During the Ming dynasty, women dominated the profession of acting, and while most actors lived in poverty, a few became influential courtesans, whose decadence was blamed for corrupting the morals of the dynasty. The Yuan dynasty was a particular golden age, though it took some time for this to overcome the conventional wisdom that no worthwhile high culture could emerge under an “alien” dynasty. Long before the Qianlong reign, of course, China had a rich dramatic tradition. In total, more than 10,000 performers were involved! According to historian Ye Xiaoqing in the book Ascendant Peace in the Four Seas, making use of the Qing historical archives, more than 4,000 actors took part in the celebrations, including 875 from the four Anhui troupes (another 10 local troupes, with more than 3,000 actors, also participated). These four groups - Three Celebrations, Gentle Spring, Spring Stage, and Four Delights - would come to be known as the “Four Anhui Companies,” and form the core of Peking Opera. So warmly received was Three Celebrations that three other Anhui troupes soon followed, performing to growing crowds around the capital. Preparations for Qianlong’s 80th birthday began two years before the festivities, and in the summer of 1790 an Anhui company called Sānqìng 三庆 - “three celebrations” - arrived in Beijing to perform for the emperor. (Sixtieth birthdays are especially notable in Chinese culture, marking a complete astrological cycle of the 12 signs through each of the five elements.) Goldstein quotes a contemporary observer who described the scene in the capital, with hundreds of actors and musicians in Beijing to fete the imperial mother: “Here was the splendor of the empire, the treasures of the imperial palace, inaugural ribbons were festooned like flowers, whole booths laid out in brocade…Every ten steps there was another stage, southern tunes and northern melodies, music from the four directions, the ingenious techniques of young actors, stirring songs and dancing costumes.”įestivals of this sort became mainstays of imperial birthdays, with the more significant birthdays attracting the most elaborate performances. After his 1751 trip, Qianlong collected the finest performers from Yangzhou and Suzhou to perform at his mother’s 60th birthday celebration. The Qianlong emperor took to performances by opera troupes in Jiangnan, the prosperous Yangtze River Delta that was the heartland of Chinese culture. (They were also the model for Dèng Xiǎopíng’s 邓小平 1992 trip that helped usher in the era of reform and opening.) But they were also instances of cultural diplomacy that, it turned out, operated in both directions. As historian Joshua Goldstein puts it in his book Drama Kings, “the Qianlong emperor developed his addiction to drama in his first southern tour in 1751, during which he was treated by Jiangnan elites to cavalcades of artistic performances.” These southern tours - or nánxún 南巡 - were part-power projection, demonstrating the ability of the Manchu leaders to move freely in a region they had only controlled for a few decades, and part-espionage, giving the court insights into their new domain. The emperor’s fondness for what would come to be called Peking Opera had roots long before his 80th birthday, the one celebrants would observe in 1790.
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