Regional Operas

In these operas singing, speech, acting and combat all follow set patterns, and many scenes are conjured up by the players' movements alone: this is what an aesthetic of drama that suggests rather than shows means. Yuan zaju and southern drama rose together, and the mature form of drama telling a story through singing, speech, acting and combat appeared at this time.

Kunqu came from southern drama that reached the Kunshan area of Jiangsu in the late Yuan and early Ming; in the Jiajing years of the Ming Wei Liangfu and others reformed it into the delicate and flowing "water-mill melody", and Liang Chenyu brought it to the stage with The Girl Washing Silk, and its classic plays include The Peony Pavilion and The Palace of Eternal Youth. Peking opera took shape in Beijing: from 1790, the fifty-fifth year of Qianlong, the four Anhui troupes Sanqing, Sixi, Chuntai and Hechun came to the capital one after another and worked with players of Hubei's Han tunes, drew also on Kunqu, Qinqiang and folk tunes, and gradually formed by the middle of the nineteenth century; its main tunes are xipi and erhuang, and its roles include sheng, dan, jing and chou.

The other operas each have their own origin. Cantonese opera, also called the great Guangdong drama, grew when outside tunes reached Guangdong in the late Ming and early Qing and joined local folk music. Yue opera began around Shengxian in Zhejiang, where players of Dongwang village built a stage and performed for the first time in 1906, and it took the name Yue opera in 1938. Huangmei opera came from the tea-picking tunes of the Huangmei area of Hubei, was sung in the Anqing dialect after it reached Huaining in Anhui, and the 1955 film The Fairy Couple made it known across the country. Qinqiang took shape in the Guanzhong area, and in the Qianlong years Wei Changsheng brought it to the capital and set off the contest between flowery and elegant drama. Sichuan opera is known for feats such as face-changing, and high tunes, Kunqu, huqin tunes, plucked-string tunes and local lantern plays came together on one stage as the "five tunes in harmony".

There are also Yu opera, Ping opera, Han opera, Xiang opera, Gan opera, Teochew opera, Jin opera, Shanghai opera, Lü opera and Gezai opera, together with Liyuan opera and Puxian opera, which keep the old look of southern drama, and Tibetan opera, which joins song and dance with religious performance. National opera is a separate branch: it is Chinese opera set beside the traditional theatre and not one of its regional forms, and The White-Haired Girl was first staged at Yan'an in 1945.