Research note: recent color reproductions of qing dynasty palace multi-colored play scripts

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Notes

1 The major exception is the performances put on for Lord Macartney in 1793 with which she opens the book and which she described in an earlier article, ‘‘Ascendant Peace in the Four Seas: Tributary Drama and the Macartney Mission of 1793,’’ Late Imperial China 26.2 (December 2005): 89–113. However, neither work includes an image of the script involved.

2 It was not until fairly late in the nineteenth century, beginning in Shanghai, that you begin to get the phenomenon of theaters maintaining their own troupes.

3 ‘‘From the Editor,’’ CHINOPERL Papers 29 (2010): vi–vii.

4 Several of these other types of documents used for staging plays in the palace are listed in ibid., p. vii. For more on the different types of scripts and production aids produced and archived by the palace, see Xiong Jin 熊静, ‘‘Qingdai neifu quben shiming’’ 清代内府曲本释名 (Explanation of the names for imperial household play scripts), Xiju 戲劇 (Theater) 2013.2: 31–41.

5 While Ding Ruqin 丁汝芹, Qingdai neiting yanxi shihua 清代內廷演戲史話 (The history of play performances at the Qing court; Beijing: Zijin cheng, 1999) and Zhu Jiajin 朱家溍 and Ding Ruqin 丁汝芹, Qingdai neiting yanju shimo kao 清代內廷演劇始末考 (Research into the beginnings and end of play performances at the Qing court; Beijing: Zhongguo shudian, 2007) both include a section with color plates before their tables of contents, these do not contain any images of play scripts. The more recent and well-illustrated Yang Lianqi 楊連啟, Qingmo gongting chengying xi 清末宮廷承應戲 (Plays for special occasions in the imperial court at the end of the Qing dynasty; Beijing: Zhongguo xiju, 2012), does not have any one section especially devoted to looking at play scripts and other documents used to mount imperial stage productions, but it does contain many color images of selected pages from them.

6 For their website and some idea of their history, scope, and activities, see http://eapub.cneas.tohoku.ac.jp/court/index.html.

7 On their publication pages, the publisher is given as ‘‘Tokubetsu suishin kenkyū ‘Shinchō kyūtei engeki bunka no kenkyū' han’’ 特別推進研究‘‘清朝宮廷演劇文化の研究’’班 (Group for the specially recommended research project ‘‘Qing palace theatrical performance culture research’’).

8 See also Isobe Yōko, ‘‘Riben suocang neifu chaoben Rushi guan sizhong juben zhi yanjiu” 日本所藏内府鈔本如是觀四種劇本之研究 (Research on four imperial household manuscript play scripts including Rushi guan held in Japan), Wenxue yichan 文學遺產 (Literary heritage) 2012.4: 130–35.

9 The first line of each of these four plays gives the name of the play from which the scene was extracted. In the case of the second of these plays, the extracted sense has remained closely tied to the original play in that it is hard to imagine audience members not remembering what comes before or after the scene in the main play, but the other two basically became independent short plays quite divorced from their original contexts.

10 This particular version of the scene is discussed in Thomas Kelly, “Putting on a Play in an Underworld Courtroom: The ‘Mingpan' (Infernal Judgment) Scene in Tang Xianzu's Mudan ting (Peony Pavilion),” CHINOPERL: Journal of Chinese Oral and Performing Literature 32.2 (December 2013): 132–55, p. 134 n 10 and elsewhere.

11 Begins with Zhang Biegu 張別古 coming to collect the money owed him for a pair of straw sandals he sold to Zhao Da 趙大 (Zhao the Elder) before the latter murdered, robbed, and burnt Liu Shichang 劉世昌 into the black pot of the title.

12 This play is better known by a shorter title consisting of the last three characters of the title as given on the palace play script.

13 On the manuscripts reproduced in this and the next volume, see also Shen Jin 沈津 (Chun Shum), ‘‘Shangtu cang jing xieben Xiyou ji chuanqi erzhong’’ 上圖藏精寫本西遊記傳奇二種 (Two fine manuscripts of Journey to the West material chuanqi plays held in the Shanghai Library), Wenwu 文物 (Cultural artifacts) 1980.3: 95. Shen reproduces the first pages of the first scenes of both plays but in black and white. The article describes the use of different colors of ink in the manuscript.

14 The two plays reproduced in this and the previous item have also been published in a color facsimile edition by Shanghai Library with an introductory essay by Jiang Xingyu 蔣星煜: Qing Qianlong yulan sise chaoben xiqu liangzhong 清乾隆御覽四色抄本戲曲兩種 (Two four-color play manuscripts prepared for the personal inspection of the Qianlong emperor of the Qing dynasty; Shanghai: Shanghai guji, 2012).

15 Isobe Yōko, ‘‘Riben suocang neifu chaoben Rushi guan sizhong,’’ p. 131, describes the calligraphy in the plays in volume one this way: ‘‘when you first look at them you might mistake them for being printed’’ (zha kan huo wu wei keben 乍看或誤為刻本).

16 The scripts do not include the mountain radical on top of this character.

17 The four plays differ in how much information is given about the aria type each aria is to be sung to, with the last of the four being most explicit (it also contains some musical notation), the third lacking any arias at all, and the other two typically only indicating in the stage directions that a character ‘‘sings’’ (chang 唱), without specifying aria type (in basically the only exception, on p. 32, the aria type is indicated both in a stage direction and in a marginal note).

18 The plays in volumes three and four have three seals on the same page (see p. 3 of volume three and p. 5 of volume four for reproductions) associated with the Qianlong emperor, the last of which uses the title he was known by, taishang huang 太上皇, after he abdicated the throne in 1795. Although the plays in volume 1 use the same format as those in these two volumes, and also make use of multiple colors, they do not have any seals to indicate that they were as prized as these two play scripts seem to have been (as noted above, volumes three and four were kept together in a special box).

19 One set of stage directions in scene 18 of the play in volume four involves 75 characters played by ‘‘miscellaneous’’ (za 雜) actors (see pp. 169–70 [original pagination: 80a–b]).

20 On p. 36, there are two examples of small slips of paper with emendations that were pasted onto the script and partially or wholly obscure the original text. On p. 38, the same page is reproduced but with the paper slips folded up so that the original text is visible. Some of the play production documents held in the palace contained the names of the actors, which were updated when necessary with the new names pasted over the old ones. For an example where this has been done, see Yang Lianqi, Qingmo gongting chengying xi, p. 13, which contains color photo-reprints of the cover and the three pages of the ‘‘abstract’’ (tigang 題[sic.]綱) for a play. The pages list the roles to be performed (onstage and off [musicians, etc.]) and give the names of those who will perform those roles. Although the photos are small, it is clear that the names that are visible have been pasted on and not all at the same time. Ye Xiaoqing, Ascendant Peace, p. 96, describes these slips of paper used for emendations as ‘‘yellow,’’ but while the slips as reproduced in Yang's book do appear to be yellow, those in volume two of the Japanese photo-reprints seem to be of the same color as the pages they are pasted on (making them harder to notice in photo-reprints).

21 Instead of regular commas (、) and sentence periods (。), the characters (dou 讀, ju 句) for those forms of punctuation are used.

22 This is how the title of this play was translated in materials for the performances of excerpts from the late Qing palace Jingju version of the play mounted in Beijing in May of 2013. The production aimed to give the audience some sense of how the play was performed for Empress Dowager Cixi.

23 See Hao Chengwen 郝成文, ‘‘Zhaodai xiaoshao yanjiu 昭代簫韶研究’’ (Research on Zhaodai xiaoshao), Doctoral diss., Shanxi shifan daxue, 2012, p. 1 of the abstract for a summary statement of this conclusion, and chapters 5–6 for details.

24 After this research note was written, I became aware that Isobe Akira in 2013 published, in the same format as the four volumes mentioned above, a 10 volume color reprint of a copy of the 240-scene palace version of the Xiyou ji  西游記 (Journey to the West), Shengping baofa 昇平寶筏 (Precious raft of ascending peace) held in the Osaka Prefectural Nakanoshima Library. The publisher, however, was directly listed as Tohoku University Press.