Research note: recent color reproductions of qing dynasty palace multi-colored play scripts

Abstract

It is fairly well known that many of the Qing emperors (and one empress dowager, in particular) were dedicated consumers of a wide variety of theatrical performances in the various Qing palaces, and that the court insisted that several different kinds of written plays scripts would be prepared and archived for all drama performances. An increasing number of scholars have been making use in their research of play scripts that were prepared for these performances and were preserved in the imperial archives or were bought by collectors after they made their way onto the old book market and eventually ended up in library collections in China and abroad. 2012 saw the long-awaited appearance of the first book in English on Qing dynasty palace theater, Ascendant Peace in the Four Seas: Drama and the Qing Imperial Court (Hong Kong: Chinese University of Hong Kong Press, 2012), by Ye Xiaoqing (1952–2010). Her study is more concerned with documents about performance than performance itself and rarely mentions play scripts in any detail. While it is true that only a few of us will choose to do research on Qing palace stagecraft, I think those of us interested in traditional Chinese theater need to have some familiarity with the kinds of things that happened on the stage in the Qing palaces since the court was generally able and willing to commit resources, human and material, that commercial troupes could only dream about. Commercial troupes had to be able to carry what they needed for performances from venue to venue. What we tend to think about as essential to traditional Chinese theater such as the use of the bare stage, limited props, no or little scenery, etc., characterized the practice of commercial troupes but not that of the imperial court. Palace performances could get quite complicated in terms of the number of people and things whose movement had to be coordinated, and this seems to have stimulated the creation of different kinds of production scripts and written aids with far more stage directions than was typically the case. Luckily, reproductions of Qing dynasty palace play scripts and auxiliary documents have become more and more readily available. In 2010, in my first letter as