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• 1 media/CTC_GuanBG.png media/guan_resourcebanner.png 2024-10-29T09:24:09+00:00 The Injustice to Dou E
  and Other Plays
  by Guan Hanqing
  竇娥冤與其他關漢卿的雜劇 65 plain 22 2025-02-16T15:37:48+00:00

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  CONTENTS

  General background about the playwright Guan Hanqing can be found below. You can find introductions to each featured play by Guan Hanqing by following the links below. Follow further links to individual modules that analyze specific adaptations of the plays.

  The Injustice to Dou E and Other Courtroom Dramas 感天動地竇娥冤與其他法庭劇

  1. Snow in June 六月雪 (1959)
     • "Constructing Shared Repertoires with Sign Language and Chinese Opera," a module on the Cantonese opera film adaptation of The Injustice to Dou E. 
  2. The Injustice to Dou E 窦娥冤 (1959)
     • "Creating A Socialist Revolutionary Subject," a module on the Pu opera film adaptation of The Injustice to Dou E. 
  3. The Crimson Palm 血手印 (1964)
     • "From Love Story to Film Noir," a module on a Hong Kong Huangmei opera film adaptation of The Dream of the Crimson Robe 緋衣夢.

  Saving a Courtesan 趙盼兒風月救風塵

  1. Rescuing One’s Sister in the Wind and Dust (2021)
     • "Ghosts as an Intercultural Bridge," a module on the English-language spoken play adaptation of Saving a Courtesan.
  2. A Dream of Splendor 梦华录 (2022)
     • "Dramatic Irony through Editing and Character Addition," a module on the mainland Chinese television series adaptation of Saving a Courtesan.

  A Clever Maid Maneuvers Her Way into Romance  詐妮子調風月

  1. Yanyan 燕燕 (2016)
     • "The Physicality of Emotions on the Opera Stage," a module on a recorded performance of a Sichuan opera adaptation of Clever Maid.
  
  

  GENERAL BACKGROUND

  For someone about whom only the barest biographical facts are known, Guan Hanqing 關漢卿 (ca. 1220-after 1279) has had an extraordinary career over the span of the last eight hundred years (Fig. 1).
  
  For starters, Guan’s emergence as China’s foundational playwright coincided with one of the most consequential developments in Eurasia, that is, the meteoric rise of the Mongols from a dispersed nomadic steppe people to the feared, admired, and sought after rulers of four very different cultural centers, that is, Central Asia, Iran, Russia and China. In each instance, steppe and sedentary traditions coalesced to spur new cultural formations, while cross-fertilizing cultural practices from one end of the Mongol empire to the other. Within a short few decades, all the horrors and the carnage of the conquests notwithstanding, across Eurasia, cities under Mongol rule developed luxurious material cultures, became nodes of sustained patronage in the arts, humanities, and other branches of knowledge, and facilitated transcontinental trade and exchange across languages from Europe to the Middle East to Central and East Asia.
  
  Against this broader Eurasian backdrop, Guan’s life experience likely straddled the fall of the Jurchen Jin dynasty (1127-1234) at the hands of the fearsome Mongol armies and the flourishing of urban culture under the patronage of Yuan China’s first Mongol ruler, Khubilai Khan (r. 1260-1294) in the newly built capital of Dadu (大都, Mongolian: Daidu, “The Great Metropolis,” site of modern Beijing) (Fig. 2). Conceived as the most ritually correct city ever built on Chinese soil (Steinhardt 1988), Dadu consisted of three major parts, that is, the Palace City, the Imperial City, and the residential city (Sun 2010). In contrast to Chinese cities under previous and later dynasties, Dadu did not enforce residential separation between people of different ethnic backgrounds (Sieber 2014). It was within this matrix of relative cultural openness that Chinese-language theater broadened out from the casual comic and ritual traditions characteristic of Song and Jin times to becoming a literary form of commercial entertainment. By all accounts (Sieber 2003; Chang 2021), Guan Hanqing was believed to the literary catalyst of this far-reaching transformation. Not only was he said to be “the originator of zaju drama” (chu wei zaju zhi shi 初為雜劇之始) in contemporaneous sources, but over sixty plays were attributed to him (Zhong, Zengbu ben Luguibu), a number unrivaled by any subsequent playwright in dynastic China. 
  
  In his own day as well as in subsequent dynasties, Guan Hanqing came to be known as a kind of sophisticated urbanite (gaocai fengliu ren 高才風流人)—a bohemian indifferent to political aspirations, but deeply invested in the perfection of a new literary language (“vernacular or mixed-register Chinese”) and in new forms of collaboration (Sieber 2022; Sieber 2024). In an expanded version of the famed Register of Ghosts (Luguibu 錄鬼簿 1330), a work designed to commemorate cohorts of creatives working in Dadu and in Hangzhou, one critic retrospectively eulogized Guan Hanqing (Chang 2021), commending him for his linguistic innovation at the intersection of colloquial and classical language, for his sensitivity and romantic savvy, for his empire-wide fame and for his multiple leadership roles in the world of theater. Here is how he envisioned Guan’s pioneering influence on his generation of theater practitioners:

  The vanguard leader of the theatrical entertainments of the Pear Garden,
  The scriptwriter-in-chief,
  The master arranger for the zaju troupes. 
  驅梨園領袖，總編修師首，捻雜劇班頭 (Zhong, Luguibu sanzhong, 131)

  
  In the twentieth century, Guan Hanqing’s name served to facilitate the entry of China into the canon of world theater. For one, Guan was dubbed the “Chinese Shakespeare” to denote his seminal position within China’s theatrical corpus, while elevating his stature both within China and beyond. For another, he was pressed into the service of various causes of modern nation-building. Importantly, Guan Hanqing’s so-called “natural style” (ziran 自然)—a tribute to his capacity to blend different linguistic registers--was now assimilated to the new idea of “realism” (xieshi 寫實), thus ushering in the possibility of reading as his plays as pointed social criticism and political allegories. Such efforts culminated in the week-long celebrations of Guan Hanqing’s 700 year anniversary in 1958. Not only were symposia, exhibitions and revivals of his plays orchestrated in the capital of Beijing, but over fifteen hundred theater companies across the country were said to have adapted and staged his plays, while national and local radio stations broadcast special programs devoted to Guan (Sieber, Theaters of Desire, 37-40). A commemorative stamp with an invented likeness of Guan Hanqing was issued, marking the moment when a relatively obscure Yuan dynasty playwright was transformed into a household name in China (Fig. 3) and abroad (Fig. 4).
  
  From the inception of his modern reception, scholars have been intrigued by the vigor of Guan Hanqing’s female heroines. Among his over sixty plays, over two thirds are lost; nevertheless, from the titles of plays that are no longer extant found in The Register of Ghosts, we can infer that in addition to the thirteen or so extant female lead plays attributed to him, the lost corpus explored the stories of an extraordinarily diverse cast of characters, ranging from well-known historical women, named and obscure aristocratic women to nameless and unnamed courtesans, concubines, and commoners  (Zhong, Zengbu ben Luguibu, 131-33). 
  
  Among the extant plays, several stand out for the eloquence and determination, with which the female leads, who have been mistreated by people with far more authority than them, push back and gain the upper hand in social conflicts: a murder case with trumped up charges against a young widow (Injustice to Dou E/Dou E yuan 竇娥冤), a violent rift between an official and his daughter (Moon Pavilion/Baiyueting 拜月亭), a public dispute between a servant and her mistress’s family members (Maneuvering Her Way Into Romance/Tiao fengyue 調風月), or a life-and-death case of domestic violence set in the courtesan milieu (Saving a Courtesan/Jiufeng chen 救風塵). The female characters at the heart of these plots not only speak truth to power, but as the lead role (zheng dan 正旦), they occupy the moral center of these plays. Thus, with zaju’s mixed format of singing, recitation and dialogue, women of all walks of life acquired a poetic voice, allowing them to publicly explore their subjective interiority on stage. Interestingly, mobilizing the very moral values that twentieth-century reformers would reject, these female protagonists helped up ideals of sincerity, fidelity, friendship, and filial love in order to carve out a greater space for female agency and autonomy (Sieber 2022). 
  
  In the twenty-first century, Guan Hanqing’s oeuvre has also entered feminist discourse. In an interview, Amy Ng, a Hong Kong-raised, London-based playwright, when asked which three plays she wished she had read at the very beginning of her career as a playwright, she pointed to Guan Hanqing’s Saving a Courtesan. When prompted to elaborate, Ng explained that her engagement with Guan Hanqing’s corpus in general and with Saving a Courtesan in particular allowed her to discover subversive female voices within Chinese culture, an aspect that had been sidelined by modern critics who had insisted that Confucianism had so completely silenced women that any advocacy for women by definition would be a foreign import. By contrast, Ng noted that her encounter with Guan Hanqing—first in high school, then as an undergraduate, and finally as a playwright--allowed her to uncover a proto-feminist tradition within Chinese literature that made it possible for her to reconcile her sense of Chineseness with her beliefs in women’s empowerment.   

  WORKS CONSULTED CLICK TO EXPAND/COLLAPSE

  Wenbo Chang. “Performing the Role of the Playwright: Jia Zhongming’s Sanqu Songs in the Supplement to The Register of Ghosts.” The Journal of Chinese Literature and Culture 8:1 (2021): 59-88.

  "Beyond the Canon: The Writers' Room--In Conversation with Amy Ng.” Posted May 24, 2021, by "Beyond the Canon." Youtube, 58 min. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JpFwfpaErPE/.

  Li Hanqiu 李漢秋 and Yuan Youfen 袁有芬, ed. Guan Hanqing yanjiu ziliao 關漢卿研究資料 (Research Materials on Guan Hanqing). Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1988. 

  陳元靚 comp. Shilin guangji 事林廣記 (The Expansive Handbook of Worldly Knowledge). Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1999. 

  Patricia Sieber. “Exclusive Pleasures on the Cheap: Yuan-Dynasty Sanqu Songs on Courtesan Kickball (cuju 蹴鞠).” In Games and Gaming in China, edited by Li Guo, Douglas Eyman, and Hongmei Sun, 78-99. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2024.

  ----. “Nobody’s Genre, Everybody’s Song: Sanqu Songs and the Expansion of the Literary Sphere in Yuan China.” Journal of Chinese Literature and Culture 1 (2014): 29-64.

  -----. “The Pavilion for Praying to the Moon and The Injustice to Dou E: The Innovation of the Female Lead.” In How To Read Chinese Drama: A Guided Anthology, edited by Patricia Sieber and Regina S. Llamas, 78-100. New York: Columbia University Press, 2022.

  -----. Theaters of Desire: Authors, Readers, and the Reproduction of Early Chinese Song-Drama, 1300-2000. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2003.

  Steinhardt, Nancy Shatzman. “Mapping the Chinese City: The Image and the Reality.” In Envisioning the City, edited by David Buisseret, 1-33. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988.

  Sun, Zhixin Jason. “Dadu: Great Capital of the Yuan Dynasty.” In The World of Khubilai Khan: Chinese Art in the Yuan Dynasty, edited by James C.Y. Watt, 41-63. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2010.

  Zhong Sicheng 鍾嗣成. Jiaoding Luguibu sanzhong 校訂錄鬼簿三種 (Three Annotated Editions of The Register of Ghosts). Ed. Wang Gang 王鋼. Zhengzhou: Zhongzhou guji chubanshe, 1991. 

  AUTHOR

  Patricia Sieber