Chinese Opera: Images and Stories
Siu Wang-Ngai with Peter Lovrick, 1997, Chapter 1, p. 3-5.
• Shortlisted, 1998 George Freedley Memorial Award, Theatre Library Association
• Shortlisted, 1997 Kiriyama Pacific Rim Book Prize, Pacific Rim Voices Project
CACOPHONY! Cymbals, gongs, and drum demand attention. Their incessant beating fills up every corner of the theatre. Their rhythm and pace are urgent and exciting, as if to say, This is important! Something is about to happen! The musicians sitting on stage left in clear view of the audience are intensely focused on their leader, who furiously beats a small drum on a tripod with two sticks. The stage itself is fully lit but bare except for a carpet.
Suddenly a whirlwind of colour blows in from stage right, quickly followed by another. Fantastic beings, made larger than life by enormous shoes and padded shoulders, leap before the audience. They wear heavy, gloriously embroidered costumes and hold tasselled whips out at their sides, making them undulate. Four pennants rise from each of their backs and flutter as they move. But the most astonishing thing about them is their faces, painted in bold and calculated designs of many colours. Everything gives the impression that some mythical creatures have taken the stage. Then one of them begins to sing. A powerful and arresting voice resonates nasally. The delivery is aimed directly at the audience. Continue reading…
Chinese was the principal vehicle of culture and civilization for the whole of East Asia for many centuries and today is spoken by more people than any other language. The earliest known examples of written Chinese are the so-called ‘oracle bones,’ records of divination from the last capital of the Shang dynasty at Anyang. They date from approximately -1300 to -1050. From the following centuries, after the founding of the Zhōu dynasty, come inscriptions on bronze vessels recording royal donations and other such events. The earliest of the Chinese classics — parts of the Book of Changes (Yjiīng), the Book of Documents (Shūjīng) and the Book of Odes (Shījīng) — also date from the early centuries of the Zhou dynasty. All these texts are written in an archaic form of Chinese referred to as preclassical. 
The presence in folk art of theatrical and artistic conventions raises some interesting points about the historical nature of the subject. If the graphic representation of historical narratives was produced as a set of conventional but evolutional motifs, can the historical narrative be understood in those same terms? I have thus far insisted that nianhua cannot be taken as a literal representation of anything that they may represent, and that the most we can take from nianhuais some indication of how subjects were cognitively ordered. So, without claiming that people really believed history to be synonymous with endless variations on the themes of classical romances, nianhua may still provide some insight into how history was understood, not as a grand cycle of rise and decay as Dun Lichen would have it, but as a conventionalized historical landscape.
The emperors of the Ming dynasty ruled a bounded territory. There might be occasional doubt as to where exactly the border ran in places where the terrain was rough and the state’s ability to control local populations weak. But everyone understood that borders existed, and all who served the Ming understood that imperial sovereignty extended only that far and not an inch beyond. A border marked a clear break between the order that Chinese sovereignty was thought to create and the disorder that its absence must imply. Being at the edge of sovereignty, where one thing became another, borderlands were places where sovereignty was difficult to enforce, where control required more stringent enforcement than was necessary elsewhere, and where administrative operations had to permit innovations and compromises that were unacceptable in the heartland. Borderlands were troubling to rule-enforcers; they were also politically dangerous for those faced with adjusting heartland rules to conditions in the periphery. This chapter is about one instance of alleged border-crossing in a Ming borderland and the great political excitement that this allegation caused. 
The 1989 Tiananmen incident was a crucial test of the vitality of the new ideas about the state and society developed in the late 1980s. Immediately after 4 June, almost all of these ideas were attacked in both the official media and academic journals. People who had advocated them were completely silenced. Many of those who had pioneered them belonged to either what Goldman termed the “democratic elite” – Hu Yaobang’s intellectual network and their associates – or Zhao Ziyang’s “think tanks.” Both groups were purged after the incident. Their members were jailed, fled overseas, or simply ceased publication in academic journals. In her book, Goldman described the fates of some of these scholars, which partially explained why most of these people became silent. 
‘The most important thing to remember,’ said Cai one day while we were discussing my soon-to-be-reoriented perception of the rigid nature of archeological lives, is that ‘a person is never simply an archeologist. One is only an archeologist at certain times and for certain reasons.’ Cai then proceeded to tell me how his calculated combination of his different roles and duties in relation to the event of his son’s birth catapulted him to the exalted position of vice director of his provincial institute at the age of thirty-two.
Shen Zonglian, our former Representative to Tibet, has been teaching in Lynchburg College (VA) since the government retreated to Taiwan. He is both capable and reliable, with a good command of both Chinese and English, and he is able to use the Tibetan language. While I was serving as Foreign Minister I used to entrust him with matters of contacting the Dalai Lama’s followers … My opinion is that now we should secretly dispatch Shen to India, and make contact with [the Dalai Lama’s brother] Gyalo Thundrup who is now in Kalimpong. After Shen has explored the whole situation more clearly in India, he may come to Taiwan to give you a firsthand report … It is better that Shen should not come to Taiwan [before he goes to India], and for the time being his secret contact with us should be kept completely confidential … In your future instructions I beg your Excellency to use “Mary” as nickname for Shen, “Li Da” for the Dalai Lama, and “Hua Sheng” for Gyalo Thundrup. 
In 1912 and 1913, the new Ministry of Education began to design a school system that would manifest the Republican spirit. Its first edict was terminological: the modern schools established in the late Qing period would now be called “schools” (xuexiao) rather than “study halls” (xuetang). The ministry tried to erase all traces of imperial education by banning official Qing textbooks, the terms that referred to the imperial system and the Qing court, the study of Confucian classics in primary school, and the practice of awarding imperial titles to graduates. The unified educational system was meant to create enlightened citizens (guomin) for the new republic.
Although his progeny, in the form of typography, printing presses, and printing machines, appeared in Shanghai in the nineteenth century, Johann Gutenberg (1400?-68) himself did not figure as a recognizable name or noteworthy personality in the Shanghai consciousness before the mid-1920s. His appearance then reflected growing public awareness of the importance of technology in national development as well as the widespread dissemination of the industrially manufactured book and journal. Gutenberg was absent from China’s first modern dictionary, Xin zidian (New Dictionary)issued by the Commercial Press in 1912.Likewise,he did not appear in the Commercial Press’s 1915 phrase dictionary, Ciyuan, or in Zhonghua da zidian (Zhonghua Big Dictionary), issued the same year by Zhonghua Books. Nonetheless, all three modern dictionaries, the most important to appear in Chinese since Kangxi zidian (Kangxi Dictionary) of 1716, were printed using technology that could be traced to Gutenberg.
