Opera and the City: The Politics of Culture in Beijing, 1770–1900 by Andrea S. Goldman (review)

Opera and the City is both thoroughly informative and highly entertaining. Goldman opens the overture of her book with a comedy sketch from the 1950s, through which she sets the stage (literally and figuratively) for the performance of opera in the city of Beijing. The playhouse, as Goldman puts it, largely maintained its hustle and bustle from the late imperial period up to the 1950s. In fact, the Manchu writer Lao She wrote his play Teahouse in Beijing in 1957, offering a panoramic view of the politics of “teahouse culture” from the late Qing to the mid-20th century. When I was an undergraduate studying in Beijing in the 1990s, the famous Hu-Guang Guild House attracted loyal opera fans and young students alike to watch highlights from both kunqu (or kunju, often translated as Kun Opera) and jingju (best known as Peking Opera). The Lao She Teahouse, prominently located in the Qianmen District in Beijing today, became a favorite tourist attraction not only for enjoying tea, but also for having a taste of a variety of popular entertainment forms ranging from Peking Opera to Sichuan Opera, storytelling, and comedy sketches.

The crucial importance of “opera” (in the broadest sense) in the modern transformations of Chinese politics and culture hence cannot be overemphasized. Goldman’s study, filling a niche between the often studied 17th- and 20th-century developments in opera history, tells a fascinating story of the rise of opera as shaper of popular sentiment and as catalyst for public association throughout the late 18th and 19th centuries. Goldman is sensitive to the myriad forms of “opera” in circulation in Beijing at the time. She is keenly aware of the competing forces at work in partaking and manipulating the opera and the stories to their own ends.

The main body of the book consists of five chapters organized into three parts. Part 1, “Audiences and Actors,” includes Chapter 1, “Opera Aficionados and Guides to Boy Actresses.” It offers a fascinating study of opera audiences and actors through a literary analysis of “flower registers” (huapu) written by Han literati men. Goldman highlights the rich ethnographical value of the material, as it is “comprised of a tangle of biographical sketches, homoerotic poetry, and theater gossip,” which “also ranked and commented upon the talents of the actor youths who cross-dressed to play the young female (dan) roles” (p. 10). Taking the literary claims of the huapu seriously, Goldman reads these sources as at once looking backward, inward, and outward, namely, as embedded in long-standing literati connoisseurship discourses about taste and distinction, as self-representation of the cognoscenti authors, and as social commentary on the circumstances of actors, performance practices, and theatrical patronage in Qing Beijing.

Goldman maps out the special dynamics of opera in Beijing by focusing on three of the key performance venues and highlighting opera genre as a field of contestation among various agents in Part 2, “Venues and Genres.” Chapter 2, “Metropolitan Opera, Border Crossings, and the State,” presents three performance venues—commercial playhouses, temple fairs, and private salons—as key sites for the examination of the spatial and social dynamics of opera in Beijing circa 1770 to 1900. Goldman highlights the ethnic, gender, and class tensions and contestations among the movements of operas, actors, and audiences, in particular the tension over where opera could be watched and who could watch it. The Manchu state emerged as the leading player in this social drama, and its policing the opera, according to Goldman, reflected “a larger anxiety of Qing rulers throughout the 18th (and into the 19th) century over a perceived threat of sinicization and consequent weakening of the martial sinew” (p. 74). Although the temple fairs gave women and the urban poor an opportunity to watch opera in public and the salon cultivated the love of opera among elite women in private, Goldman considers the playhouse most...