From Opera Boat to Silver Screen: Visual and Sonic Culture of Cantonese Opera (尋覓粵劇聲影: 從紅船到水銀燈) by Sai-shing Yung (review)

Compared with other historical studies of Cantonese opera and its subcategories, the book written in Chinese by Sai-shing Yung, From Opera Boat to Silver Screen: Visual and Sonic Culture of Cantonese Opera, is distinguished by its research perspective on Cantonese opera in Hong Kong and other regions. Rather than a monograph focusing on one subject, Yung’s book is a collection of twelve essays published between 2002 and 2011, which are arranged respectively in twelve chapters, each chapter a different approach to Cantonese opera.

The twelve essays in the book are organized under two general topics. One deals with the performing arts and cultural influences of Cantonese opera, and the other with the opera (as well as its subcategories) produced in stage performances, record companies, and film industries. In accordance with the two topics, a discussion of three media instrumental to the development of Cantonese opera in Hong Kong and other regions during most of the twentieth century is carried throughout the book. The first one, the red boat, conveys a specific way of life, that of the older generations of Cantonese opera artists and their way of making a living. Painted in red, the boat is a traditional transportation vehicle that carried the performers and their stage properties—“red boat troupes” (pp. xxii–xxiii)—to different villages and towns, mostly along the inland waterways of Guangdong and Hong Kong, where the troupes landed to give performances. Yung believes that what is new about the performances of the red boat troupe is that in the 1920s they were no longer disorganized and were handled for the first time as a business. The emergence of the red boat troupe facilitated subsequent developments in the theater. It is Yung’s intention to use the opera “boat” in the book title to symbolize how Cantonese opera became a commercial institution from the late nineteenth century to the 1920s.

The second tool, phonographs and records imported from Western countries, popularized Cantonese opera in recorded format in the 1920s throughout southern China and Hong Kong. Traditionally, audiences approached Chinese theater through two materialized formats, either live performances on stage or theatrical scripts in texts. Live performances, “theater on stage,” in other words (p. 35), were offered to both illiterate and literate people. Theatrical scripts, “theater in text” in Yung’s words (p. 35), could only be enjoyed by the educated. “Theater on record,” “the third format of theater” (p. 47), restricted neither to a designated place nor to a written text, allowed more audiences to enjoy the opera, and the audience more freedom when enjoying the theater. The popularization of Cantonese opera is the main topic of the first two chapters. When describing the transnational production of Cantonese opera records by British, German, and American record companies during the first ten years of the twentieth century, Yung says: “the global mobility of Cantonese opera is a historical landmark for the production and dissemination of the Chinese theater” (my trans.; pp. 54–55).

The third tool is the film industry. Cantonese opera used to circulate only in Cantonese-speaking communities in Guangdong and Hong Kong. Cantonese opera in the 1930s, however, was also available in movie versions to the Cantonese population in both Southeast Asia and North America. The marketing of Cantonese opera by the movie industry was most expansive, Yung stresses, from the mid-1950s to 1968. The operation of the film industry by both Chinese performers and investment companies to disseminate Cantonese opera is the main focus of the last nine chapters (chapters 3–12). These chapters are all valuable, because they provide rich sources about performing artists, investment companies, and even ideological interventions around the 1950s, all of which answer questions about the activities and kinds of Cantonese opera that existed in Guangzhou, Hong Kong, and other regions.

Yung locates his discussion of Cantonese opera...