Chinese Shadow Theatre: History, Popular Religion, and Women Warriors by Fan Pen Li Chen (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 223 Chinese Shadow Theatre: History, Popular Religion, and Women Warriors. By Fan Pen Li Chen. Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 2007. xxii + 343 pp. Cloth $75.00. Chinese shadow theater is opera with non-human actors, performed mostly for non-elite audiences sitting in front of a backlit screen, behind which vividly colored figures and animals are made to move, speak, and sing through the rods and voices of members of the troupe, who also provide musical accompaniment. For many of us, one of our most striking encounters with this performing art came in the opening sequence of Zhang Yimou’s 1994 film, To Live (Huozhe 活着), when Ge You’s character replaces a tired-out performer’s place behind the screen and bellows out wanwanqiang 碗碗腔 lyrics in a gambling den in the 1930s. Before the book under review, Fan Pen Chen had already done much to bring Chinese shadow theater to the West through her meticulous, annotated translations of shadow plays in scholarly journals, and in her Visions for the Masses: Chinese Shadow Plays from Shaanxi and Shanxi.17 Chinese Shadow Theatre is based on Chen’s extensive fieldwork with shadow theater troupes in several Chinese provinces and anchored on exhaustive archival research in China, Taiwan, Germany, and the U.S. Guiding us through a millennium of Chinese shadow theater history, with a particular focus on the Qing dynasty (1644–1911), Chen harnesses her versatility and expertise in the fields of drama, history, popular culture, ethnography, and linguistics to present a rich picture of this theatrical tradition, its importance in popular religion, and the significant role of women warriors in its repertoire. Chinese Shadow Theatre is divided into two parts, the first containing four topical chapters and the second translations of three scripts, and ends with four appendices. Chapter 1 presents a brief introduction to the book and the topics it covers. It whets our appetite for more by reconstructing a 1920 performance in the residence of the bandit-turned-warlord, Zhang Zuolin 張作霖 (1875–1928), for his new but melancholy concubine, who was so pleased with it that she rewarded the performers with a sum that was many times the ordinary fee. Chapter 2 shows that although shadow theater might have been around since the Western Han (206–8), it was in the Song dynasty (960–1279) that ample documentation indicates that shadow plays were performed in public and private venues and even reached a degree of popularity surpassed only much later, in the Qing 17 Ithaca, NY: Cornell University East Asia Program, 2004. CHINOPERL Papers No. 31 224 dynasty. In this chapter, besides surveying the various native theories of the origin of shadow plays, Chen also subjects a large array of secondary Chinese and western scholarship to critical analysis in order to debunk several long-held misconceptions about the Chinese roots of European shadow theater. As for the Mongol conquest taking Chinese shadow theater westward, she proves the claim to be tenuous and traces its popularity both in the West and China to the improper or at least illadvised use by Bertold Laufer (1874–1934) of a supposed record of a shadow theater performance for the second Great Khan of the Mongols, Ogetai (1186–1241), in Persia that appeared in a much later work by the Persian court historian, Rashid ad-Din (1247-1318), that was then spread in Chinese by Gu Jiegang 顧頡剛 (1893–1980) and Tong Jingxin 佟晶心 (pp. 36-41). She dismisses the common idea, again originating with Berthold Laufer, that a returning Jesuit priest, Father Du Halde, took shadow theater to Western Europe in 1767, the main problem being that shadow theater had been performed in Britain and Germany long before then (p. 48). She also points out the danger of being fooled by names, whether it is the case of the European term ombres chinoise (and related terms in other European languages), which used cardboard silhouettes rather than the kind of figures used in Chinese shadow theater, or assuming that an ombres chinoise play entitled “Broken Bridge” must be the same as the Chinese White Snake story Duanqiao 斷橋 (Broken Bridge). Chen also questions claims about the Chinese roots of shadow theater in Southeast Asia...