The Captive’s Revenge: The Taiping Civil War as Drama

Introduction

Huang Shuhua (style name Wanli, 1847–64), the protagonist of Xu E’s (style name Wuge, 1844–1903, juren 1885) play Lihua xue (Snow on the Pear Blossom/The Pear Blossom Rights Wrongs, completed 1886 and published 1887) is an exile in three stages: originally a flower-spirit expelled from heaven, she grows up in a scholar’s family in the outskirts of the Taiping capital Tianjing (Nanjing).¹ In her childhood the family kept a low profile, maintaining loyalty to the Qing while living in the Taiping capital and making a living by farming. They thus were displaced in both social class position and in political allegiance. During the Qing reconquest of Nanjing, a soldier slaughters her family and takes her far from home. In an inn in Hunan she leaves a written record of her plight, and subsequently succeeds in killing her abductors and herself. She thus becomes a martyr of the Taiping civil war after the time for martyrdom is supposed to have ended. The play closes with her return to her divine status in heaven. Her threefold exile is imagined two decades later by a pair of male sojourners, who also recall their own experiences of displacement in the Taiping era. Only the exile from and return to heaven are the playwright’s invention; the rest of her story was first told in the autobiographical preface and set of poems she left behind.²

The play both reenacts Huang Shuhua’s threefold exile and attempts to provide her with resolution and return to her proper place. To achieve Shuhua’s deserved homecoming, the play frames her historical experience with an account of divine origins and predestination, celebrates retributive violence, and presents survivors memorializing the dead. In the process the author reflects on the different functions of written records and drama in recording and granting meaning to violence and loss. In the end, however, many of the questions raised by Shuhua’s story remain unresolved.

Drama about the Taiping Rebellion

Lihua xue is one small piece of the large nineteenth-century project of memorializing the casualties of the Taiping civil war.³ The production of textual memories of the chaos coincided with changes in Chinese print culture during the Guangxu era. In a conventional outline of the decline of traditional Chinese literature and the rise of modern Chinese literature, these works in all genres fall in the years of traditional literature’s decline and before the beginning of modern innovation. They are consequently neglected by contemporary scholarship. Among the plays about the Taiping era, Lihua xue is relatively late; Xu and his collaborator retell Huang’s story more than twenty years after her death.

Times of chaos seem to increase the quantity of event and sentiment that demand literary representation, but at the same time the breakdown of order makes it difficult to fit that experience into literary form. In a previous study I considered the function of biji (jotting books) in collecting fragmentary recollections of the age of chaos. In generic terms drama, highly structured, long (or at least having multiple parts), and tied to performance, seems the opposite of biji. Rather than gathering fragments and suggesting the larger patterns of moral, cosmic, or historical order that these fragments might represent, drama presents a complete sequence of initial order, fall to chaos, and restoration of order. Even in its representations of chaos, the structures of role types, scenes, and tunes remain.⁴

The extensive scholarship on drama depicting the Ming-Qing transition provides useful models for study of the more neglected plays about the Taiping civil war.⁵ In his introduction to drama describing the Ming-Qing transition, Wilt Idema notes that drama was a particularly appropriate genre for historical reflection, because with its multiple voices theater allowed for the expression of conflicting emotions and interpretations.⁶ These multiple voices, however, come from a limited cast of characters. This is all the more true in the shorter dramas (under twenty scenes, some closer to ten) popular in the nineteenth century. The role types of drama compel both...