Writers › Writer / Poet
Li Xingdao
Yuan playwright from Jiangzhou whose chalk-circle play, in which Judge Bao finds a child's true mother, lies behind Brecht's Caucasian Chalk Circle
In a study at night, a desk holds a brush pot, a porcelain vase with a plum branch, a lit red lantern, a folded fan and an unrolled blank scroll, with no one seated there, while through a round window the moon rises over a lake with a sailboat.
Also known as Li Xingfu
- Roles
- Writer / Poet
Li Xingdao, also recorded as Li Xingfu, was a Yuan playwright from Jiangzhou in present-day Shanxi; all that is known of him is a brief entry in Zhong Sicheng's Register of Ghosts (Lu gui bu). One play of his survives, The Chalk Circle (Huilan ji), preserved in Zang Maoxun's Ming anthology of Yuan drama. In it Zhang Haitang, concubine of a wealthy man, is accused of his murder by the wife who actually poisoned him and who claims Haitang's son as her own; Judge Bao has a circle drawn in lime, sets the child inside and lets the two women pull, and the real mother, unwilling to hurt him, lets go. Stanislas Julien translated the play into French in 1832, the German writer Klabund adapted it as Der Kreidekreis, and Bertolt Brecht reworked that story into The Caucasian Chalk Circle.
Life and times
Dates Dates unknown; zaju playwright of the early Yuan