LETTER XXIX
Peking, 7th September 1866.
Some time ago I was invited to go to the play by the great curio merchant here—Han Chang-kwei-ti. As the Pekingese theatres have a great celebrity, I ought to give you some account of them.
There are a great many theatres in the Chinese city, their situation being marked by a few masks, lay figures, images of tortoises or dragons, or other queer beasts; though indeed no sign is necessary to indicate their whereabouts, for the infernal din which comes from them the whole day long would guide any one to them. The theatres are the property of restaurateurs, who engage a company of actors to come and play for so many days, so that the troupes are constantly changing quarters. You go in by a long passage, which leads into a lofty and spacious hall, lighted from the top, and surrounded by a gallery. In the pit, or body of the hall, are tables at which the people sit drinking tea, eating sweetmeats, or with papers of fried melon and gourd seeds before them. This is the place of the poorer people; the rank and fashion go to the gallery, part of which is divided into private boxes. At one end of the hall is a raised platform, without scenes or appliances of any kind, open at the sides, and separated from the dressing-room by two doors with curtains; at the back of the stage sit the orchestra, five or six performers, all of whom play upon several instruments, which they take up in turn, according to the character of the music. The chief instruments are fiddles, lutes, clarionets, flutes, a sort of mouth organ, and any number of variety of gongs, drums, and cymbals. I talk of fiddles, etc., for simplicity’s sake, but you know a Chinese fiddle is no more like a European fiddle than a Chinaman with his pig-tail is like a European in a chimney-pot hat.
Nothing could be more rude or primitive than the state of the drama. The tragedies are all strutting and mouthing; roaring in a bass voice that seems to come out of the actor’s boots, or squeaking in a falsetto shrill enough to set your teeth on edge. The whole of the words are declaimed in a sort of recitative, which is more than half drowned by the drums and gongs. The language of tragedies is the old literary style and very obscure, and as if to make it still more difficult to the Pekingese, the actors all affect the Soochow dialect as the mother-tongue of the stage. The consequence of this is that even a well-educated Chinaman will make a very poor guess at the plot unless he has read the tragedy beforehand. Not understanding what is going on does not, however, seem to affect the enjoyment of the audience, nine-tenths of whom could no more tell you what the play is all about than I could.
As there is no scenery or stage appliances a great deal must be supplied by the imagination. A lady coming in with an attendant in the plain clothes of a Pekingese coolie, holding horizontally on each side of her two flags on which are painted wheels and clouds, is a fairy entering in her chariot of clouds. A warrior brandishes a whip to show that he is on horseback; to dismount, he makes a pirouette on one leg and throws down his whip; to remount, he makes a pirouette on the other leg and picks it up again. But let me tell you the plot of the tragedy I saw, as Han Chang-kwei-ti explained it to me.
A warrior in white has an everlasting feud with a rebel in red, who always gets the better of him, and performs the most astounding pas seuls, making quite appalling faces (heightened by streaks of red, blue, and white paint) to the terror of the whole empire, as represented by five old men and two little boys in white. The warrior in white, after a series of stage combats with the rebel in red, which it would break the heart of our best pantomimists to imitate, sits down in an arm-chair and tucks up one leg under him, by which the audience are to understand that he has gone to sleep in a lonely forest. He then dreams that the ghost of his father appears to him to teach him a trick and give him a sword, by the aid of which he may circumvent the rebel in red. The dream is represented by his getting up from his chair and acting through the scene with his father’s ghost, after which he sits down in the same posture as before. During one of his dead father’s speeches, which may have struck him, as they did me, as rather tedious, the actor felt a little thirsty, so he called for a cup of tea, which a coolie brought to him, and he drank it with his face to the audience, gargling his throat and spitting out the last mouthful without the smallest regard for the situation. Well, the father having stalked out, the warrior tucked up his leg again and then awoke. A final combat of many rounds then terminates in the victory of the warrior, obtained by the grace of his father’s sword. The rebel is slain and walks out, and the victorious army, consisting of four wheezy old men, make a triumphal entry into the gates of the capital, which are signified by two coolies holding up two poles with a blue cotton curtain in which a hole has been cut.
The dresses of the tragedians are magnificent. They are stiff with gold and embroidery, and immensely valuable. The masks and painting of the faces are to the last degree grotesque and hideous. The beards and wigs are coarse and clumsily contrived.
After two or three historical pieces have been played a farce follows, and indeed it is time that the proceedings should be enlivened a little. The farces are not difficult to follow (though I cannot say that I understand writers whom I know to be ignorant of Chinese, and who say that the acting of the Pekingese comedians is so good that the whole play is quite intelligible; I know I was out of my depth often enough, in spite of the admirable acting, and of my being able to understand a great deal of the dialogue). The dialect is the pure Pekingese vernacular, and the dialogue is spoken with the exception of a few songs. The women’s parts are played by boys, who imitate to perfection the mincing gait and affectations of the Chinese women—“the carriage as graceful as the weeping willow”—sham small feet are attached to their own boots in order to carry out the illusion, which is quite perfect. These boys are bought in the south and trained up as apprentices. They receive no pay from the head of their troupe, but they earn largish sums by attending the banquets of the Chinese men about town; when they are not actually playing, they go up into the private boxes to the richer visitors, whom they amuse with the last gossip of the green-room.
The farces are too indecent for me to do more than give you a mere sketch of one. Medea does not stop short of doing anything coram populo, so I give you a sort of Bowdler’s family edition of the plot of one that I saw.
A young gentleman of great wealth of the name of Wang has been ruined by a mistress named Yu Tang Chun, who, strange to say, although his money is all spent, still preserves a hankering for him. He, on the other hand, finding himself without a penny, is ashamed to go near her, so he retires to a temple to live by his wits. The scene opens with Yu Tang Chun bewailing his absence and her solitude in a long recitative and song (rather pretty for Chinese music). To her enters the low comedy man—such a good actor, and so full of fun!—who tells her where her lover is, and all about his deplorable state. She determines to go and see him, and take him a present of 300 taels (£100) to enable him to go to Peking and pass his examination. Accordingly, she sets out, and a table with the five offerings is placed upon the stage to represent a temple, to which she goes under the pretence of burning joss stick. As soon as she sees her lover the two set up a wild shriek, and rush into one another’s arms. Over what follows it is absolutely necessary to draw a curtain. The play ends by her giving Wang the money. He starts for Peking, and returns in a second or two, having passed a brilliant examination and obtained high office. Sometimes, but rarely, girls are present among the audience, and when this is the case, it is only fair to say that these pieces—the grossness of which passes all belief—are not given. On those occasions the playbill is made up of military and historic dramas, the propriety of which is as undeniable as their dulness.
The price of admission to the best theatres at Peking is one tiao (about 8d.) to the pit, something more to the gallery, and a private box costs twelve tiaos. As the whole thing is, as I said before, a speculation of the restaurateur’s, refreshments are hawked about during the whole performance. There is a man who carries about a long pipe (like Herr von Joel with his cigars at Evans’s), who is very persistent in seeking custom. If it is hot weather the people in the pit take off their coats and lounge naked to the waist, sitting out the whole performance from noon till seven P.M., after which they pack up what remains to them of their fruit and melon seeds, and go off home, not having had near enough of it.
I have been three or four times, and find that a couple of hours of the din and smoke are as much as I can stand, besides which I find that eating po-po out of politeness interferes with one’s dinner.
My time here is drawing very short. When I told my teacher that I was going away he hummed and hawed, and shifted about uneasily. At last he summoned up courage and said, “Sir, I have one last favour to ask of you. The teachers of the West are very cunning in medicine; they possess many secrets. I have no child, and it is a great sorrow! Bitter is the life of the man who is childless! In vain have we addressed our prayers to the goddess Kwan Yin, my wife remains barren. Sir, if you could give me some drug or some charm to remove this evil, for small favours one can find thanks, but for so great a favour none!”
Dear to man is the fame for abstruse learning! But I was obliged to confess myself at fault.
I start for Japan on Monday week, and then good-bye to Peking!