Page:"Round the world." - Letters from Japan, China, India, and Egypt (IA roundworldletter00fogg 0).pdf/119

 that the Chinese ladies have not yet adopted from the French. Every person in the audience carried a fan, which when not in use was placed between the collar and the back of the neck.

I can only describe the play as a “comical, melo-dramatic farce.” It seemed to me a most whimsical and ridiculous travesty; but the audience listened with the most serious earnestness, from the entree of the principal characters, which were harlequin-like, with a series of somersets over tables and chairs, to the finale, when the hero, after a painful and agonizing death, got up and quietly walked off the stage. I doubt whether the Chinese have any adequate conception of the ludicrous, either on the stage or in actual life. Making all allowance for the difference of national tastes and habits in dramatic performances, their more than Turkish gravity and impassiveness opened to me a new phase in the character of this strange race. The actors, who belonged to a famous troupe from Peking, and were all “stars,” recited their parts in a high, drawling falsetto tone, frequently advancing and retiring, bowing. gesturing, twisting and turning in the most grotesque ang ludicrous manner. There was an undue amount of action, loud altercations, the most violent gestures and frequent mock conflicts, with a great flourish of gongs, which seemed to inspire awe in the minds of the spectators. The play was in the Mandarin dialect, quite different from the colloquial language of Shanghai, and must have been unintelligible to the greater part of the audience, to whom, as well as to ourselves, it was a pantomime. The Emperor and other high officials were represented with a vast amount of tinsel, and long processions of “supes,” with spears and tin helmets, marched in and out, looking as little like real soldiers as these characters do at home. Fire-crackers and blue lights, gongs and tom-toms, enlivened the battle scenes, and the whole wound up, like our evening campaign speeches on the Square, with “a grand exhibition of fireworks.”

It is but just to Chinese theaters to say that vulgar and immoral plays are unknown, and the associations of the stage are quite different from those of western lands. The female characters are always performed by boys, and with remarkable accuracy in their imitation of voice and general appearance. The prompter sits on the siege, and beside him is a bowl of saki, or rice