Praying to the Moon

Introduction

From Guan Hanqing's Moon Pavilion; only single scenes survive, chiefly Snatching the Umbrella and Praying to the Moon

Praying to the Moon is a representative play of the gaoqiang style of Xiang opera, descended from Guan Hanqing's Yuan zaju The Moon Pavilion and the Ming chuanqi The Secluded Chamber. It is set amid the wars of the Zhenyuan years of the Jin, when the scholar Jiang Shilong and Ruilan, daughter of Minister Wang, are each cut off from their families, meet by chance and marry after many hardships. Xiang opera, Qi opera, Chenhe opera, Hengyang Xiang opera and Changde Han opera all have the play, but each keeps only a few single scenes, and the ones most often staged are Snatching the Umbrella and Praying to the Moon. The Praying to the Moon scene, played by Peng Fu'e and Peng Linong, went to the Central-South regional opera festival in 1952, and its revised script won a third prize for scripts at the second Hunan provincial festival in 1955. In 1986 Peng Linong's pupil Zuo Dabin took the play to Hong Kong for the first exhibition of Chinese regional opera.