LEGENDS ON STAGE
Peking Opera's Famous Stories: Farewell My Concubine
From a doomed general's final night to the Monkey King's rampage, these are the stories and performers most likely to turn up on a Beijing opera programme.
See Liyuan Theatre tickets on GetYourGuide ↗Farewell My Concubine: loyalty at the end of an empire
Among Peking Opera's most enduring pieces is Farewell My Concubine, drawn from the historical struggle between rival warlords Xiang Yu and Liu Bang at the end of the Qin dynasty and the founding of the Han, over two thousand years ago. The opera centres on Xiang Yu's final night before a decisive defeat, and his consort Yu's choice to take her own life rather than become a burden to him as his army collapses — a piece built almost entirely around loyalty, love and tragedy rather than spectacle. Its combination of a powerful jing or laosheng lead, a demanding dan role, and a famous sword-dance sequence has kept it a staple of the repertoire, and its title later lent itself to an internationally known 1993 film loosely inspired by the opera and its performers.
Havoc in Heaven: the Monkey King runs riot
Drawn from the classic novel Journey to the West, Havoc in Heaven — sometimes translated as Uproar in Heaven — dramatises the mischievous immortal Sun Wukong, the Monkey King, rebelling against the celestial bureaucracy after being denied the respect he believes he's owed. It's one of Peking Opera's showcase pieces for wusheng-trained performers specialising in the demanding "monkey opera" style, combining rapid acrobatics, martial choreography and broad physical comedy in a way few other pieces attempt at once. Because it's colourful, fast-paced and largely legible without deep familiarity with Chinese history, excerpts from Havoc in Heaven are a common choice on visitor-oriented programmes looking for an accessible, high-energy piece alongside quieter, more dialogue-driven works.
Mei Lanfang: the performer who took Peking Opera abroad
No individual performer is more closely associated with Peking Opera's international reputation than Mei Lanfang, the twentieth century's most celebrated dan performer, renowned for his refinement of female-role technique across qingyi, huadan and other dan subtypes. Beyond his standing at home, Mei Lanfang toured internationally in the late 1920s and 1930s, performing in Japan, the United States and the Soviet Union, and is widely credited with introducing Peking Opera's aesthetics to Western audiences and artists for the first time. His influence on how dan roles are trained and performed persists in the art form today, and his name remains the standard reference point whenever the female-role tradition in Peking Opera comes up.
Where the repertoire's stories come from
Much of Peking Opera's classic repertoire draws on a relatively small pool of shared sources familiar across Chinese storytelling: historical chronicles of the Three Kingdoms and Han-Chu conflict, the folk-hero bandits of Water Margin, the supernatural journey of Journey to the West, and various court romances and legends passed down through earlier opera traditions. Because these source stories were already widely known to Chinese audiences, playwrights and performers could focus less on exposition and more on the performance itself — the singing, the combat, the emotional high points — safe in the knowledge that audiences already understood who the characters were and roughly how their stories ended, much like Western audiences bring prior knowledge to a familiar myth or fairy tale.
What actually shows up on a Beijing stage
Few Beijing venues stage a single full-length opera in one sitting; instead, an evening typically bundles together a handful of shorter, self-contained excerpts, often chosen specifically to show off different role types and skills across the programme. That means a visitor might see a dramatic scene from Farewell My Concubine, a comic or acrobatic excerpt from a Monkey King piece, and a painted-face jing showcase, all inside one evening rather than committing to one lengthy narrative. It's a practical format as much as an artistic one — condensed excerpts travel well for visitor-oriented programming, and knowing the outline of a few famous stories in advance makes it considerably easier to follow what's happening on stage, even with English subtitles running alongside.