Embroidering a Purse

Introduction

Its earliest written lyrics are the twelve verses printed in the 1828 song collection Baixue Yiyin

Embroidering a Purse is one of the most widely spread popular ditties of the Ming and Qing song tradition. The opera and folk-art scholar Fu Xihua found that it was already very popular by the middle of the Qing. The song collection Baixue Yiyin, printed in 1828, contains a twelve-verse Embroidering a Purse, the earliest version of its lyrics known in writing. The songs in that collection range from stage stories to love songs heard in the streets, and on the whole picture town life of the mid-Qing centred on Shandong. Folk song books of every province later held many tunes of this name, a good number of them variants grown from one parent tune, of which the Shanxi and Yunnan versions are the best known.