Yue Opera: How an All-Women Theater Became China's Second Opera

Peking Opera is the emperor of Chinese theater: martial, percussive, painted in primary colors. Its greatest rival is almost its perfect opposite. Yue Opera, born in the villages of Zhejiang province, is soft-spoken and heartbroken, all silk sleeves, watercolor scenery and doomed lovers, and for most of its golden age, every role on stage, including the ardent young men, was played by a woman. Today it ranks by common consensus as China's second-largest opera form, and its signature work, the Butterfly Lovers, has been called China's Romeo and Juliet by every foreign journalist who has ever seen it, because no better comparison exists.

From Rice-Field Ballads to the Stage

Yue Opera is young by Chinese operatic standards, and its birth can be dated with unusual precision. In the countryside of Shengxian, today's Shengzhou near Shaoxing, farmers sang a narrative ballad style called luodi changshu, story-singing fallen to earth. In the spring of 1906, by the standard account preserved in local records, a group of these singers in Dongwang village stacked rice-drying boards across grain vats to make a stage and acted out a story instead of merely singing it. The improvised platform is remembered as the form's founding moment, and Shengzhou celebrates centennial anniversaries from that date.

The early troupes were all male, performing a rough folk theater accompanied by little more than drum and clapper, nicknamed didu ban after the sound. They soon followed migrant workers to Shanghai, the entertainment capital of Asia, where the form absorbed orchestration, staged scenery and influences from Kunqu's refinement and the spoken drama's realism.

The Women Take Over

The transformation that defined Yue Opera began in 1923, when the first training class for girls opened in Shengxian. Female troupes proved a sensation in Shanghai's theaters, whose audiences, notably including the city's growing population of working and middle-class women, preferred the sweetness of female voices in the form's lyrical registers. By the late 1930s all-female companies had effectively replaced the men, and the convention hardened into identity: women played the scholars, the generals and the lovers, a mirror image of the all-male stages of older opera.

The 1940s brought the reformers, above all Yuan Xuefen, who introduced scripted rehearsals, directors, stage lighting and new plays with social conscience, including a celebrated 1946 adaptation of Lu Xun's story Sister Xianglin. In 1947, ten leading actresses, remembered as the Ten Sisters of Yue Opera, staged a joint benefit performance in Shanghai to fund an independent theater, defying the guild bosses who controlled the stages, an episode still retold as the form's declaration of artistic independence.

Yue Opera was reformed on the principle that theater should move with the times. — attributed to Yuan Xuefen, reformer and leading performer

Butterflies, Dreams and Jade Hairpins

The repertoire leans romantic and literary, and four works tower over it:

• The Butterfly Lovers, Liang Shanbo and Zhu Yingtai: a girl disguises herself as a boy to study, her classmate loves her too late, and the lovers are united only as butterflies over a grave. The 1953 film version, starring Yuan Xuefen and Fan Ruijuan, was among New China's first color films and reportedly charmed audiences at the Geneva Conference in 1954, where Zhou Enlai screened it for foreign guests.
• A Dream of Red Mansions, the 1962 film of which, starring Xu Yulan and Wang Wenjuan, became one of the most-watched Chinese films of its era upon re-release.
• The Jade Hairpin and Emperor's Female Son-in-Law family of scholar-beauty classics, showcases for the form's dozen-plus recognized vocal schools, each founded by a named actress and inherited by designated students.

Musically, Yue Opera flows rather than crashes: the accompaniment centers on the erhu family rather than clanging gongs, the dialect is the soft Wu speech of Zhejiang polished for the stage, and the singing favors long, sighing lines built for grief and courtship. Costuming took inspiration from ink-wash paintings, preferring pastel gauzes to Peking Opera's saturated brocades.

National Treasure, Modern Test

Yue Opera was inscribed on China's first national intangible cultural heritage list in 2006, with Shengzhou and Shanghai sharing custodianship. Like all traditional theater it battles gray-haired audiences and short-video attention spans, but it has produced the rare heritage success story of recent years: in 2023, a chamber production of New Dragon Gate Inn in Hangzhou, starring Chen Lijun in a dashing male role, went explosively viral online, selling out months of performances and pulling crowds of young women to Zhejiang, a phenomenon covered with some astonishment by national media. Female tourists now queue for tickets the way their great-grandmothers once did in 1940s Shanghai, suggesting the form's original chemistry, women performing romance for women, has lost none of its voltage.

A century after farmers balanced boards across grain vats, Yue Opera remains what it became in Shanghai: proof that in Chinese theater, a whisper can carry further than a war drum.

Sources: China Daily, Xinhua News Agency, China's National Intangible Cultural Heritage List (2006), Shengzhou municipal opera archives, Shanghai Yue Opera House records.