This Week in China’s History: September 25, 1790
When you need a birthday present, what do you get for someone who has everything?
If we’re talking about the Qianlong emperor, the answer in 1790 was: an entire genre of art!
The emperor’s fondness for what would come to be called Peking Opera had roots long before his 80th birthday, the one celebrants would observe in 1790. As historian Joshua Goldstein puts it in his book Drama Kings, “the Qianlong emperor developed his addiction to drama in his first southern tour in 1751, during which he was treated by Jiangnan elites to cavalcades of artistic performances.” These southern tours — or nánxún 南巡 — were part-power projection, demonstrating the ability of the Manchu leaders to move freely in a region they had only controlled for a few decades, and part-espionage, giving the court insights into their new domain. (They were also the model for Dèng Xiǎopíng’s 邓小平 1992 trip that helped usher in the era of reform and opening.) But they were also instances of cultural diplomacy that, it turned out, operated in both directions.
The Qianlong emperor took to performances by opera troupes in Jiangnan, the prosperous Yangtze River Delta that was the heartland of Chinese culture. After his 1751 trip, Qianlong collected the finest performers from Yangzhou and Suzhou to perform at his mother’s 60th birthday celebration. (Sixtieth birthdays are especially notable in Chinese culture, marking a complete astrological cycle of the 12 signs through each of the five elements.) Goldstein quotes a contemporary observer who described the scene in the capital, with hundreds of actors and musicians in Beijing to fete the imperial mother: “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.”
Festivals of this sort became mainstays of imperial birthdays, with the more significant birthdays attracting the most elaborate performances. Preparations for Qianlong’s 80th birthday began two years before the festivities, and in the summer of 1790 an Anhui company called Sānqìng 三庆 — “three celebrations” — arrived in Beijing to perform for the emperor. So warmly received was Three Celebrations that three other Anhui troupes soon followed, performing to growing crowds around the capital. These four groups — Three Celebrations, Gentle Spring, Spring Stage, and Four Delights — would come to be known as the “Four Anhui Companies,” and form the core of Peking Opera.
The spectacle was immense. According to historian Ye Xiaoqing in the book Ascendant Peace in the Four Seas, making use of the Qing historical archives, more than 4,000 actors took part in the celebrations, including 875 from the four Anhui troupes (another 10 local troupes, with more than 3,000 actors, also participated). In total, more than 10,000 performers were involved!
Long before the Qianlong reign, of course, China had a rich dramatic tradition. The Yuan dynasty was a particular golden age, though it took some time for this to overcome the conventional wisdom that no worthwhile high culture could emerge under an “alien” dynasty. During the Ming dynasty, women dominated the profession of acting, and while most actors lived in poverty, a few became influential courtesans, whose decadence was blamed for corrupting the morals of the dynasty. To spare their new Qing dynasty from this temptation, the early Qing emperors banned women from appearing on stage, clearing the way for the dan actor: males, sometimes eunuchs, who played female roles. Qianlong completed the misogynistic turn, banning women from public theaters altogether, whether on stage or in the audience.
Despite the Qing founders’ attempts to calm down the theater, by the Qianlong reign performances were both more popular and bawdier than ever. Sexually suggestive performances like those of Wèi Chángshēng 魏长生 — a dan actor who was also rumored to have been the lover of powerful court eunuch Heshen — captured the attention of the capital, so much so that the Qianlong emperor not only expelled Wei from Beijing, but banned the entire genre of Wei’s specialty: the percussive style of opera, where gongs and clappers punctuate actors’ movements and gestures. Banned in Beijing, Wei fled to Jiangnan, where his style influenced opera companies there.
So when the time came for Qianlong’s 80th birthday, the Jiangnan troupes that came to town brought back the very style the emperor had banned, and that the capital crowds were starved for. The companies that arrived in Beijing to perform for the emperor stayed on into the fall, drawing larger and larger crowds.
Ironically for a form that takes a specific location as its name, Peking Opera is best understood as a blend of many different regional styles, with influences from both low and high culture on its development. The percussive style that Wei Changsheng had perfected had come to dominate opera performances in Jiangnan — actors in Shanghai and Suzhou were particularly adept at the style — but also coming together in Beijing were influences from Anhui, where the four companies had come from, and Sichuan.
Although there is general consensus that the performances of 1790 mark the origin point of Peking Opera, the form continued to evolve, led by the Four Anhui Troupes. These troupes, historian Goldstein writes, “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.” As the genre grew, it incorporated elements of both high and low culture, fed by literati tastes, influences of traveling peddlers, martial arts, and various regional styles.
By the 1860s, Peking Opera was so ensconced at court that, under the supervision of the Empress Dowager Cixi, a school for training eunuchs to sing in the style was established at the Qing court.
In the 20th century, Peking Opera achieved both its greatest highs and lowest lows. Although presented as uniquely Chinese, Peking Opera was popular among both Chinese and foreign audiences. As Goldstein put it, “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.” Cinema and sound recordings brought fame and notoriety to Peking Opera stars. The performances of Méi Lánfāng 梅兰芳 not only transformed the genre, but also helped reach audiences outside of China, performing in Japan, the United States and the Soviet Union. But under the pressures of the Cultural Revolution, Peking Opera was denounced as a feudalistic form, replaced by “revolutionary operas” like the famous Red Detachment of Women.
Like many forms that are associated with tradition, Peking Opera is a popular attraction, but struggles to find a way to remain a vibrant, living form while still embodying the traditional aesthetics that make it a tourist attraction, like an aging rock artist who strives to develop creatively against the pressure to be a nostalgia act. Nonetheless, there are few birthday gifts that still endure, 230 years after they were first unwrapped.
This Week in China’s History is a weekly column.
