{"id":3652,"date":"2025-03-28T07:30:47","date_gmt":"2025-03-28T12:30:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/subnivean.com\/blog\/?p=3652"},"modified":"2025-03-26T18:55:47","modified_gmt":"2025-03-26T23:55:47","slug":"did-you-know-yuan-dynasty-actors","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/subnivean.com\/blog\/did-you-know-yuan-dynasty-actors\/","title":{"rendered":"Did You Know? Yuan Dynasty Actors"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Picture credit: Wikimedia Commons<\/a>. (Public domain)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div><\/div>

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[Note: I am re-posting some short articles I wrote for Theatre Unbound's website many years ago. Read the full series<\/a>.]<\/p>\n

In Yuan Dynasty China (1271-1368), women frequently appeared onstage \u2013 in fact, it\u2019s likely that most Yuan Dynasty actors were women.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Fourteenth-century author Xia Tingzhi gives biographies of 117 female actors in his Qinglou ji qianzhu<\/em> (\u201cGreen Bower Collection\u201d). Many of these women \u201cportrayed male military figures, demonstrating their artistic mastery of martial arts and acrobatics,\u201d according to Chou Hui-ling, doing so even in performances with both men and women in the cast. The material they performed \u2013 zaju <\/em>or \u201cvariety plays\u201d \u2013 relied on songs and improvised dialog to carry the exciting plots.<\/p>\n

William Dolby says, \u201cThis prominence of women, if such it was, must have been significant in creating a theatre radically opposed in style and manner to the Beijing opera in which male actors played all the parts, including the female roles. The multiplicity of vivid female lead roles in itself probably indicates the actresses\u2019 salience, although conceivably it constitutes a chicken-and-egg dilemma.\u201d<\/p>\n

We don\u2019t know why so many Yuan Dynasty women were able to pursue careers on the stage. One theory is that, when the Mongols under Kublai Khan conquered China, women of the displaced Han ruling class, faced with the necessity of earning a living, became entertainers.<\/p>\n

Further reading:<\/p>\n

Chou, Hui-ling. \u201cStriking Their Own Poses: The History of Cross-Dressing on the Chinese Stage.\u201d (The Drama Review<\/em>, v. 41 no. 2, Summer 1997).<\/p>\n

Dolby, William. \u201cSome Mysteries and Mootings about the Yuan Variety Play.\u201d (Asian Theatre Journal, <\/em>v. 11, no. 1, Spring 1994).<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In Yuan Dynasty China (1271-1368), women frequently appeared onstage \u2013 in fact, it\u2019s likely that most Yuan Dynasty actors were women.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3653,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"aside","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[155,114,156],"class_list":["post-3652","post","type-post","status-publish","format-aside","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-theatre","tag-did-you-know","tag-women-in-theatre","tag-yuan-dynasty-china","post_format-post-format-aside"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/subnivean.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/Yuan-Zaju.jpg","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/subnivean.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3652","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/subnivean.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/subnivean.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/subnivean.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/subnivean.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3652"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/subnivean.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3652\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3657,"href":"https:\/\/subnivean.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3652\/revisions\/3657"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/subnivean.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3653"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/subnivean.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3652"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/subnivean.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3652"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/subnivean.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3652"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}