Staging Heavenly Peace: Taiping qian in the Manchu Court

• In Event: Signifiers in Motion: The Transmutation of Chinese Texts in Early Modern East Asia

Abstract

The southern drama Taiping qian (Coins of Heavenly Peace), attributed to the Suzhou playwright Li Yu, is not an obvious pick for performance in the imperial court. In the final scenes of the play, the lead character—a powerful immortal—frustrates the emperor’s desire for a magic show, instead leaving the world of men for a fairyland. Despite the failed court performance at its center, Taiping qian traveled from the marketplaces of Jiangnan to the imperial capital of Beijing, where it was rewritten for Qianlong’s court. This paper will examine the ways in which this palace edition negotiates the crises of authority both within the play and without by transforming a performance of defiance into a performance of submission that restores the emperor’s dominion over on- and off-stage realms. By making the unseen seen and the unexpected expected, by resignifying the loaded politics of reclusion and withdrawal, and by remapping the circulation of money and power, the play is rendered suitable for both the emperor-spectator and the new socio-political order. At the same time, in its depiction of an emperor’s difficult and imperfect incorporation of the frontier (both western and supernatural) into the imperium, the palace edition gives voice to the particular ambitions and anxieties of the expansionist Manchu court. While much of the work on Qing palace drama has focused on the new spectacles written specifically for the imperial court, this paper brings attention to the process whereby popular late Ming cultural forms were reconstituted in the Qing political imaginary.

Author

• Ariel Fox, University of Chicago