Peking Opera (Jingju)

Peking opera took shape in mid-nineteenth-century Beijing. After the "Four Great Anhui Troupes" came to the capital in 1790 to mark the Qianlong Emperor's birthday, Anhui tunes fused over decades with Han, Kunqu and other regional styles, settling into a distinct form around 1840–1860 — and, rooted in Beijing yet popular nationwide, came to be honored as China's "national opera."

Performance turns on the "four skills" of song, speech, acting and combat and the "five methods" of hand, eye, body, technique and step, with roles divided into sheng, dan, jing and chou. The singing rests on the xipi and erhuang modes, accompanied by the jinghu fiddle and percussion; painted faces signal character by color, and stylized movement and an abstract treatment of time and space let a single table and two chairs conjure entire armies.

The summation of Chinese opera, Peking opera was inscribed on UNESCO's Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2010. Masters such as Mei Lanfang and Cheng Yanqiu carried it to world stages, and it remains the foremost emblem of Chinese stage art — and of how the world pictures traditional Chinese theater.

In Beijing, dedicated theaters such as the Chang'an Grand Theatre and the Mei Lanfang Grand Theatre stage Peking opera year-round; at Qing-era opera houses like the Huguang Guild Hall and Zhengyici, you can watch it in the original wooden-stage setting for which the music was made.