Reforming the State and Constructing Commercial Opera in Sichuan,1902–1920s: An Entangled History of Performing Arts and Administrative Reforms

Opera and Society in the 1800s

The necessities of recolonization of Sichuan after the Ming-Qing transition meant that life in most provincial towns and villages was a crude frontier experience for much of the eighteenth century. Apart from some splendid remnants such as great Buddhist sculptures and caves and a few buildings in Chengdu, there was not much to look for and even less to look at. Yet as people flowed into this desolate land, a new settlement structure was formed and its nodal points established. Invariably, Sichuan became a country of small market towns built on the banks of its twisting rivers. Such towns were surrounded by farmsteads perched on hills, valleys and, more seldom apart from the Chengdu Plain, flatlands (Lan and Huang, 2009; Chen, 2016; Zhao, 2012; Hu, 1980; Smith, 1988). These towns held most of the shrines, temples, and monasteries for a rural sacrificial community; they were also sites for flour and oil mills, shipyards, many trade and craft shops, and broad streets where people, both as individuals and as a community, could display their goods and engage in trade. For both types of activity, often correlated or coordinated in time, a small marketing town provided a center (Richthofen, 1903; Skinner, 1977a; Skinner, 1977b; Siu, 2002). Since most of the population in and around these towns migrated to Sichuan from other provinces, they brought with them their gods as well as the forms and customs for worshiping them. In the late seventeenth and first half of the eighteenth centuries, these gods were housed in more or less modest temples, which were later enlarged into co-provincial associations (huiguan 會館) and reconstructed into spacious compounds. Such buildings were not merely halls housing sacred statues. In front of the altar buildings above the main gates, large theater stages were built, while surrounding halls served as storerooms, hostels, and dining rooms. In some cases, opera stages were added to the older temples that survived (at least in name and memory) the late Ming debacle. ² At times, no space was available for a stage by the temple and so the town took on a so-called boat shape 船形場, with a fusiform street in the middle and an independent theater building at its heart (Ji, 2015: 14–21). The theater-building frenzy was not a onetime event but a process that took more than a century and a half and finished only in the early years of the twentieth century.

While a small-town perspective is useful for understanding Sichuan, it would be reductionist and methodologically unsustainable if we ignored larger units such as county towns, the provincial capital of Chengdu, and the emergent business capital of Chongqing. Like the rest of the province, all these places took a battering during the Ming-Qing transition and required much effort to rebuild. At the same time, however, their refashioning was much quicker and more radical than in the countryside: Chengdu ceased to host a branch of the imperial household as it did during the Ming, and more than a third of the city was turned into a Manchu garrison. Chongqing became a center of multiple layers of government, a hub of the Eastern Sichuan circuit 道, and the main trading node for the rapidly developing nationwide Yangzi trade (Wang and Xiang, 1967 [1939]: 713–14). Much of the local and imperial investment went into the reconstruction and construction of shrines, while immigrant communities built large huiguan compounds that became the main centers of social life in these cities. Already from the first half of the eighteenth century, the festival calendar of both places was filled with large-scale celebrations and parades that involved staging opera or employing actors for ritual performances: it was not only commoners and gentry who participated, but also officials.

Smaller centers such as Hechuan 合川 (and also Langzhong 閬中, Nanchong 南充, and Nanbu 南部), for which we have access to relatively complete documentation, emulated developments in Chengdu and Chongqing (Zhang, 1968 [1920]: 2843–44; Wang and Xiang, 1967 [1939]: 713–14, 765, 771, 776; Fu, 1987 [1909]: 1.202–6, 548–60). There, as elsewhere, opera was bound to religious celebrations; as one document issued by the county yamen Office of Works 工房 states, certain households held the privilege of organizing such events from the Yongzheng 雍正 period (1723–1736) (Nanbu County Archives, 11-55-608).

The real flourishing of the operatic arts, however, belonged to the nineteenth century, when most of the large huiguan theater stages were set up and lavishly decorated and when a large body of documents present actors both in the public sphere of communal ritual and in the private entertainment of elite households. In fact, opera served as one of the main sociocultural institutions binding people in an alien land while simultaneously helping them integrate Sichuan (as a human-historical entity and a physical land) into their own group and individual narratives. According to Zhao Shiyu, religious belief was not sufficient to create a lasting bond among immigrant communities: “therefore, to hold some group activities was extremely necessary, which would provide more opportunities for its members to get acquainted with each other, to strengthen contacts, to share useful information and to deepen affections. In terms of group activities, there were parties and opera shows held to commemorate the gods they believed in. Besides, traditional temple fairs were also popular among guild halls, where platforms and stages were constructed” (Zhao, 2014: 269–70; Wang, 2007: 303–31, 391–409).

The theater-building frenzy, both in small and large towns, corresponded to a number of significant socioeconomic and cultural changes that took place in the province and which defined its late imperial culture as well as the way in which opera settled in both religious behaviors and the mental imagery of Sichuan’s people. Foremost was the growth in wealth and urbanization experienced in Sichuan in the last century of Qing rule. Most cities were linked through interregional trade along the riverways and cross-national commerce on the Yangzi. While Chengdu did not experience a stunning rise after it regained its pre-Qing population, Chongqing did, and not only as a city but also as a whole region that encompassed closer and more remote hinterlands. Throughout the century, Chongqing’s urban population jumped from 30,000 to 300,000, while most of the outlying area was for the first time in history subjected to intensive agriculture, with the significant cultivation of New World crops (sweet potatoes, maize, tobacco, etc.). Urban growth and commercialization became the experience of all local centers along the Four Rivers, such as Guang’an 廣安, Zigong 自貢, Neijiang 内江, Langzhong, Suining 遂寧, Mianyang 綿陽, Guanghan 廣漢, Luzhou 瀘州, etc. (Chabrowski, 2015: 53–76; Dykstra, 2014: 172–224; Wang, 1989; Wu, 2010: 436–546).

A commercial boom and the enrichment of communities were quickly visible in architectural and ritual terms and thus in the growing need for opera performances to make festivities both splendid and satisfactory. There was also an unmistakable correspondence between the size of the city, its wealth, and the number of times opera was staged in a year. The outcome of such developments was that the provincial capital and its environs as well as Chongqing were traversed by a larger number of opera bands, some of which prided themselves on histories stretching back several generations. ³ At the same time, the farther one stepped away from these cultural and economic hubs, the more difficult it was to encounter opera, and those performed had neither much new to offer nor any stage art to brandish. In fact, from the historian’s perspective, most of these local rustic performances are rare lights in documentation that invariably privileges the fame and money of the big towns and the wealthy patrons residing there.

The economic vitality and the unprecedentedly rapid expansion of the population under the Qing were related to the increased cultural interconnectedness of Sichuan with outside provinces and the consequent spread of music, texts, and a taste for such entertainment (Sun, 2005: 1–46; Chen, 2016). First, a much richer offering of operas was growing in Chengdu throughout the century, with retiring officials and acting governors bringing troupes of their liking from Beijing. Second, the emergence of Chongqing among the most active inland ports of China translated into increased contacts with other trading centers. By the end of the nineteenth century and in the first decade of the twentieth, the city was visited by troupes from the Hubei-Hunan region and by Beijing opera actors (both male and female) traveling upriver from Shanghai.

A different integrative motion can be observed in the merger of the tunes prevalent in Sichuan into one form of operatic art throughout the Qing period. A few words of explanation are needed here. Due to the immigrant character of Sichuan’s population, the province (on the macro scale) and its biggest cities (on the micro scale) were divided into mutually estranged communities that retained allegiance to their places of origin. With this, they retained their beliefs, lineage affiliations, dialects, and preferred musical tunes. As the number and institutional power of co-provincial halls were material and political markers of this social structure, the prevalence of certain operas in different regions was a cultural expression of each social section. The main tunes roughly corresponded to the geographical origins from which immigrants hailed: gaoqiang 高腔 traveled along the Yangzi with the natives of Jiangxi, Hubei, and Hunan; huqin 胡琴 came from Anhui and shared music with the pihuang 皮簧 popular there (a style that forms the core of Beijing opera); tanxi 彈戲, with its origin in the style known as bangzi 梆子, was brought from Shaanxi and Shanxi provinces; kunqiang 崑腔 came via two routes, one with peoples of Jiangnan 江南 and the other with troupes serving officials designated to seats in Sichuan. Additionally, some mostly northern Sichuanese actors sung to the tune known as “lantern play” or dengxi 燈戲, which was apparently of local, though quite obscure and disputable, origin (Du and Wang, 2008: 27–38; Liu, 2013: 266; Kalvodová, 1996: 80–90).

Before the last decades of the Qing, these tunes, related stories, and acting forms existed largely separate from each other. Bands trained to play in one style would rarely have any need or opportunity to learn other melodies or stage operas to them. This started to change in and around Chengdu, where different populations mixed and where links with the capital were behind the first efforts to open a commercial theater and commercial troupes. It seems, however, that the financial hardships experienced by the overly specialized bands was an even stronger factor behind the creative push to merge styles and performance forms, which led to the appearance of the multi-voice 多聲腔 troupes, most significantly the Three Celebrations Society 三慶會 (Liu, 2013).

We can conclude that the economic growth of Sichuan, which was spared the Taiping disaster during the nineteenth century, allowed for the development of its cities and the relative enrichment of both individual and communal life. ⁴ The latter mostly took the form of theater construction and opera performances, the most direct expressions of the beliefs and aesthetic preferences of Sichuan’s varied and mixed populations. By the end of the century, because of the increased volume of cross-national trade, exchanges between local elites and imperial officials, and the sophistication of the cultural market, earlier dialect/sub-ethnic/musical divisions started to collapse in Chengdu and Chongqing. Nevertheless, opera still retained its mostly local and ritual-bound character, and not much augured the path it would take in the twentieth century.

New Policies: Creation of the New Institutional Forms, 1902–1911

The idea of a reformed, urban, commercial theater that could be used for propagating political programs entered Sichuan through the agency of the province’s first police chief, Zhou Shanpei 周善培 (hao 號: Xiaohuai 孝懷, 1875–1958). It was not, however, one man’s creation or the direct replanting of the model that developed in Beijing in the eighteenth century and in Shanghai in the late nineteenth century. Sichuan opera and commercially run playhouses were a result of the official policy of registering theaters, the fiscal demands created by the newly established police departments, and conditions in the artistic and cultural milieu of Chengdu and Chongqing.

Kristin Stapleton has identified the main motor behind the opera reform in Chengdu: Zhou Shanpei and the city police department acting in accord with the newly formed Chengdu Chamber of Commerce, its leader Fan Kongzhou 樊孔周 (?–1917), and like-minded actors (Stapleton, 2000: 141–42, 146). There were profound differences in the interests of each side of this triangle, a fact that could lead to conflict and potentially tear apart the links that led to opera reform. There were also important status distinctions between the members of the group undertaking institutional and cultural reform of the opera. Crossing social boundaries was justified by the expected outcomes: a new theater could pay for the police, promote new political views, bring earnings to investors, and improve the economic conditions and social status of the actors. Achieving all these ends was guaranteed by a novel contractual relationship that underlay the reformed theater and by the close involvement of all the sides in establishing the institution and fulfilling their ambitions and diverse agendas.

In 1902, Zhou Shanpei, still a young man, received an invitation from the acting governor-general of Sichuan, Cen Chunxuan 岑春煊 (1861–1933), to organize the provincial police service. Cen was one of the most powerful officials of the time, a scion of the clan of imperial grandees closely associated with the Empress Dowager and among the main actors implementing the New Policies in the aftermath of the crushed Boxer Rebellion (Guo, 1988). His function in Sichuan was related to the dismissal of his predecessor Kuijun 奎俊 (1841?–1916) and was clearly connected to the suppression of the restless province. Cen had to both increase state security and control and implement the new political order of the reforming monarchy. His choice of Zhou was not accidental: the young scholar was recommended to the acting governor-general through Cen’s acquaintance and Zhou’s preceptor, Zhao Xi 趙熙 (1867–1948). Moreover, the future head of police was one of the few men born in Sichuan who had studied in Japan, had a fair amount of work experience with Zhang Zhidong’s reformist faction, and maintained friendly contacts with groups of political émigrés such as Liang Qichao. ⁵ If these contacts could be problematic in Beijing at the time, they seem to have worked to Zhou’s advantage in a far southwestern province. Above all, his practical experience and political mindset were the two features that made Zhou exceptional: not only was he determined to work to the utmost for the reform’s success, but he also dreamt of remaking China out of a hodgepodge of Japan and Shanghai’s foreign concessions, a modernity he knew well. After Cen was appointed to head Guangdong and Guangxi in 1904, Zhou’s rank was raised to circuit intendant in 1905. The new governors-general also appreciated and retained his services: only when the dynasty crumbled did Zhou lose his job (Stapleton, 2000: 67–76). ⁶

Interestingly, one of Zhou Shanpei’s early projects was the reform of opera. In 1905, he created a platform for writing, reviewing, and publishing scripts in the hope of influencing both cultured elites and performers. It operated under the name of the Opera Improvement Society (Xiqu gailiang gonghui 戲曲改良公會; gonghui can also be translated as “club”—a more accurate description of what this organization was) and extended invitations to the most prominent literati living in Chengdu at the time. Among the members were the Hanlin 翰林 scholar, famous poet, and Zhou’s teacher Zhao Xi, the author of many opera scripts and stage performance reformer Huang Ji’an 黃吉安 (1836–1924), jinshi 進士 and later the organizer of benevolence halls Yin Changling 尹昌齡 (often known under his zi 字 as Yin Zhongxi 尹仲錫, 1869–1942), and educator and university teacher Liu Yubo 劉豫波 (1857–1949). Later, they were joined by such figures as the modern normal school graduate Ran Qiaozi 冉樵子 (1888–1929) and Liu Huaixu 劉懷敘 (1879–1947), who had training both as an actor and a musician (playing the guqin 古琴) (Du and Wang, 2008: 102–8; Stapleton, 2016: 56–67, 123; Li, n.d.).

The Opera Improvement Society was conceived within the framework of the elite-invented and elite-implemented reform movement; in no way was it a revolutionary initiative that attempted to bring on board broader public support and engagement. It was meant to treat opera seriously as a potential channel for the dissemination of appropriate values and for combating the vulgar and destructive culture that in Zhou’s and his associates’ opinion was responsible for China’s troubles. Moreover, their focus on editing and publishing new opera scripts betrays not only the literati bias toward the printed word but also an effort to influence and even control the booming market for woodblock printed opera scripts in Chengdu and Chongqing (Liu, 2005: 9).

From the outset, the main task placed on Zhou Shanpei was to try revamping the way Chengdu operated and thus set an example for the entire province (Stapleton, 1997: 100–132). The instrument of change was a well-financed police department that had secured an ambitious yearly budget of 25,000 taels and broad rights to intervene in the daily life and business organization of the city. The new force took over both the responsibilities and premises of the baojia 保甲; moreover, it seized numerous temples and lineage shrines, turning them into local bureaus. Thus, it acted not only as a protector of public security but also as an imposer of the new “civilization” 文明, which in the case of Chengdu meant trying to remake the city so it would resemble what Zhou had seen in or imagined as Tokyo (Stapleton, 2000: 80–95).

In the field of public mores and culture, after a few years of Zhou’s tenure it appeared that simply rallying elites around such projects was not sufficient for bringing change: only directly interfering in the urban fabric and constructive action could produce the expected outcome. Consequently, the police had to legitimize and protect ventures that altered the manner in which material and cultural goods were circulated, that is, markets, theaters, and a red-light district. In contrast to the former two, publicly run prostitution not only did not find support but also dented his reputation (Stapleton, 2000: 112). ⁷ This task of urban redevelopment, as we call it nowadays, required substantial funds and a degree of social support.

In this new enterprise, Zhou Shanpei found a very useful ally in Fan Kongzhou, an avowed nationalist and a successful bookseller and printer who, among other activities, was involved in disseminating illegal books prior to the New Policies and secured a position as the agent of Shanghai’s Commercial Press (Ren, 1987: 4.177–78). Zhou and Fan managed to gather the richest families of Chengdu to join their project of building a shopping arcade (Quanyechang 勸業場), a model market similar to those that had recently been built in Shanghai and Hankou and modeled on the famed Paris arcades (Stapleton, 2000: 141–42; Benjamin, 1999). As Fan provided money and contacts to realize Zhou Shanpei’s reformist projects, he also had his own interests in play with his elevated and powerful partner. Indeed, his contact with power bore fruit quite quickly: he became a head of the Chengdu Construction Company Ltd. 成都建築有限公司, which united the city’s wealthiest men, and a vice director of the newly formed Chengdu Chamber of Commerce. The arcade was opened in 1909 at the northern end of the central market district and provided a well-organized, sheltered, and hygienic space for a few hundred sellers. At the same time, Fan and Zhou set up another establishment: in 1908, just outside the gate of the arcade, they built Chengdu’s first government-sponsored, commercially run theater, the Yuelai chayuan 悦來茶園 (Joy Tea Garden) (Dai, 1986: 102). ⁸

This was not the first commercial opera establishment in town, however, since it was predated by the Ke Yuan 可園 (the Elegant Tea Garden), ⁹ a venture opened in 1906 by Wu Bichen 吳弼臣. ¹⁰ More than anything else, the story of the Ke Yuan reveals why Chengdu’s officials decided to run a theater in the first decade of the twentieth century. The Ke Yuan was the first to offer separate seating for men and women (thus officially being open to female spectators) as well as meals and snacks in addition to opera performances. It therefore seemed not only to have been modeled on prosperous Beijing and Shanghai venues but also to have conformed to the standards of moral behavior that so obsessed late Qing elites. However, according to Fu Chongju 傅崇矩 (1875–1917), Chengdu’s historian, journalist, publisher, and cultural/political critic, the public very quickly thronged in such numbers that the division of the sexes collapsed and immorality flourished (Fu, 1987 [1909]: 1–5, 277). Moreover, the Ke Yuan’s repertoire was at the very least problematic. Fu claimed that two kinds of play were performed on this commercial stage: obscene ones 淫戲 and violent ones 兇戲. The former were defined as those where young female impersonators 生旦 performed erotic movements, bared their bodies, or made obscene sounds from behind the curtain. Moreover, the role of flower lady 花旦 was offensive, seductive, lewd, and clownish. The latter plays were objectionable because real weapons were used onstage, and they promoted and performed acts of physical violence, staged the destruction of corpses, took out intestines or staged blood dripping from the actors’ clothes and bodies, and so on (Fu, 1987 [1909]: 277–78). If anything, the Yuelai was an answer to both the threat of demoralization (real and imagined) posed by the Ke Yuan and the failure to tame opera.

For both the police and business investors, the new entertainment institution meant cracking into a very profitable enterprise. As Wang Di has stated,

[in] 1910, investors in the Joy Tea Garden (Yuelai chayuan) received 1.67 taels for every 10 taels invested, and 0.8 percent interest monthly. Adding the interests the investors received in 1909, they gained nearly two to three taels for every 10 taels of investment, which was a very nice profit indeed. (Wang, 2008: 37)

It is therefore quite clear that financial benefit was among the most important factors that pulled together the disparate interests of the local government and the business community. This point, whose importance cannot be overstated, is essential to our understanding of the history of opera in Sichuan. The New Policies–era imperial government was searching for novel sources of income in order to put in practice its massive programs of school reform, industrial development, railway construction, a military buildup, and administrative reform, for which the police force was a primary instrument. Within the tax regime of the Qing government of the early twentieth century, sources of finance were very limited and insufficient for the realization of the aforementioned plans (Von Glahn, 2016: 374–84). Involving local business communities in economic ventures that could both produce a sufficient and sustainable profit to appear as worthy investments and promise regular and possibly increasing tax remittances for the local government was considered the best way out of this gridlock. A commercial theater like the Yuelai was such a venture.

A wealthy investor and a willing local government body, however, were not enough for such an enterprise to succeed. Not only did the opera need actors willing to work under new rules, in a changed environment and for a different public, but the officially sanctioned opera also had to be palatable to the elites and officials who put their names on the project. Engaging with actors could easily lead to disrepute for a member of the educated elite and such relations were not to be flaunted in public, irrespective of how common they actually were (at least as it appears in light of Chongqing’s tight regulations on artists making contact with the public during outdoor performances; see below). In an ideal world, acceptable opera ought to have been staged on the basis of literati rules in line with the new court’s agenda of empire-wide reform of the political structure and social mores. As of 1908, in the face of the perceived moral emergency in the Ke Yuan, Zhou needed not only money and policing powers but also cooperative actors who would be either reform-conscious or at least malleable to his will. Fortunately for him and his business associates, appropriate opera troupes were active in Chengdu at the time, such as Changleban 長樂班 (Boundless Joy Troupe) run by the female impersonator (dan 旦) Liu Zhimei 劉芷美 (1883–1921) and his colleague, teacher, and dan actor Huang Jinfeng 黃金鳳 (1850–1909). Both Liu and Huang had experienced poverty and an itinerant life (Editorial Board, 1992: 565–66, 580). In 1906, it was on Liu’s initiative that the old teacher and his actors acceded to the idea of renaming and reorganizing the old band and making him the new leader (Du and Wang, 2008: 61). The freshly established Boundless Joy, now directed by a young and energetic actor, became one of the city’s most popular opera companies, performing in at least two musical styles: the popular gaoqiang and more local dengxi. This was a novelty that crossed the dialectical and musical divisions so fundamental to opera history in the Qing period.

This cooperation between an investor and local police department was emblematic, as it provided a novel hybrid form of business organization that secured the private investor’s income and the financial health of his business while also ensuring a regular source of revenue for the purposes of the government institution (which mostly meant the police department). Although we have limited material about the contracts that secured the legal existence of Chengdu’s new opera houses, we have ample contemporary evidence from Chongqing. It shows that commercial theaters were organized under the same principles as joint-stock companies, themselves new legal creatures of the New Policies era (Faure, 2006: 45–64). In the second month of Xuantong’s 宣統 second year (1910), a petition to the Ba county yamen arrived asking for permission to open Cuifang chayuan 萃芳茶園 (Assembled Virtue Tea Garden) and Huifang chayuan 會芳茶園 (Distinguished Assembly Teahouse): these were not only the city’s first commercial theaters but also reproductions of the Yuelai model. The content of these applications, the official response, and the context of the ruling given by the officials clarify the process by which commercial theater in Sichuan was established.

The application for opening the first entertainment company and theater, which reached the county yamen’s office on the nineteenth day of the second month of 1910, expressed such rationale with great clarity. Messrs. Ding 丁, Xiang 象, Yin 寅, Wang 王, and Ao 敖, the five investors in a new limited liability company 股份有限公司, brandished a claim that their enterprise was intended to advance public virtue, combat violence, pornography, and inappropriate romanticism, and thus serve the public good (Baxian Archives, 6-54-1635). Moreover, their project, initially called the Distinguished Assembly Teahouse, was to gather actors instructed to stage only reformed 改良 operas, thus checking the evil wrought by the old theater and turning it to the purpose of the social amelioration and civilization of the inhabitants of the port city (Baxian Archives, 6-54-1635). The applicants therefore petitioned the government to confirm the establishment of their company and asked for the rules on which it should be run.

A second petition related to the establishment of the Assembled Virtue Tea Garden was submitted on the same day by merchants Wei Fanyu 魏繁餘, Yu Huashe 余華社, Peng Saichun 彭賽春, Wang Qingxiang 王清香, Tan Xiayi 潭暇宜, and Li Pinxiang 李品香, who expressed their excitement about and approval of the beneficial effects of the opening of the Eastern Sichuan Industrial Promotion Association 勸工會 and stated their intent to open an opera teahouse within its premises. According to the merchants, it would occupy the property of the restructured Meige Temple 梅葛廟 in Cuiwei ward 翠微坊, inside the city walls. They claimed it could be ready for opening in the fourth month. The guarantee for the lawful operation of the theater and its presentation of the reformed repertoire was the experience of Huang Shenmao 黃紳茂. Huang was an organizing member of Chengdu’s Yuelai Tea Garden and he was supposed to assist the Chongqing investors. Detailed instructions were received by an attendant of Huang’s called Shenluo 紳駱 and applied to the areas of literary training and musical performance fundamental to the improved artistic opera that the investors were trying to advance. As the petition states, the new opera in the port city was to closely follow and learn from the Yuelai so that the performances staged there could quell vulgarity and advance the highest and most refined music 雅頌. Moreover, at the end of the document, the opera investors added a question about whether their intention to open another teahouse in the Chaotian ward 朝天坊, next to the city’s biggest and busiest wharf, would require a separate application (Baxian Archives, 6-54-1635).

The initial response of the magistrate was to give four basic rules about the operation of the new theater. First, the overall capital of the venture was 10,000 taels, while each share was fifty taels. Apart from the shareholders who bought the stock of the company when they were issued, only one or two people could purchase shares not involving any third party to raise capital (“一, 本園共集本銀一萬两以五十两為一股, 除發起人分認股本外, 只招一二同 志入股並不廣招外股”); presumably, this regulation was meant to prevent undue speculation on the shares (Baxian Archives, 6-54-1635). Second, the plays staged in this new venture were to be only of the moralizing kind that promoted the established orthodox ethics of loyalty, filial piety, chastity, and righteousness 忠孝節義. At the same time, under no circumstances were romantic or pornographic plays to be performed. All of this was strictly prohibited. Third, vulgar men and immoral women had to be kept apart, and the theater was ordered to instruct the public in the appropriate level of decorum. Fourth, the actors employed by this venture were forbidden from socializing with patrons outside its premises, irrespective of whether they were invited by degree holders or merchants. Moreover, the shareholders of this playhouse were barred from inviting actors to feasts or to drink wine (Baxian Archives, 6-54-1635). Further regulations decreed by the circuit government prohibited the reformed opera house from participating in superstitious 迷信 celebrations, and ordered it to pay its normal expenses and to find a suitable troupe either locally or from the lower Yangzi regions that could sing the “capital tune” 京調 or some other melody. Additionally, the document mentions that the teahouse they were supposed to open was named the Assembled Virtue Tea Garden and that, importantly, it owed a monthly payment to the police 警察經費 (Baxian Archives, 6-54-1635).

The question of the appropriate registration of the new enterprise for commercial opera dragged on until the fifth month, during which further regulations were issued by the county yamen. By the end of the month, the police department 巡警 stated that the Assembled Virtue Tea Garden, managed by Chen Dingan 陳定安, was forbidden to play in the maoerxi 髦兒戲 style (on which more below). Furthermore, Chongqing police researched the real sum of the monthly contribution paid by Yuelai in Chengdu, which was called renzhen tanya 認真彈壓 and amounted to 22 silver yuan per day and 660 silver yuan per month. This meant that just one commercial theater could earn 7,900 taels a year, about a third of the total sum of 25,000 allocated as a budget to the police department in the provincial capital. The conclusion drawn by the Chongqing police department officials was to request similar payments from the theatrical ventures in their city. These regulations were accepted by Chen, the manager of three opera-teahouses already operated by this company: Cuifang chayuan 翠芳茶園, Huifang chayuan 會芳茶園, and Jiyuan 寄園 (Baxian Archives, 6-54-1635).

The issue of maoerxi was a particular preoccupation for the city officials: a string of prohibitions on this particular style were filed together with permissions for operating a theater business in Chongqing. By the end of the Guangxu 光緒 (1875–1908) reign and into the Xuantong years, this name described female-only troupes that played Beijing opera and gained popularity in and outside Shanghai. Xu Ke claimed that being a member of such a troupe provided a rare opportunity for the female performers in terms of education, and he even ventured to describe them as belonging to the realm of educational opera 教坊 (Xu, 1928: 53). In 1909, the county officials in Chongqing violently repudiated this point. In their eyes, maoerxi was a serious moral threat that exposed an urban population of already dubious moral fiber to the outrage of watching women on stage. They equated this kind of performance with the public soliciting of prostitutes, treating them in restaurants after shows, and engaging in illicit sexual contacts. Moreover, they fretted that such appalling opera, being an infection from Shanghai, a city with a most disturbing influence on anyone who ventured there, would hijack their project of social rectification (Baxian Archives, 6-54-1635). Their fears were not a product of a moralistic fever spurred by a distant threat. In fact, during those very days, Chongqing received a visit from Shanghai’s maoer troupe run by Wei Yicheng 魏翊成 and Brothers, which for the first time ever played a Beijing opera there. The performances took place in the Mao family temple 毛家祠堂 and were open to a broad public on the purchase of tickets (Chongqing Municipal Bureau of Culture, 2000: 12). The fact that the temple had already been turned into a stage for commercial performances demonstrates how the official policy of dissolving temples and appropriating their lands for schools 廟產興學 had backfired (Goossaert and Palmer, 2011: 44–50; Liang, 2008: 102–19; Xu, 2008: 406–31; Ling, 2008). The stakeholders in lineage shrines, temples, and co-provincial halls were all too keen to profit from the existing infrastructure such as theater stages, whether the authorities liked it or not. As early as 1910, maoerxi was performed in the Assembled Virtue Tea Garden in a brazen violation of the regulations issued just few months before (Chongqing Municipal Bureau of Culture, 2000: 163). Moreover, local residents considered it noisy: the flocking public disturbed their routines, for which the theater was penalized financially in the fifth month of 1910 (Baxian Archives, 6-54-1637).

The establishment of the first commercial theaters in Chongqing was caught in a two-pronged political game of New Policies in Sichuan. On the one hand, local government pressed for new sources of income; on the other, it plunged into a project of moral and intellectual rebuilding. Commercial theater, at least in theory, could provide both, but engaging with it was risky for many reasons. When, after six months of deliberation, the Ba county administration issued permission for opening three opera stages in the city, it repeatedly stated that rules had to be obeyed: only the reformed repertoire ought to be staged, male and female seats had to be kept separate, and all the due taxes 彈壓 were to be paid as decreed (Baxian Archives, 6-54-1635). Multiple repetitions of the same formulas in a string of documents related to opening of the opera house demonstrate a deep sense of insecurity over this popular and “vulgar” art. Officials assumed that theater, if tightly regulated, could produce the demanded outcome: broad propagation of the revived Confucianism that was assumed to possess the power to alleviate the empire’s ills (Zarrow, 2005: 13; Zarrow, 2012: 24–55, 119–46). If moralizing was an important aspect of the new theater, and not merely a formulaic one, then the demand for funds in fact shaped the commercial stage as a police-protected private institution. It was the theater’s immense profitability and not its ability to serve as a propaganda mouthpiece that shaped its future in Republican Sichuan.

Within a year, the new institutional form of opera also started to take root outside the province’s two largest cities, not as commercially run theaters, however, but in the form of an obligatory extraction paid to the fledging local police departments. An official instruction issued in the sixth month of the Xuantong third year (1911) for Fuyi township 富驛鎮 in Nanbu county stipulated that “every market and every bao and every jia when performing opera” had to submit a payment 資釐錢 to the township’s police department 巡警. The receipts 釐捐票 were to be forwarded to the county police authorities for examination. Instead of extracting a fee on an everyday basis from commercial establishments as in Chengdu and Chongqing, the Nanbu County Office of Household Registration 户房 officials imposed an annual fee on all the locations under its authority (Nanbu County Archives, 22-59-579, pp. 1–2). This regulation was similar to the policy implemented from 1905, which gave school directors the power to appropriate funds whenever a festival 迎神賽會 took place or an opera was played (Liang, 2008: 109). In contrast to the education reform, the money in our case was to fuel the development of the police administration and was to be extracted in such a manner that it would not eliminate theatrical performances from the social life of Sichuan communities. The inconsistency in implementing various reform programs certainly underlay much of the confusion over and resistance to the New Policies.

The willingness to charge opera with financing the new government institutions demonstrates the resilience of temple festivals in Sichuan, irrespective of the dissolution of many of the huiguan, the appropriation of temples for schools and police stations, and the expansion of commercially run theaters. In fact, there is little evidence that, despite opening a school within the premises of the monumental co-provincial halls in Chongqing, the functions of the shrine and adjacent theatrical stage were discontinued. In Tanghe 唐河, Qingyuangong 清原宮, a temple to the Lord of Sichuan (commemorating Erlang 二郎 and his putative father Li Bing 李冰, third century bce), and a Sichuanese sojourners’ hall in today’s Jiangjin 江津 district were constructed in 1908, well after the decree of the New Policies and commencement of the movement to use temple properties to fund schools (Administrative Office, 2014: 58, 141; Hinton, 2001).

While this may be quite a unique case, other temples were renovated in the last years of the Qing and their stages gained rather than lost splendor (Administrative Office, 2014: 13, 66). A number of archival documents from this period that deal with disturbances involving opera troupes or breaches of contracts between the troupes and the patrons inviting them demonstrate the vitality of the forms of religious celebration and theater business that had been developed in the preceding century. Lawsuits were filed because actors either did not perform for the agreed number of days or abused the local community by eating its food or demanding more money. The magistrate typically showed bias toward the pleaders and accusers, many of them descendants of locally prominent families that organized operas as part of their long-standing ancestral or communal celebrations. Such cases, all filed in 1910, included a complaint by local elites against a traveling Hubei troupe (named Chuban 楚班, for its origin), which, outside the main celebrations 大會, still performed in the Long Life Market 長生場 in Jiangbei 江北, across the Jialing River from the city of Chongqing. Another case stored in the same folder discusses the disturbance caused by the Precious Glory Band 貴榮班, which was initially invited to adorn the Lei Family festival 雷祖會 in the Hidden Dragon Market 龍隱場 (Baxian Archives, 6-54-1636). A fairly similar case from the same year can be found in the Nanbu County Archives describing a troupe called Eastern Peace 東泰班, which a community in Xichong 西充 claimed had breached the prohibition on staging operas by continuing to put on plays and collect money from the spectators. The voice of local elites is undoubtedly expressed in the plea submitted to the Office of Rites 禮房 of the county magistrate: it found such entertainment to be wasteful and driving already poor inhabitants of the area to financial ruin (Nanbu County Archives, 21-89-888, pp. 1–4).

Two elements connect all these cases: first, all the bands mentioned were itinerant, sometimes coming from fairly distant places such as Hubei province. Second, invariably the local governments’ answer was the expulsion of the (allegedly) abusive actors from the area and the restoration of social order. These similarities may indicate the discomfort of the administration of late Qing Sichuan with the expansion of commercial opera into rural districts and small market towns. The officials seem to have agreed that providing such entertainment was wasteful and that funds could be better extracted though a tax or a yearly contribution, as demonstrated above. Moreover, the appearance of a fair number of itinerant troupes might have been connected with the growing social upheaval in Sichuan’s rural districts.

In the last days of the dynasty, urban commercial theater grew out of the financial demands of administrative reform, compromises with locally prominent actors, and the mostly failed efforts to reform culture and popular customs. Outside Chengdu and Chongqing, these changes were not very notable: indeed, even in the outskirts of these cities opera invariably belonged to the world of religious festivals. However pressed it was by the fiscal demands of the authorities and the seizure of many temple premises, it did not enter into the crisis that would so clearly mark it after the 1911 Revolution.

Into the Republic

Republican developments, often seen as revolutionary in the political, social, economic, and cultural spheres, make little sense if we do not review the consequences of the steps taken in the last years of the empire and, perhaps more importantly, the institutional frameworks that survived the violent events in 1911 and 1912. Commercial opera is a perfect example of a social institution that was profoundly redefined by the New Policies, entangled with other newly formed governmental bodies, state-building demands, fiscal policies, and developmental visions, and then flourished in the new period. At the same time, different attitudes, policies, and developments can be observed in Sichuan’s large and diverse countryside. Whereas the city theaters in Chengdu, Chongqing, and a few lesser towns boomed, the rural picture was bleak: many ritual practices were discontinued, and communities were impoverished to such a degree that often they could not afford to invite opera troupes. If itinerant village bands persisted through the difficult and violent times, they hunted for any opportunity to squeeze themselves into the busy and profitable big city market (Gunde, 1976; Graham, 1963 [1961]: 189–98, 203–14). Due to the limits of space, I will only provide a few examples below.

In the early months of 1912, the Chengdu imperial police department was replaced by the Sichuan Provincial Capital Military Police 四川省會軍事巡警, which continued to control and tax public entertainment, most notably theaters. The relationship of the Military Police with opera differed from the one established during the Qing in some important ways.

First, the Military Police were much more interested in extracting regular payments 彈壓 from the theaters than in directing the political and cultural message expressed through performances. Moreover, contrary to its previous policy, by early 1920s it not only permitted but also protected all-women opera troupes, such as the Women’s Club 婦女公會. In 1925, the city even rented this band the premises of the defunct City God Temple (Chengdu Municipal Archives, 93-6-1076-22, p. 57).

Second, since police budgets were under pressure from military leaders preoccupied more with war than law enforcement, the police tried to bolster their earnings by ensuring the success of theater enterprises. This was achieved by more liberal registration, tax waivers whenever a playhouse did not make profit (due to rain, low ticket sales, etc.), initiating investments in a movie projector, struggling against bad management, or locating theaters next to shopping arcades, markets, department stores, banks, or public parks. In fact, permissions for tax holidays given to theaters due to rain are the most numerous in the police document collections (covering the years 1914–1920 and 1933–1935) of the Chengdu Municipal Archives (Chengdu Municipal Archives, 93-6-1669, 93-6-1534, 93-6-1361, 93-4-1352, 93-4-1353). Law enforcement’s engagement in the theaters’ managerial issues was not so common, but it did happen twice in the case of one playhouse called Sichuan Stage 蜀舞台. In 1916, the police tried to prevent it from defaulting by installing a movie projector in its premises, thus diversifying the entertainment on offer. In 1920, officers accused the theater’s boss of mismanagement and tried to find a solution for the opera house’s financial troubles (Chengdu Municipal Archives, 93-6-1533-48, p. 110; 93-6-1533-46; 93-6-1534-32, p. 91). Police interest was attracted on a case-by-case basis. The authorities did not engage in planning or promoting particular forms of entertainment; instead they were focused on maximizing gains from existing and newly opened ventures.

Third, Sichuan Republican officials’ attitude toward reformed plays was lukewarm at best, and only during a year-long period in 1924–1925, under the governorship of Yang Sen 楊森 (1884–1977), was a serious effort to “civilize” opera undertaken. For example, in April 1924 the city government 市政公所 revived a late Qing demand for all theater artistic programs to be submitted in advance to the authorities for scrutiny. It was stipulated that the plays would be read and analyzed by the Social Education 社會教育 bureau and either permitted or prohibited (Chengdu Municipal Archives, CDA 93-6-1090-2, p. 5).

A clear outcome of these policies was the multiplication of active and long-running theaters (as well as other smaller venues hard to account for) that played traditional operas refashioned for city audiences. In Chengdu, the number of registered houses grew from two in 1912 to seven in 1923, a number that was more or less stable a decade later (February 1923: Chengdu Municipal Archives, 93-6-2893-9, p. 84; in 1933: Chengdu Municipal Archives, 93-4-1352-12, p. 34; Chongqing: Chinese Opera Gazetteer Editorial Committee, 1995: 470–71).

One of the most visible signs of the difference between the two metropolitan centers of the province and their hinterlands (including medium-size cities, market towns, and rural areas) was the talent drain that occurred in the latter. If we look at the biographies of the most beloved actors in Chengdu, the first Republican generation largely came from the close hinterland, while the second was already trained in town and did not have to leave it to seek good earnings. ¹¹ Additionally, institutional handicaps, such as a lack of relatively stable police authorities, haunted even some fairly large towns with an established operatic tradition. For example, there are indications that in the Neijiang district in south-central Sichuan, a new style of covered teahouses, probably modeled on Yuelai, appeared in 1918; operas were also occasionally performed on the old open-air stages of the defunct temples and huiguan. Yet there is no evidence as to the stability or development of theater businesses before the 1940s (Neijing Municipal Bureau of Culture, 1991: 343–47). Other towns, such as northeastern Mianyang, managed to support a stage in the old yamen’s hostel and occasionally to invite a big city troupe to play there. Only after the relative stabilization of the province in 1927, however, was the town embellished with its first commercial and educational theater-cum-cinema, called Zhiyuyuan 智育院 (Teaching Wisdom Theater) (Chen, 1987: 81–82)

At the same time, in most rural and urban areas the occasions when one could stage an opera were decreasing: in some particularly well-documented districts such as Ba county, in the vicinity of Chongqing, which had a flourishing operatic culture, the “modernizing” drive destroyed most festivals in two rounds of prohibitions in 1912 and 1929 (Wang and Xiang, 1967 [1939]: 674–709). It must be mentioned that the destruction of religious festivals was more severe close to the main centers of warlord power than in more backcountry locations, as, for instance, happened in the town of Jiangbei, across the Jialing River from Chongqing (now a district of the city) in November 1934. The logic of these eradications was that the authorities on the one hand wanted to destroy superstition 迷信, but on the other treated opera as a commercial event that was thus obliged to pay taxes equal to those levied on city theaters. More often than not, small town shows did not keep account books or did not want to show the list of contributors: consequently, they were accused of cheating and spreading superstition (Chongqing Municipal Archives, 81-8-57).

Conclusion

The direction opera in Sichuan took in the twentieth century was clearly unintended by its creators, the local officials inventing and implementing the New Policies. Yet their decisions under the multiple pressures of, among others, political contingency, the state-building drive, and the cultural rectification campaign profoundly affected the way opera was staged, what appeared in the theaters, how was it received, who watched it, and for what purpose. Moving a communal performance art from a ritual environment and function and from the private chambers of the rich into a commercial milieu where it responded to the ticket-paying public’s demand for entertainment entirely restructured opera in Sichuan. In the big cities of Chengdu and Chongqing, it turned into a prosperous business that both supported local authorities financially and received protection from them. At the same time, commercial opera swept seasonal ritual plays from the audience’s life: the main teahouses and playhouses where it was staged took over desacralized temples and opera troupes found much better employment in commercial establishments than in the itinerant bands that catered to the ritual market. Audiences, moreover, exercised a different degree of control over the performance: they could choose where to go, which establishment to patronize, and where to spend their money. The community-organized, contribution-based religious shows did not possess such power. Through this, urban opera won its autonomy from the seasonal ritual calendar while concurrently falling into dependence on spectators’ whims and the local government’s benevolence.

While in the 1910s and 1920s urban commercial theater flourished as a new institution of city life, rural opera slumped into a crisis, which effectively led to its withering and in some places death. Sichuan’s countryside, especially close to the bigger centers, was affected by the quadruple scourge of frequent warfare, excessive taxation, military conscription, and anti-superstition campaigning. At the same time, no incentives (such as protection or investment) or a stable government-created institutional web was put in place. Many areas, even those on the outskirts of bigger towns, could not forge a relationship between theater and the city like the ones established in Chengdu and Chongqing. Blocked from such an opportunity, they instead suffered from attacks and exactions that impoverished, damaged, or destroyed any splendor in their seasonal festivities, which gained no entertainment or communal value in its stead.

In conclusion, it is essential to note and appreciate the process of institutional reform in the last decade of the Qing and the survival, however altered, of these state-building efforts in the Republic. The commercial theater, now called Sichuan opera, was an accidental child of the New Policies that was brought to maturity by the fiscal policy of the Republican urban police departments. Other operas that were unable to hide in the eye of the storm of war, taxation, and extraction that ravaged Republican Sichuan were starved away by poverty and official enmity.