The Chinese Theater's Journey to the West

Chinese theater originated in ancient shamanic rituals performed with music and masks, features that the thater retained later. The Hundred Shows (baixi) was the main form of entertainment from the Han to the Six Dynasties (3rd c. BC to 6th c. CE), which included religious rituals, court dances, acrobatics and martial arts. During the Six Dynasties period (3rd-6th c. CE) masked dance dramas emerged, and by the 12th century, duirng the Song Dynasty, Chinese opera (xìqǔ), the main form of theater developed. Courtly theater was influenced by both Buddhist storytelling (bianwen) used to communicate religioius ideas to the masses, and a form of play called nanxi that was rooted in folk dances, mime and singing. The small zajou comic theater of the Song Dynasty later developed into a more elaborate form that was performed by courtesans who played both male and female characters. During the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644) private theater troupes were organized, where the actors received strict training in singing, dancing, and role-playing techniques often for eight years. Unlike Western opera's focus on singing, in Chinese theater a strict formatlity is applied to every aspect of the actor's performance, including song, speech, movement, costume, and makeup. The actor's technique is the focus of the show.

Originally masks were also used in today's most prominent Chinese theater type, the Peking (Beijing) opera (Jingju), which emerged around 1750, during the Qing Dynasty (1644-1912) in Beijing. It combines music, vocal performance, mime, dance and acrobatics. Today actors usually wear face paint. This mask represents the character Sun Wukong, or the Monkey King, who appears in Chinese folklore and play and in the famous 16th-century Chinese novel Xiyou ji, or Journey to the West. The Monkey King is a popular mythical hero of magic powers who is able to shape-shift and multiply himself, and in some places he is a divine spirit summoned at funerals. He was born from a stone egg on top of the Mountain of Flower and Fruit. The Monkey King gained immortality but rebelled against the heavenly gods when they excluded him from a royal banquet. He stole Xi Wangmu’s peaches of immortality and Laozi’s pills of longevity, then destroyed heavenly palaces. The Buddha captured the Monkey King and imprisoned him in a mountain for five hundred years. He was eventually released to protect the monk Tripitaka in his pilgrimage to India to retrieve sacred Buddhist sutras. 👇

The novel (attributed to Wu Cheng'en and published in 1592) captures the legendary pilgrimage of the historical Buddhist monk Xuanzang (Tripitaka) to the forbidden "Western Regions" of Central Asia and India along the Silk Road between 629 and 645 CE. It is based on Xuanzang's real journey recorded in The Great Tang Records of the Western Regions (646), mixed with Chinese folk tales and mythology. He embarks on this journey with three protectors - one of which is Sun Wukong, the Monkey King - vaguely following the historical monk's path while fighting demons and monsters. The comic novel nevertheless provides a controversial satire of Chinese society, as well as state and Buddhist bureucracy, and authoritarianism of the time that is still relevant today. Seeing behind the apperances takes time and effort.

The map of Xuanzang's journey below contains elements of both stories.

The Monkey King became the staple of the Peking Opera but it is also popular in puppet theater, shadow plays, and contemporary cinema.

During the time when the Peking Opera emerged women were prohibited from performing. Yet female performers played an infuential part both in the development of the genre earlier, and later in the transformation of conventional techniques used by male actors. Li Yuru (1923-2008), for instance, was instrumental in the acceptance of female singers in female roles and pioneered techniques that became standards on the post-Mao stage, including realism in psychological portrayal and the depiction of female subjectivity. During the early 20th c. an all-female theater called Yue emerged as well from popular entertainment, outside of Peking opera, that featured actesses in both gender roles.

Chinese opera is accompanied by instrumental music. The collection of the Institute of Texan Cultures features several musical instruments that could be played in an opera performance.

To learn more about Asian musical instrumens and listen to how they are played see the exhibition at the University of Texas, Dallas below. 👇

The various forms of Chinese theater, including opera, puppetry, and shadow play, made their way to the West by the 18th century, first to Europe and then to America. When gold was discovered at Sutter's Mill, CA in 1848, the Chinese population quickly rose to about 25,000 within a couple of years, and sustained itself despite the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act. Chinese theater performers arrived as well to entertain their compatriots, while the first Western theater was built in Shanghai around the same time with the same purpose.  In the early 20th c. Chinese spoken drama or huaju (hua-chü) emerged in Shanghai, especially played by the young activists of the May of Fourth Movement, some of which addressed issues such as the opression of women in Chinese society. More than 150 years later East and West "cross-pollinated" in the West in Monkey: Journey to the West (2008), a postmodern "pop opera," sometimes described as "circus opera," created by Chinese opera director Chen Shi-Zeng, and pop musicians Albarn and Jemie Helwett from Gorillaz. A huge hit, it included animation and other projections, Western pop and Chinese opera, circus performers, and martial arts. 👇

Read about the MOCA New York collection of Taiwanese glove puppets. 👇

What are the challenges of Chinese puppet collecting at the Lin Liu-Hsin Puppet Theatre Museum inTaipei? 👇

Check out the programs and performances of the New York Chinese Theater Works. 👇

Further Reading

Scott, A. C., The Classical Theater of China (New York: Routledge, 2005).

Mackerras, Colin ed., Chinese Theater: From Its Origin to the Present Day (Hawaii: University of Hawaii Press, 2021).

Bonds, Alexandra B., Chinese Opera Costumes: The Visual Communication of Character and Culture (New York: Routledge, 2019).

Cheng, Weikun, "The Challenge of the Actresses: Female Performers and Cultural Alternatives in Early Twentieth-Century Beijing and Tianjin," Modern China 22, no. 2 (1996): 197-233.

Lei, Daphne Pi-Wei, Operatic China: Staging Chinese Identity Across the Pacific (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006).

Li, Huan, "An Unorthodox Voice: The Rise of Modern Qinshi, Their Challenges, and Their Pursuits," Yearbook for Traditional Music 53 (2021): 71-101.

Sun, Hongmei, Transforming Monkey: Adaptation and Representation of a Chinese Epic (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2018).

Anthony C. Yu, trans. and ed. The Journey to the West. Vol 1-4. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977).