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| Beijing in the 1910s and 1920s: the camel train was entering the city. |
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| Food stalls in a Beijing street in the 1920s. | Peking Opera had its heyday in the 1930s when there were more than 10 theaters in Beijing alone, most of them scattered in the Qianmen area. This is a big number given the fact that Beijing at the time was quite small.
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| In 1927 Shuntian Times in Beijing held the first public poll for China's best dan players. |
Residents of the area and traveling businessmen living in dingy hotels there were Peking Opera's principal audiences.
In the 1920s and 1930s, Peking Opera was a fashionable and important entertainment. Compared with other forms of ente
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| National Opera Pictorial launched in 1932 carries treatises on Peking Opera and performers' articles. | rtainment, it held absolute dominance. Liu Zengfu is a Peking Opera specialist as well as a renowned physiologist. He recalls that when he attended Tsinghua University , the first thing he did when Sunday came was to get over his
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| The paper-cuts are images of Peking Opera characters. | ¡°opera addiction¡± by watching a Peking Opera at one of the theaters. Once his German teacher, a foreigner, cancelled the German lesson for the following Monday, saying he had to attend a friend's wedding on Sunday evening in the city. But when Liu sat in a theater for a Peking Opera performance on Sunday evening, he saw his German teacher sitting right in front of him. Teacher and student exchanged knowing smiles.
In early 1938 Yang Xiaolou, a master Peking Opera actor, died at the age of 61. Almost all famous Peking Opera performers attended his funeral
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| The paper-cuts are images of Peking Opera characters. | . His fans and audiences all turned out to say good-bye to their beloved actor. The tact that an actor's death caused such a sensation in the city was quite unprecedented in the history of Peking Opera.
The birth and development of Peking Opera needed to have a proper environment. And old Beijing provided just such an environment. The Yanshou Temple Street south of present-day Hepingmen reflects the life of old Beijing. It is a largely deserted small
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| Brick carving with opera figures on the wall of an opera buiding. | street today. But in the 1930s and 1940s, the street, which was about 250 meters long, was flanked by more than 100 shops, of which seven sold condiments, six food grains, six breakfast, six pork, four mutton and four general merchandise. In addition, there were shops for noodles, cakes, dried and fresh fruits, soy sauce, sesame oil£¬ bean curd£¬vermicelli£¬ paper, tea, cloth, cotton and shoes as well as restaurants, teahouses, tailor shops, pharmacies, public baths, barber shops, galvanized iron shops and electrical materials shops. Workshops followed traditions in the trade they plied and the way of conducting transactions. Many people in opera circles lived near the Yanshou Temple Street since childhood.
Today, the street is still there. But gone are the shops and the ambience of business and cultural activities. Life scenes seen in the heyday of Peking Opera have disappeared from the surroundings of today's residents. |
