Recorded 12 April 2010

Translated and annotated by Kim Hunter Gordon

Lecturer

Yue Meiti 岳美緹 (b. 1941) is a female sheng 生 of the Shanghai Troupe. A 1987 winner of the Plum Blossom Prize (Meihua jiang 梅花獎), she specializes in jinsheng 巾生 roles. Her autobiography, A Jinsheng in Today's World: Fifty Years of Yue Meiti's Life in Kunqu (Jinsheng jinshi: Yue Meiti kunqu wushinian 巾生今世: 岳美緹崑曲五十年), was published in 2008 (see also Yue Meiti 1994).

Synopsis

To Win a Peerless Beauty (Zhan huakui 占花魁), also translated as Winning the Prize Courtesan, is the work of the Suzhou playwright Li Yu (I) 李玉 [Appendix G]. The story concerns a penniless oil peddler, Qin Zhong 秦鍾—actually the son of a general captured during the fall of the Northern Song—and the high-class courtesan he admires from afar. The convoluted plot, adapted from a vernacular short story in the 1627 collection Stories to Awaken the World (Xingshi heng yan 醒世恒言) by Feng Menglong 馮夢龍 [Appendix G], ends happily with the marriage of Qin Zhong (who has been returned to his original status after his father is liberated) and the courtesan (who as it emerges is the niece of a palace eunuch). For an English synopsis and a discussion of the divergences between Feng's story and Li's drama, see Ariel Fox (2015, 73–76).

The fourteenth scene, “The Inn on the Lake” (“Hu lou” 湖樓), is one of the few scenes from Li Yu plays that remains in the traditional performance repertoire. It is in this scene that Qin Zhong first learns of the identity of a courtesan whose beauty has twice struck him as he noticed her on the shores of the West Lake. Having stopped work in order to search for her, Qin enters a tavern by the lakeshore, hoping that he can find out more.

Role Types

As Yue discusses, Qin Zhong is poor but of high birth, and is therefore played as something between a qiongsheng 窮生 and a jinsheng. Shi A-da 時阿大 is a comical chou 丑 of a gossiping but good-hearted variety.