 97 Huang Yufu, 247 Huang Zhong (role), 25 Huangshan lei (Tears on barren mountain), 180, 261, 262, 280–81, 333n40 huashan (“flower gown”): compared to huadan and qingyi, 125–26; and dance, 125–26; origins of, 9, 258; performed by Mei Lanfang, 125, 247– 49; role used in ancient-costume new drama, 123, 125; and the refiguring of dan roles, 130, 247; visuality and, 157 huiban (Anhui-style drama), 3 huiguan (guildhalls), 58, 89, 309n4 Hundred Days Reforms of 1898, 93, 95, 96–97, 309n4 huqin (two-stringed fiddle), 13, 42 “hybrid” dramas, 90, 98–105, 122, 131, 132, 134; Fu Sinian on, 148; rejection of, 135, 137, 159, 171. See also new drama; wenmingxi Ibsen, Henrik, 142, 180, 181 illiteracy, 226 imperial birthdays, 11–12, 19–20, 21 imperialism, 3, 47, 54, 168, 271. See also colonial modernity India, 5–6 Injustice to Dou E (Dou E yuan; Guan Hanqing), 151 Inner City, 57 interiority, 185–86, 188–89, 194–96, 207–8 “invented traditions” (Hobsbawm and Ranger), 4–5, 135, 178 Italy, 93–94 Jade Mirror Terrace (Yu jing tai), 261 Japan, study in, 100

Index Japanese occupation, 235, 291 Ji Zhunxiang, Zhao Family Orphan by, 151 Jia Biyun, 113 Jiang Guangyun, 318n44 Jiang Jin, 243–44, 328n21 Jiang Qing, 291 Jiangnan arsenal, 106 Jiangnan region, 10, 21 jianye (mean professons), 23; 106 Jiao Juyin, 233, 281 Jiaofangsi, 20 Jiating enyuan ji (Diary of a family’s grievances), 134, 315n1 Jin Huilu, 281, 333n40 Jin Langyin, 241 Jin Yuemei, 89 Jin Zhongsun, 180, 235–36 Jinghua ribao (Talk of the Capital Daily), 119 jingju (Peking opera), origin and use of the term, 2, 298n3, 298n5. See also Peking opera Jingju zhishi shouce, 310n7 jingpai (Beijing style), 156–57, 189–96, 295, 322n43 Jingtai Yuan, 57 jingxi (capital plays), 2 jingxiban (capital drama troupes), 43 Jingzhong ribao (Alarm daily), 99 Jingzhongmiao (Pure Loyalty Temple), 23, 24, 108, 300n18. See also Actors’ Guild Jinhua Tuan (Progress troupe), 100 Jinsheng Theater (Tianjin), 61 Jiuhuang (deity), 22 jiuzhuang (public eating establishments), 60 Johnson, James, 7 Jones, Andrew, 144 Journey to the West (Xi you ji), 186 Jubu congkan (Chrysanthemum Magazine), 114 jubu (Chrysanthemum Registry), 67 Judge Bao, 194 Juxue luntan (Drama Studies Forum), 118, 128 Kaifeng, 206 Kaiming Gongsi (Enlightenment Company), 77 Kaiming She (Enlightenment Society), 100, 101 Kaiming Theater, 212 Kang Baocheng, 146, 195 Kang Youwei, 99, 309n4 Kangxi emperor, 55

361 Kano, Ayako, 149–50 kanzuor. See table tenders Karatani Kojin, 184–85, 188, 195 keban (training schools): assignment of roles, 33–34; attached to acting troupes, 32; changed their names to she, 108; conditions in, 33; community solidarity in, 34; contracts, 33, 34; corporal punishment at, 32, 35–36; decline of, 227–28, 326n62; funding of, 33, 227, 302n52; handling of daosang, 228–29; independent, 32–33, 302n52; masters, 35–36; physical training in, 34, 37–38; reform of, 227, 228; in Shanghai, 91, 192, 304n84, 309–10n7, 322n42; special instructors and, 303n64; student performances, 35; students’ day, 34–35; teacherdisciple bonds, 33–34, 38. See also Fuliancheng; National Drama Academy kechuan (guest performance), 44, 45, 49, 92 King of Actors: Mei Lanfang as, 264; Shuntian News contest, 128–29, 314n105; Tan Xinpei as, 54, 264, 305– 6n118 King of Actresses, 314n105 King of Child Actors, 314n105 Ko, Dorothy, 169 Kong cheng ji (Empty city ruse), 51–52, 118 Kong gu xiang (Fragrance in an empty valley), 257 kunjuer (female performers), 111. See also actresses kunqu: companies and theaters, 28, 61; considered ya, 11, 300n5; decline of, 13, 96; dialect and, 156; foundation for Peking opera, 53; Hu Shi on, 146; New Rome by Liang Qichao, 93–94; martial themes and, 11, 299n16; and national drama, 177; in the Qing, 2–3, 10, 11, 12, 21; Republican period revivals, 118–19; scripts adapted for Peking opera, 96; Wu Mei and, 140, 152. See also Ming drama Lady Hua Rui (Hua Rui furen), 258 landscape, 185, 195 langzuo (corridor seats), 63, 74 laodan role, 123 Laolangshen, 22, 233 laosheng: dominant role in the late Qing, 6, 13, 18–19, 50, 53–54; as guild heads, 24; as model of late Qing masculinity, 6, 19, 54; musicality of, 157; “opinion-school,” 97; schedule of

362 laosheng (continued) performances, 31. See also Cheng Changgeng; Sun Juxian; Tan Xinpei; Wang Guifen; Wang Xiaonong; Yang Xiaolou Larson, Wendy, 135–36 Later Three Outstandings (hou san jie), 19, 91, 300n6. See also Sun Juxian; Tan Xinpei; Wang Guifen League of Left Wing Writers, 143 Lee, Leo Ou-fan, 142 Legend of the Red Buddha (Hong Fo zhuan), 261 Levenson, Joseph, 271 Levine, Lawrence, 7, 218 Li Chifo, 114 Li Chunlai, 29 Li Dazhao, 315n5 Li Hongchun, 34, 327n83 Li Hongzhang, 95 Li hua ji (Pear blossom plot), 261 Li Huating, 201 Li Jinzhang, 231 Li Maoer, 110 Li Shifang, 234, 323n63, 327n82 Li Shizeng: and Cheng Yanqiu, 281, 282, 283, 333n40; and Mei Lanfang, 267, 268, 271; and the National Drama Academy, 231, 234; and the National Drama Study Society, 284 Li Wangchun, 199 Li Yu, 141 Liang Qichao: essay “On the Relationship between Fiction and the Government of the People,” 93, 139, 141, 310n13; mentioned, 86, 99, 137; New Rome, 93–94 liantaixi (serial plays), 182, 190–91 lighting, 103, 155 Limao huan taizi (The prince exchanged for a leopard cub), 190 Lin Daiyu, 312n65 Lin Fengxian, 240 Lin Ruxin, 114 Linggong Xueshe (Nantong Actors Academy), 229–31, 280, 326n74 lingren (actor), 77, 308n62 Literary Mind and the Carving of Dragons (Wen xin diao long; Liu Xie), 162–63 literati, 12, 40, 67–68 Little Golden Stage keban, 91 Liu Baoquan, 13 Liu Gansan, 29 Liu Hongsheng, 75, 76, 80 Liu Shengyu, 169 Liu Xie, Wen xin diao long by, 162–63

Index Liu Xifen, 111, 314n105 Liu Yazi, 99, 101, 113 Liyuan Gonghui (Guild of the Pear Garden). See Actors’ Guild Long Qifa, 41 Long Live the Chinese National Congress (Zhongguo guohui wan sui), 102 longtao (dragon train), 28, 301n36 Los Angeles Times, 272 Lotus Flower Falling, 107 Lu Jingguo, 100 Lu Sanbao, 119 Lu Xun, True Story of Ah Q, 106 Lu Xun Academy Peking Opera Troupe, 294 luantan (assorted melodies), 11, 21, 300n5, 300n16 Lucky Theater (Beijing), 134 Luhe Opera Club, 221 Luo Yinggong, 42, 117, 207, 333n40 lyrics, 97, 141 Ma Lianliang, 35, 49, 197–98, 236 Ma Shaobo, 294 magazines, 46, 130, 315n112. See also Drama Monthly; New Youth; print media Mai ma (Selling a horse), 51–52, 118, 179 Maiden Slays the Dragon (Tongnu zhan long), 134 Manchu elites, 31, 302n48 Manchuria: Japan’s invasion of, 271, 280–81, 333n40, 333n42; Peking opera in, 10 Mann, Susan, 109 Mantingfang Theater (Shanghai), 43, 61 Mao Dun, 142, 143 Mao Shilai, 327n82 Mao Zedong, 10, 144 maoerxi (kitten shows), 110, 312n64 martial maidens, 258–59 masculinity, 6, 19, 50, 53, 54, 306n119 May Fourth intellectuals: and break with old culture, 135, 315n5; and the community of qing, 138–40, 141; debates on drama, 95, 134, 136, 143–44, 166, 193, 318n47; and realism, 142, 150, 159–60, 170, 317n25, 317–18n40; revised view of, 135–36; use of the term, 137. See also Fu Sinian; Hu Shi; New Youth May Fourth moment, 8, 135–37, 315n5 May Fourth movement. See May Fourth intellectuals; May Fourth moment McMahon, Keith, 303–4n78

Index Mei Lanfang: advertising affiliations of, 202, 203, 268, 323n74; in ancientcostume new dramas, 103, 122–23, 124, 125; on Beauty Defies Tyranny, 188; in The Bend of Fen River, 187– 88, 321n28; benefit peformances, 204, 206, 323n82; and Cheng Yanqiu, 9, 260, 280–84, 287, 288; commemorative stamps, 293, 294; in contemporary-costume new dramas, 112, 119– 22, 120, 121, 132, 133, 134, 219, 295; as cultural ambassador, 267–68; dance sequences of, 193; disciples of, 231, 234, 260, 328n23; and Du Yuesheng, 222; essays on Peking opera acting, 280; in Farewell, My Concubine, 125, 193, 293; in The Goddess Scatters Flowers, 118, 193, 269, 293; in Guifei zui jiu, 184, 249; in Hong Ni Guan, 249–50; and homosexuality, 127, 270; and huashan role, 125, 252; as icon of Chinese national culture, 270, 271, 277–78, 287, 288; and interiority, 188, 195; under Japanese occupation, 291; as King of Actors 128–29, 257, 264; marriage of, 122, 328n16; in Meilong Town, 253; and Meng Xiaodong, 242, 270, 328n16; mentioned, 111, 211, 212; mother of, 328n16; and the National Drama Study Society, 284; “Oppose Mei Lanfang” clubs, 206; paintings of, 207; performed as huadan, 252–53, 330n40; performed with Tan Xinpei, 53; physical beauty of, 119, 246, 249, 277; and the play-point system, 224; popularity of, 90, 127– 29, 269, 284, 286; and the print media, 198, 199, 206, 248, 272, 322–23n62; public image of, 268, 269; and Qi Rushan, 116–18, 181, 187, 284, 332n34; and qiao techniques, 252, 253, 330n44; in ranking of the Four Famous Dan, 246; received honorary doctorates, 275, 279–80; recordings by, 202; relocated to Shanghai, 284, 332n34; revival of kunqu plays, 118–99; salary of, 48–49, 129–30, 224, 305n103; sexual allure of, 249–50; in A Thread of Hemp, 112, 119, 121, 133, 148; as touring opera star, 49, 201; tour of Japan, 267, 331n6; training of, 42– 43, 229, 330n41; trip to USSR, 265, 285; trips to Shanghai, 48, 116, 220, 305n103; U.S. tour of, 265–70, 271– 79, 274, 281, 325n29; and visuality, 286–87; and Xu Shaoying, 201. See also Four Famous Dan

363 Mei Lanfang Cigarettes, 203, 268 Mei Qiaoling, 24, 42. See also Four Delights troupe Mei Shaowu, 278, 332n34 Mei Yutian, 42 Meiguihua (The flower of Rose Village), 98 Meiji society, 184–85 Meilong Town (Meilong zhen), 253 Meixin Teahouse (Shanghai), 110 Meng Xiaodong, 222, 242, 270 Mi Heng, 51, 305n110 mimeticism, 171 Min Ming She (Cry of the People Society), 100 Ming, collapse of, 20 Ming drama, 140, 146, 151. See also kunqu Ming Huang (Tang), 22 Minzhong Xiju She (People’s Theater Society), 131, 133 Miss Deng Xia (Deng Xiagu), 112, 119, 120 missionary schools, 311n37 Mistakes in Flower Field Garden (Hua Tian cuo),255–56, 330n49 Mitchell, Timothy, 5, 6; Colonizing Egypt, 7; “enframing,” 7, 85–86, 87, 136 mixed-sex performances, 110–11, 243– 44, 312–13n69 mixed-sex seating, 83–84, 110, 243 Modengjia Girl, 165–67, 166, 315n117 modernity: in Meiji Japan, 184–85; Shanghai and, 46–47; tradition and, 47, 171, 304–5n94. See also colonial modernity Mona Lisa, 185–86 Monkey King, 43, 186, 190–91 Morning News (Beijing), 175 movie theaters, 212, 213. See also film Mu Guiying, 180 Mu Guiying Takes Command (Mu guiying gua shuai), 293 music, Chinese, 144–45 musicality, 128, 140, 151, 152, 153, 156–57 Nanfu (Southern Bureau), 21 Nanshe (Southern Society), 99 Nantong, 81–83, 82, 200, 229, 230, 326n74 Nantong Actors Academy (Linggong Xueshe), 229–31, 280, 326n74 Nanyang Tobacco Company, 267, 323n74 nation-building, 4, 56, 139, 179

364 national culture: and the jingpai/haipai debate, 196; Peking opera and, 10, 180–81, 270, 277; and public spaces, 223. See also national drama national drama (guoju): advocated by Qi Rushan, 157–58; dance in, 157; government role in, 287–88; kunqu as, 152; Peking opera as, 2, 137, 158, 159, 175, 176–78, 181–82, 264–65, 287– 89; scripts for, 178–81 National Drama Academy (Zhonghua Xi Xiao): affiliated names, 234–35; announcement of, 231–32; apprenticeships, 233–34, 327n91; comparison with Fuliancheng, 232, 234; curriculum of, 233; female students, 232; and the GMD culture clique, 234, 281–82; and the National Drama Study Society, 284; research trip to Europe, 282, 286; student performances, 232 National Drama Movement (Guoju Yundong), 175–76, 320n2 National Drama Pictorial (Guoju huabao), 284 National Drama School, 158 National Drama Study Society (Guoju Xuehui), 284 National Drama Union, 225 National Opera Music Institute (Guohua Xiqu Yinyue Yuan), 231, 265, 268, 281, 282, 288. See also National Drama Academy Natong, Grand Councillor, 26 nei (inner) and wai (outer), 109 Neiwu fu (Bureau of Imperial Household Affairs), 21 Neixue (Inside School), 21 New Bright Theater (Tianjin), 201 New Camellia (Xin chahua), 102 new drama, 89–90; 94–95, 99–100, 311n43; female performers in, 114; decline of, 131–32; Peking opera and, 100–101, 132; as precursor to huaju, 100, 101, 131; theater architecture and, 103–4. See also ancient-costume new drama; contemporary-costume new drama; theater reform; wenmingxi New Drama Comrades Society (Xinju Tongzhi Hui), 100 New Drama Roving Troupe (Xinju Liudong Tuan), 100 New New Stage Theater (Xin Xin Wutai), 128, 306n118 New People’s Drama Society (Xinmin Xinju She), 100 New Policies (Xin Zheng), 96

Index New Rome (Xin Luoma; Liang Qichao), 93–94 New Stage, 76–79, 89, 100, 103, 115, 133, 143 New Tide, 327n18 New Woman (Xin nuxing), 237 New York Times, 265, 272 New Youth magazine, 134–35, 137, 141, 314n90, 315n5; October 1918 drama issue, 145–49, 152 newness, 90–95 “newspaper” plays, 288 newspapers, 6, 130; performance schedules, 46, 92. See also advertising; print media; Shenbao Nie hai bolan (Waves on the sea of sin), 119 Nineteen Knights of Qingcheng (Qing cheng shijiu xia), 258 Niu Zihou, 33 Northern Pictorial, 283 Number One Dance Stage, 210–11 opera sets, 78, 104, 182–83, 191 opera troupes: cohension in, 27–29, 45; female, 110–11; relationship to theaters, 43, 304n85; in Shanghai, 43–44. See also baoyin; keban opium use, 26 Opium Wars, 18–19 “Oppose Mei Lanfang” clubs, 206 orchestra, 74, 81, 217, 325n29 organized crime, 219–20, 221–22 Orientalism, 9, 276, 277, 286 outside actors, 21, 24, 25, 301n24, 301n26 Ouyang Yuqian: adaptations from Dream of the Red Chamber, 101, 131; and character interiority, 194; essay on drama in New Youth, 148–49, 320n9; established institute for yueju, 163–64; My Life Performing Drama, 114; and the Nantong project, 81–83, 229–31; Pan Jinlian by, 176, 179–80; on Peking opera as national culture, 177; and the People’s Theater Society, 131; performed Diary of a Family’s Grievances, 134, 315n1; on performing female roles, 114; scripts favored by 179–81; and the Spring Willow Society, 100, 311n37, 311n38; on wenmingxi, 104 Owen, Stephen, 162 Palace Museum, 169 Pan Jinlian, 176, 179–80 Pan Yueqiao, 77, 108

Index patron-actor relationships, 67, 115, 117, 198–90, 207 Pavilion of the Royal Monument (Yubei ting), 31 Pear Blossom Plot (Li hua ji), 261 Pear Garden. See Actors’ Guild Pear Garden News (Shanghai), 197, 222, 226. 243; “The Huadan’s Mission” in, 254, See also Player newspaper Pearl Fan (Zhenzhu shan), 257 Pearl Tower (Zhenzhu ta), 245 Peking opera: actresses in, 250–51; censorship of, 252, 330n39; compared with kunqu and bangzi, 177; costumes in, 155; defense of, 152; dialect and, 156, 177, 319n57; fixed as traditional genre, 135, 164–65, 176; as “invented tradition,” 4, 135, 178; length of, 223, 224, 325n47; misogynist tendencies in, 244, 328–29n22; and national culture, 10, 180–81, 196, 270, 277; in the 1940s and 1950s, 288–89, 294; in the 1980s and 1990s, 291, 292, 295; origins of, 2–3, 11–13, 20, 22, 29, 53, 298n1; packaged for Broadway, 273; political and cultural activism in, 89, 90, 95–98, 179–80, 309n1; schools of, 91; technique in, 182–89; terms for, 2–3, 264–65, 298n5; and traditional Chinese arts, 207; visuality and musicality in, 128, 156–57, 286, 319n60; and Western realism, 334n1. See also jingpai versus haipai; national drama, Peking opera as; new drama; opera troupes; pihuang pengchang (fan support), 197, 216. See also pengjuer pengjuer (boost actor), 198, 200, 323n63; short story, 240 Peony Pavilion, 141, 293 People’s Theater Society (Minzhong Xiju She), 131, 133 performance rights, 118 piaoyou (amateur actors), 31–32, 197– 98, 310n7 Pickford, Mary, 272 pihuang: clubs, 31–32; companies, 27– 28; in the late nineteenth century, 13; Peking opera and, 2–3; Qing imperial patronage of, 24–25; sequence of plays in, 28; in Shanghai, 43; use of term, 13. See also erhuang; Peking opera pingju, 298n52. See also Peking opera Pinhua baojian (Precious mirror for appraising flowers; Chen Sen), 40, 67, 303–4n78

365 play morality (xide), 27, 52 play-point (xifen) system, 46 48, 223, 224–25 playbills, 215–16, 276 Player newspaper, See Pear Garden News playhouse theaters (juchang): class differentiation in, 84–85, 309n79; created unobstructed perspective, 78–79; employee standards, 215; as instance of enframing, 7, 85–86, 87; management of, 213–14; reconfigured dramatic representation, 86–88; separated social and representational space, 76, 80–81, 85, 86, 87, 104; seating in, 83–84, 210–12, 220–21, 222–23; stage and theater design, 77–79, 83, 86, 103–4, 116, 186; vendors in, 214. See also Reform Customs Theater; New Stage; theater reform poetry, 141 Poland, 96, 102 Poland’s Savage Subjugation (Bolan Wangguo can), 102 police, 219 Pomona College, 265, 275, 331n2 Precious Mirror for Appraising Flowers (Pinhua baojian; Chen Sen), 40, 67, 303–4n78 pressure set (yazhou), 301n38 Prince Exchanged for a Leopard Cub (Limao huan taizi), 190 print media, 46, 92, 130, 196–200. See also newspapers private performances. See tanghui Progress Troupe (Jinhua Tuan), 100 prop men, 74–75, 80–81 propaganda, 176–77 props, 183 Prosperous Citizenry (Guomin fu), 102 prostitution, 110, 113–14, 239–40, 313n78. See also courtesans; xianggong public spaces, 169–70, 223 Qi Rushan: biography of, 116; compared to Liu Xie, 162–63; on dialect, 156, 177, 319n57; on drama reform, 116, 155, 191, 194, 325n29; emphasis on visuality and movement, 156–57, 278; on the essence of Chinese theater, 319n59; evolutionary narrative of drama, 145, 153, 155–56, 318n47; and Mei Lanfang’s U.S. tour, 266–68, 272–76, 278, 279; mentioned, 44, 137, 139, 145, 156; and national drama, 158, 179, 236, 284, 287–88; on origins of Peking opera, 2, 298n3;

366 Qi Rushan (continued) relationship with Li Shifang, 323n63; relationship with Mei Lanfang, 116– 18, 187–88, 234, 284, 323n63, 332n34; scripts for Mei Lanfang, 118, 148, 181; theory of aestheticism, 150, 153–55, 156, 158, 159, 161–63, 170, 178, 250, 276, 318n51; writings of, 119, 272–73, 332n23; on yinchang, 154, 170 Qi Song, 127–28 Qian jin yi xiao (A thousand pieces of gold for a smile), 125 Qian kun fu shou jing, 331n53 Qian li ju (Thousand-mile steed), 258 Qianlong emperor, 11, 19–20, 21, 68 qiao (stilts), 11, 126, 247, 330n44; techniques performed by Xun Huisheng, 252–53, 253, 255; training regimen, 41, 42 Qin Liangyu, 258 Qin Shao, 230 Qing Yiyu, 117 qing (emotion), 138–39, 141; community of, 139–40, 142, 156, 158, 159, 160– 61, 317n25 Qing bai lei chao, 68 Qing cheng shijiu xia (Nineteen knights of Qingcheng), 258 Qingfang Theater (Tianjin), 61 Qinghe Yuan, 29 Qingle Yuan, 29 qingyi (virtuous women): compared to huadan, 123–25; costumes of, 261; Feng Zihe as, 103; and the huashan role, 125–26, 247; mentioned, 41; musicality of, 157; Shang Xiaoyun as, 36, 257; stage walk of, 34; training of, 36 Qingyingge, 300n9 qinqiang, 11, 12, 126 qipao, 112 Qiu Jin, 102, 259 Qu Qiubai, 143, 144 quanben (complete versions), 178 quelling box, 219 queue, 168–69 Qunxian Theater (Shanghai), 110, 312n65 railroads, 6 Ranger, Terrence, 4 Ravel, Jeffrey, 7 realism: Chen Yanqiu on, 282–83; May Fourth intellectuals and, 142, 152, 159–60, 170, 317n25, 317–18n40; opposition with aestheticism, 150, 153, 158, 159, 161–62, 164, 170, 292,

Index 318n51; socialist, 294; in Western drama, 147, 149. See also reality and representation reality and representation, 167, 170, 217, 285, 292. See also representation, gendered effects of record contracts, 202 Record of the Present Conditions in Officialdom (Guanchang xian xing ji), 102 reform, 209. See also theater reform Reform Customs Theater (Gengsu Juchang; Tianjin), 81–83, 82, 200, 229, 230, 326n74 reformed new drama (gailiang xin xi), 89, 102, 134, 143. See also hybrid drama; new drama regional drama (difang xi), 2, 298n1 Ren Shunfu, 309n1 Ren Tianzhi, 100, 101 representation, gendered effects of, 238, 250, 330n36, 330n38. See also reality and representation Republic of China, 106 Revolution of 1911, 106 revolutionary drama, 144. Revolutionary Family, 311n43 Riddle, Ronald, 332–33n36 Riley, Jo, 183–84 Rolph, James, 272, 274 Rong, Mr. (sifang master), 41–42 Rongchunshe keban, 228, 310n7 rotating stage, 77 rotation system of scheduling, 29, 30–31, 91, 307n18; decline of, 44, 45–46 Ruan Lingyu, 237–38 rural drama troupes, 47–48 San Francisco, 276, 279 San Francisco Chronicle, 272 Sanle keban, 326n62 Sanqing Company. See Three Celebrations Troupe Sanqing Yuan, 29 Sanyue Keban (Three Happiness School), 36–37 scalpers. See table tenders Schopenhauer, Arthur, 137 Scott, Benjamin D., 331n2 Sedgwick, Eve, 9 Selling a Horse (Mai ma), 51–52, 118, 179 serial Peking opera dramas (liantaixi), 182, 190–91 Shakespeare, William, 144, 181 Shang Xiaoyun: characters performed by, 257–59; as child-actor king, 257,

Index 314n105; founded keban, 228; influences and advisers, 117, 258, 259; mentored by Sun Juxian, 36– 37, 229; paintings by, 207; performed in Modengjia Girl, 165–67, 166, 315n117; and qingyi role, 257–58; in ranking of Four Famous Dan, 246; recordings by, 202; style of, 246; as teacher of Ye Shengchang, 37; temperament of, 257, 3301n52; as touring opera star, 49, 202–4; training school experience of, 36; voice of, 257, 258, 331n53. See also Four Famous Dan Shanghai: actor salaries in, 48, 182, 190; foreign influences in, 90; guest engagements in, 92; organized crime in, 219– 20, 221–22; Peking opera training in, 91, 309–10n7; role of, in modernizing Peking opera, 46; theaters in, 43–44, 90–91, 212–13, 324n11; theater reform in, 76–79; use of term jingju in, 298n3. See also haipai Shanghai Actors’ Association, 108 Shaw, Bernard, Mrs. Warren’s Profession, 143 Shehui Jiaoyu Tuan (Social Education Troupe), 100, 134 Shen Fuhai, 236 Shen Renshan, 33 Shenbao: advertisements and performance schedules, 44, 92; article on theater reform, 215; articles on Peking opera, 298n3; covered acting-world scandal, 44, 304n87; on Mei Lanfang, 198, 265 Shengpingshu. (Bureau of Rising Peace), 21–22, 23, 24, 25, 45, 300n15 Shengsi hen (Eternal regret), 293 Shi Liangcai, 198 Shi Xiaofu, 27 Shibao (Shanghai newspaper), 198 shingeki (Japanese New Theater), 149–50 Shisan Dan, 241 shizhuang xin xi. See contemporarycostume new drama Shklovsky, Victor, 160 shoujiu (backdrops), 202, 323n75 Shui hu zhuan (Water margin), 179, 294 Shuntian News, 128–29, 257 Si Lang Visits His Mother (Si lang tan mu), 294 sifang (private training): abolition of, 206, 227; conditions in, 39, 40–41; expansion of, 91; teachers in, 38, 41– 42. See also xianggong Sino-French War, 19 Sino-Japanese War, 19 sleeves, 122, 183

367 Social Education Troupe (Shehui Jiaoyu Tuan), 100, 134 socialist realism, 294 Song Jiaoren, 102 Soong, T. V., 282 Southern Bureau (Nanfu), 21 Spring Chamber Dream (Chun gui meng), 180, 262, 280–81, 333n40 Spring Harmony troupe, 27, 32 Spring Orchid (Chun Lan), 255, 330n49 Spring Stage troupe, 20, 24 Spring Sun Society (Chunyang She), 100 Spring Willow magazine, 315n112 Spring Willow Society (Chunliushe), 77, 100, 101, 131 stage appearance (banxiang), 246 stage names, 33 stage sets, 78, 104, 182–83, 191 stage standing (zhan tai), 97, 311n24 stage walks, 34, 252 Stanislavski, Konstantin, 285 star system, 45, 47–48, 224–25, 235 stardom, 1, 9, 44, 45, 49, 92, 190 Stealing the Ghost Bell (Dao gui ling), 186 steamships, 6, 43 Story of Heroic Sons and Daughters (Ernu yingxiong zhuan), 258 Strange Happenings in Sichuan (Sichuan qi wen), 102 stretching, 34 Stuart, John Leighton, 267 study abroad, 90, 100 su (crude) styles, 18, 66, 300n5. See also bangzi; handiao Summer Palace, 300n9 Sun Juxian: emulated conduct of Cheng Changgeng, 50; one of Later Three Oustandings, 300n6; and new drama, 311n43; performed with Mei Lanfang in A Thread of Hemp, 119; school of, 91; and Shang Xiaoyun, 36, 229; singing style of, 52 Sun Yatsen, 99, 108, 233, 269 Sun Yiyun, 26 Sun Yusheng, 71 suona (instrument), 103 Szonyi, Michael, 303n78 table tenders, 71–72, 79, 81, 220–21, 222–23, 308n46 Tablet of Blood and Tears (Xue lei bei), 102 taboos, 27 Tagore, Rabindranath, 267 Taiwan, 158 Tale of the Three Kingdoms, 95. See also Guan Yu

368 Talk of the Capital Daily (Jinghua ribao), 119 Tan Qunying, 106 Tan Xinpei: and commercialization, 18, 19; compared to Cheng Changgeng, 51–53; individualism of, 18, 45, 52– 53; as King of Actors, 54, 128, 305– 6n118; mentioned, 10, 42, 91, 111, 313n88; and movement to ban xiaonggong system, 97, 107; patronized by Cixi, 26, 51, 187; performances of, 73– 74, 89, 321n28; relationship with Wang Xiaonong, 97; roles of, 25, 51, 118, 186–87; salary of, 48, 305n102; Shanghai tours of, 48, 51, 305n102, 306n118; singing style of, 13, 51; and the Tongchun Troupe, 45; user of opium, 26; yinchang of, 75, 76, 80, 154, 170 Tang Zhuting, 36 tanghui (private performances), 29, 32, 222, 227; pay for performers, 48–49; private stages for, 58, 60, 306n14; viewed as humiliating to actors, 77, 308n61 Tao Yulan, 222 teacher-disciple relationship, 27, 33, 233– 34. See also keban; sifang teahouse theaters: architecture and seating arrangements, 63–66, 64, 65, 71, 72–73, 74–75, 87, 103–4; audience interaction with actors, 73–74; compared to playhouse theaters, 6–7; and conventions of Peking opera, 103–4; decline of, 211–12; as marketplace, 69–72, 214; mentioned, 27, 47; painting of, 65; prostitutes in, 68–69; rotation scheduling system in, 29–31, 45–46, 72, 91, 307n18; in Shanghai and Tianjin, 44, 61–62, 68–69; social stratification in, 56, 66, 68; staff of, 70, 214; table tenders in, 71–72, 308n46; towel tossers in, 71, 81; transformation of, 79–80, 170; women excluded from, 68. See also theater reform; theaters Tears on Barren Mountain (Huangshan lei), 180, 261, 262, 280–81, 333n40 technique, 182–89, 196; tradeoff with interiority, 194–95 theater reform, 80–83; actor training, 227–35; audience and staff discipline, 214–15, 216; Cheng Yanqiu’s recommendations for, 283–84; employment crisis, 224; and nation-building, 56; stage and seating, 210–13; and three institutions of Peking opera, 209–10, 235; limits of, 217–18, 223, 235–36;

Index playbills, 215–16; rules for actors, 216; in Shanghai, 76–79; Shenbao articles on, 215 theater rituals, 22 theater schedules, 29–31, 44–46, 72, 92, 307n18 theaters: commercial, 21–22, 60; Japanese influence on, 77; public and private, 58, 60; in Qing palace grounds, 20, 300n9; Qing regulation of, 55, 57– 59; as a place of public education, 58, 176–77; relationship to troupes, 43, 304n85; seating of women in, 69, 307n36; in Shanghai, 43–44, 307n36; temporary stages, 60, 306n12; in the United States, 218. See also playhouse theaters; teahouse theaters; theater reform theatrical genres, 2–3 Thousand Mile Steed (Qian li ju), 258 Thousand Pieces of Gold for a Smile (Qian jin yi xiao), 125 Thread of Hemp (Yi lu ma), 112, 119, 121, 148 Three Celebrations (Sanqing) troupe, 12, 24, 44–45; leadership of, 13, 17, 18, 28 Three Great Laosheng, 32, 302n49. See also Cheng Changgeng; Yu Sansheng; Zhang Erkui Three Happiness School (Sanyue Keban), 36–37 Three Later Outstanding Laosheng, 19, 91, 300n6. See also Sun Juxian; Tan Xinpei; Wang Guifen Three People’s Principles, 269 Tian Guifeng, 247 Tian Han, 294 Tian Jiyun, 24, 89, 107, 206 Tian men zou xue (Treading the snows of the heavenly gate), 103 Tianchan Wutai Theater (Shanghai), 191, 213 Tianjin: actresses in, 110; mixed-sex seating in, 83–84; new drama in, 311n43; Peking opera training in, 310n7; popularty of Peking opera in, 3; theater reform in, 83; theaters in, 61, 212, 213; touring actors in, 49, 202–3 Tianle Yuan, 29 Tiannu sanhua (The goddess scatters flowers), 118, 124, 193, 269, 293 ticket prices, 30, 35, 61, 182, 201, 205, 213 Tie gongji (The iron rooster), 190 Todorov, Tzvetan, 160 Tongchun Troupe, 45

Index Tongle Yuan, 29 Tongmenghui, 99 Tongnu zhan long (Maiden slays the dragon), 134 Tongzhi emperor, 301n26 touring: effects of, 47, 62; international, 9; middlemen and, 201–2; network, 44–45, 48; social requirements of, 197–98; stars, 49, 201, 202–4. See also Mei Lanfang, U.S. tour of; Tan Xinpei, Shanghai tours of towel tossers, 71, 81, 214 tragedy, 151, 318n44 training schools, 192, 196, 209, 322n41; attached to opera troupes, 32, 227; reform in, 227–35, 326n68. See also keban; sifang transitional dramas (guodu ju), 148. See also “hybrid” dramas Treading the Snows of the Heavenly Gate (Tian men zou xue), 103 True Light (Zhenguang) Theater, 214–15 trunk opening and closing days, 22 Tschanz, Dietrich, 94 umbrellas, 27 Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Hei nu yu tian lu), 100 United States–China relations, 266 University of Southern California, 265 U.S. media, 265, 270, 332n15. See also Mei Lanfang, U.S. tour of Valentino, Rudolph, 127 vernacular language, 134, 138, 149–50 vernacular language movement (baihua yundong), 86, 88, 139, 143, 144, 169, 327n28 visuality, 128, 156–57, 286, 319n60 Volpp, Sophie, 40, 304n78 waijiangpai (beyond-the-river style), 321n33 Wailing Society (Aiming Tuan), 100 Waixue (Outside School), 21. See also outside actors Wang, David Der-wei, 136 Wang Fengqing, 48, 111, 201, 224 Wang Guifen, 91, 300n6 Wang Guowei: and community of qing, 139; compared with Wu Mei, 140, 318n47; death of, 137; mentioned, 143, 262; views on drama, 137–38, 145, 151, 318n47 Wang Hanxi, 198 Wang Jide, 139 Wang Keqin, 241

369 Wang Mengbai, 207 Wang Shaoqing, 315n5 Wang Xiaoming, 318n40 Wang Xiaonong, 53, 89, 95–97 Wang Xiaoqing, 278 Wang Yaoqing: influence on Four Famous Dan, 258, 260; mentioned, 107, 207, 236, 246; and mixed troupes, 111; roles of, 125, 258; and the shift away from qiao, 330n44; skill as dancer, 129; in Story of Heroic Sons and Daughters, 258 Wang Yuhua (Xin Yanqiu), 49, 328n12 Wang Zhaojun, 258 Wang Zheng, 259 Wang Zhongqi, 141 Wang Zhongsheng, 100, 311n43 Wang Zhongxian, 131 warlords, 241 Warren, George, 277 Water Margin (Shui hu zhuan), 179, 294. See also Pan Jinlian water sleeves (shui xiu), 122 Waves on the Sea of Sin (Nie hai bolan), 119 Wei Changsheng, 11, 126 Wen Yiduo, 175 wen and wu roles, 11, 123, 306n119 Wen xin diao long (The literary mind and the carving of dragons; Liu Xie), 162– 63 Wen zhao guan (Escape from Zhao Pass), 17 wenchang, 11. See also orchestra Weng Ouhong, 236 wenming xin xi. See wenmingxi Wenming Chayuan (Civilized Teahouse), 80, 110, 119, 325n32 wenmingxi (civilized drama), 89, 97, 100–101, 176, 311n39; demise of, 132, 171; theater architecture and, 103–4; as a transitional form, 103–4 Western Chamber (Xi xiang ji), 255 Widow Zou, 254 Wilson, Edith, 272 women: admitted to Shanghai teahouses in the Qing, 62; excluded from audiences, 21, 35; in the Republican period, 106, 112, 130; martial, 258– 59; new terms related to, 313n76; in Peking opera scripts, 179–80. See also actresses; audiences, female; courtesans; prostitutes Wu Mei, 140–41, 143, 145, 151–52, 156, 162 Wu Song, 179–80 Wu Wojun, 83, 100

370 Wu Xianzi, 279 Wu Xiaoru, 13 Wu Youru, 59, 59 Wu Yuan, 17 Wu Zhihui, 327n93 Wu Zixu, 51, 305n110 Wu Zuguang, 294 wu (military/acrobatic) roles, 11, 123, 306n119. See also wusheng role wuchang, 11. See also orchestra Wuchang uprising, 106 wusheng role, 192, 258–59 Wutong yu (Rain on the wu-tong trees), 151 Xi xiang ji (Western chamber), 255 Xi you ji (Journey to the west), 186. See also Monkey King Xia brothers, 76–79, 98. See also New Stage Xia Kuizhang, 309n7 Xia Yuerun, 76, 77, 78 Xia Yueshan, 108, 115 Xianfeng emperor, 24, 300n24 xianggong (male courtesans): ban of, 97, 107, 113, 127, 227; houses of, 39; literati patrons of, 40; and sifang training, 38–39, 40–41; use of term, 303n70 Xiao Cuihua, 330n40 Xiao Jiaotian, 52, 305n113. See also Tan Xinpei Xiao Wutai (Comedic Stage), 100 Xiaorongchun school, 302n52 xiaoshuo (fiction), 93, 310n12 xide (actors’ etiquette), 27, 52 Xiesheng Theater (Tianjin), 61 xifen (play-point) system, 46 48, 223, 224–25 Xiju (Drama), 131, 163 xiju (drama), and huaju, 135 Xiju congkan (Drama Journal), 284 Xiju yuekan. See Drama Monthly xijuhua (dramification), 117–18, 319n58, 314n90 Xiliancheng, 33, 327n83. See also Fuliancheng Xin Luoma (New Rome; Liang Qichao), 93–94 Xin Ming Da Xiyuan (Great New Light Theater; Tianjin), 212 Xin nuxing (New Woman), 237 Xin shuo wan bao, 102 Xin xiaoshuo magazine, 310n12 Xin Yanqiu (Wang Yuhua), 49, 328n12 xinju (new drama), 100. See also new drama

Index Xinju Liudong Tuan (New Drama Roving Troupe), 100 Xinju Tongzhi Hui (New Drama Comrades Society), 100 Xinmin Xinju She (New People’s Drama Society), 100 Xinwenbao (Shanghai newspaper), 198 Xiong Foxi, 194, 214, 269, 287–88, 320n3 xipi (melodic mode), 12, 53, 300n16 Xisheng Theater (Tianjin), 61 xiyuan (teahouses), 60–61 xizhuang (teahouses), 60 xizi (player), 77, 308n62 Xu Banmei, 100, 131, 309n1, 312– 13n69 Xu Ke, 30 Xu Shaoying, 201, 220 Xue Kehong, 240 Xun Huisheng: advised by Chen Moxiang, 117; compared to Mei Lanfang, 269; and the Green Gang, 220; huashan characters of, 252; innovations of, 193; landscape painting by, 207; lectures on acting, 195; mastery of qiao, 252–53, 253, 255; mentioned, 49, 178, 215, 246, 311n43; in ranking of the Four Famous Dan, 246; repertoire of, 41, 179, 254–56; style of, 246; training of, 40–41, 229, 251–52, 304n79. See also Four Famous Dan ya and su, 11, 18, 66, 87, 96–97, 108 Yan gui han (Cry of the opium ghost), 102 Yan’an, 144 Yan’an Peking Opera Study Society, 294 Yang Cuihong, 239–40 Yang Guifei, 126. See also Guifei zuijiu Yang Xiaolou, 49, 210–12, 259, 327n91 Yang Yuelou,18, 44, 46, 48; marriage scandal in Shanghai, 44, 69, 304n87 Yang Yuhuan, 127, 184, 187 yangbanxi, 289, 291, 294 Yanyang lou (Bright spring pavilion), 31 Yao Peiqiu, 210–11 Ye Chunshan, 33, 35–36, 228, 234 Ye Longzhang, 234 Ye Shaojun, 316n22 Ye Shengchang, 37 yi ban dai ban (each troupe carries a training school), 32, 227 Yi lu ma (A thread of hemp), 112, 119, 121, 148 yinchang (“drink stage”), 75–76, 80, 154, 170, 216, 312n51

Index yiqiang, 2, 10, 11, 300n5 yiren (artist), 77 Yisushe (Transform Customs Society), 326n68 Yongzheng emperor, 21 Yu Dafu, 142 Yu jing tai (Jade mirror terrace), 261 Yu Sansheng, 300n6, 302n49 Yu Shangyuan, 137, 145, 175, 176, 318n51 Yu Shuyan, 49, 212, 220, 224, 230, 242 Yu Tang Chun 26, 179 Yu Xuyan, 284 Yu Zhenting, 110 Yu Ziyin, 302n46 Yuan Shikai, 106, 169 Yuan Yuling, 162 Yuan drama, 138, 140, 145, 151, 316n10 Yuanmingyuan, 300n9 Yubei Ting (Pavilion of the royal monument), 31 Yucheng keban, 326n62 yue opera, women’s, 182, 243–44, 328n21; Cantonese yue opera 163–64. See also Cantonese opera Yuedong guild, 309n4 Yuenan wanguo can (The tragic demise of Vietnam; Ding Baochen), 102–3 Yuxing Yuan, 29 Yuzhou feng (Beauty defies tyranny), 188, 293 zaju. See Yuan drama Zarrow, Peter, 97 Zhalou Theater, 60 Zhan Changsha (Attacking Changsha), 18 Zhan Jin bing (Battling the Jin), 293 zhan tai (stage standing), 97, 311n24 Zhan Wan cheng (The battle of Wan City), 254 Zhang Bojun, 282, 284 Zhang Boling, 84, 267 Zhang Cixi, 252 Zhang Erfen, 300n6 Zhang Erkui, 32, 302n49 Zhang Eyun, 200, 246 Zhang Fei, 51, 305n110 Zhang Houzai, “My View on China’s Old Drama” by, 152–53

371 Zhang Jian, 81–82, 83, 87, 200, 229–30 Zhang Jiao’ao, 282, 333n45 Zhang Jiliang, Diary of the Tear-Soaked Golden Stage, 67 Zhang Jinguang, 78 Zhang Junqiu, 33; and Du Yuesheng, 222 Zhang Qu, 271 Zhang Renjie, 327n93 Zhang Wenbin, 311n43 Zhang Wenxiang Assassinates Ma (Zhang Wenxiang ci Ma), 102 Zhang Wenyan, 328n14 Zhang Xiu, 254, 330n47 Zhang Xun, 241 Zhao Taimou, 175 Zhao shi guer (Zhao family orphan; Ji Zhunxiang), 151 zhen (real), 140. See also realism Zheng Zhengqiu, 100, 101, 132 Zhengshi Gongsi (City Shaking Company), 77 Zhenguang Theater (True Light Theater), 214–15 Zhengyu Yuhua Hui (Music Rectification and Educational Society), 108, 116. See also Actors’ Guild Zhenling Elementary School, 226 Zhenzhu shan (The pearl fan), 257 Zhenzhu ta (Pearl tower), 245 Zhongguo Da Xiyuan (Great China Theater; Tianjin), exemplified new theater design of Republican period, 83 Zhongguo guohui wan sui (Long live the Chinese National Congress), 102 Zhonghe Theater, 29, 45–46, 212 Zhonghua Xi Xiao. See National Drama Academy Zhongyang Da Xiyuan (Shanghai), 213 zhongzhou pronunciation system, 177 Zhou Enlai, 10 Zhou Xiaoying, 191 Zhou Xinfang, 49, 192, 193, 194–95, 207 Zhou Yibai, “Aesthetics of the Stage in Chinese Drama,” 183 Zhou Zuoren, 316n22 Zhuge Liang, 51 Zou, John Yu, 112, 320n2

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