We already know that with the rise of Shanghai, the city developed a dramatically prosperous market for theatre. There was only one theatre, the Kun opera playhouse Sanyayuan, (founded in 1842) in Shanghai before the Taiping Rebellion.64 The war forced more than 100 Kun opera performers (and far more patrons) to Shanghai, and by the 1870s, there were more than thirty theatres in the foreign settlements.65 From that time, continuing throughout the early 20th century, Shanghai saw the rise and fall of over a hundred theatres.66 Both theatres and performance genres increased rapidly. Regional
and local operas performed in dialects and local traditions gathered in Shanghai. By 1885 Shanghai had attracted most of the mature genres of Jiangnan as well as those of other regions, such as Hui opera, Beijing opera, Guangdong opera, Tanhuang opera (Jiangsu), the Mao’er theatre, the village flower drum and the like.67 The city gathered a great variety of theatres, becoming the center of performing culture by the turn of the 20th
century.
64 He Ma and Zheng Yimei, Shanghai jiuhua (Shanghai: Shanghai wenhua chubanshe, 1956), pp.
2-3.
65 Huang Maocai, “You Hu cuoji (1898)”, reprinted in Shanghai tongshe ed., Shanghai yanjiu ziliao (Taipei: Zhongguo chubanse, 1984), p. 559.
66 Xue Liyong, Xianhua Shanghai (Shanghai: Shanghai shudian chubanshe, 1996), p. 119. 67 A list of regional genres in Shanghai can be found in Zhongguo xiquzhi bianweihui, Zhongguo xiquzhi: Jiangsu juan (Beijing: Wenhua yishu, 1992), pp. 157-65, pp. 124-28.
The spirit of urban recreation, however, was not limited to professional theatres. Streets provided one of the best public stages for popular entertainers. Unlike
professional theatres that attracted customers seeking certain performances, street performers were able to turn any passerby into their audience, and people did not necessarily have to pay for viewing. William Rowe has identified a great variety of popular entertainers, performing in open-air marketplaces or in wine shops and teahouses of early modern Hankou, including street singers, female impersonators, actors, verse- chanters, storytellers, public lecturers, and clap musicians.68 Similar types of urban recreation could be found in other cities, including Shanghai.
Like Hankou, Shanghai had its street singers. Listening to blind singers’
performance was characterized as one of the Ten Really Jolly and Funny Things. Here we have a female blind singer, who is invited to perform in a private household or perhaps inside a commercial place like a teahouse or restaurant, according to the interior setting. She is playing erhu二胡, a two-stringed spike fiddle while singing. A blind man beside her is clapping out the rhythm as accompaniment. A male spectator, perhaps the master of the house or a consumer of the commercial house, stands before them with one of his hands putting up, indicating his immersion in the performance.
Street entertainers depicted in nianhua are mostly acrobats and magicians.
Acrobatic performance in one of Songshan Daoren’s designs (figure 3.16) depicts a team of acrobats including a woman and a child who are performing on a table, along with a male musician. The female acrobat displays the balance skill, lying on a table with her feet stretching up to hold the child who is standing on his head. The musician is
68 William T. Rowe, Hankow:Conflict and Community in a Chinese City, 1796-1895 (Stanford,
somewhat clownishly depicted beating a gong, and nearby can be seen sword, trident, nunchakus and an erect ladder. A male spectator of apparently good social standing throws money toward the acrobats. The caption alludes to the Jin dynasty’s Tao Kan 陶
侃, once governor of Guangzhou, who had moved bricks outside the house in the morning and inside the house in the evening, meaning to temper oneself–that is to say– the acrobats had to train hard in order to profit from their performance. In Suzhou, acrobatic performance had been closely associated with New Year celebration as recorded in the miscellaneous writing by Gu Lu, and tightrope walking had been a common motif in the old Gusu prints. Contemporary commercial artist Wu Youru also designed a nianhua titled Acrobatic Performance at the Yu Garden, in which the tightrope walkers, martial artists, somersaults, musicians and crowds of spectators were depicted at the center.
Figure 3.16 Songshan Daoren, Acrobats, 1895, Woodblock print, 32 x 28 cm. Shanghai Library. After Feng Jicai, Zhongguo muban nianhua jicheng: Taohuawu juan (Beijing:
Zhonghua shuju, 2011): 249.
In addition to the commonly seen acrobatic performances such as tightrope walking and Kung-fu demonstrations, Songshan Daoren also recorded a magician (figure 3.17). He has a pole in his mouth; toward the other end of the pole there are three prongs above which a miniature stool-like device is situated. The bowl is tied to a stick or string that has the other end attached to the little stool. As the caption indicates, the performer is able to let the bowl rotate by itself. The performance is so fascinating that a certain old man Wang and a “Cantonese woman” with (stereotypically?) large or natural feet, are captivated by the performance with no intention to leave.
Figure 3.17 Songshan Daoren, Magician, 1894-95, woodblock print, Shanghai Library.
After Shanghai tushuguan, Qingmo nianhua huicui: Shanghai tushuguan guancang
jingxuan (Beijing: Renmin meishu chubanshe, 2000): 2: 111.
Opera performers and acrobats who performed in public spaces took the street as their stage. Peddlers and artisans, too, contributed sounds, calls and “noises” to the street markets. Some of those itinerant “merchants” actually sang a song or musical phrase, with or without a musical instrument. These sounds and performances transformed Shanghai streets into a lively stage, where daily performance of the street people, as well as periodic formal performances of religious and political significance, notably the
recitation of morality books and perhaps the preaching of “Sacred Edict” (shengyu聖
諭),69 took place, blurring the boundaries of everyday life and performance.
It is not clear exactly when the tradition of peddling through sounds and calls
started in China. Meng Yuanlao夢元老 (fl. 1110-1160) of the Song dynasty made the
earliest reference to peddling in his Record of a Dream of Splendor in Eastern Capital
(Dongjing menghua lu東京夢華錄, 12th century). Current scholarly literature has approached the subjects of peddlers and their calls from the folklorist perspective, maintaining that the nature and use of instruments had pre-modern sources, and that the calls of the city were parts of the folk culture.70
Basically, there were three types of peddling, depending on how they made their sounds. The first type relied only on the peddlers’ voice, another type used only musical instrument, and still another used both voice and instrument, although there did exist a “silent” group, such as the above-mentioned candy peddler (Figure 3.4) who claims (in the caption) that he does not have to say a word for “peddling” as the customers would come automatically, playing the moving candy-picker which is set in the middle of basket, where candies are placed. A male customer is flicking the picker, which would spin and
69 The growth of recitation of morality books around the mid-19th century is associated with the
influence of professional baojuan performances and recitation of the Sacred Edict promoted by the Imperial government. In the late 19th and early 20th century, publishers in larger urban areas published
several types of morality books for recitation, and notably some of them were printed in lithography by Shanghai publishers. According to Christopher Reed, Dianshizhai studio’s first publication was Shenyu xiangjie (Sacred Edict Explained in Detail). See You Zi’an, “Cong xuanjiang shengyu dao shuo shanshu: jindai xuanjiang fangshi zhi chuancheng,” Wenhua yichan, no.2 (2008): 49-58; Reed 2004, p. 110; Philip Clart, Religious Publishing and Print Culture in Modern China, 1800-2012 (Boston: De Gruyter, 2015), p. 166.
70 Qu Yanbin, Zhongguo zhaohuang yu zhaolai shisheng (Shenyang: Liaoning renmin chubanshe,
2000). Peddlers are particularly prominent in books about “old Beijing”, just a few examples, Bai Tiezheng,
Lao Beiping de gugudian’er (Taipei: Huilong chubanshe, 1977); Fu Gongyue, Beijing jiu ying (Beijing: Renmin meishu chubanshe, 1989); Zhengyangmen guanli chu, Jiujing shi zhao (Beijing: Beijing chubanshe, 1996).
the customer could get the prize located where the picker stops. A photograph of perhaps the 20th century records the same trade run by an old woman with a child, probably her
grandson, in a Shanghai street.71
Nianhua artists not only depicted the way peddlers made their calls, but also recorded some of their cries. A means of advertising, those calls and songs were believed to have a harmonious link with the goods on sale.72 In his discussion of Chinese martial arts novels, Paize Keulemans argues that sound played a key role in late 19th century martial arts novels. By incorporating and sometimes inventing the storytellers’ sounds, these novels turned the silent printed texts into a lively simulacrum of festival atmosphere, contributing to the construction of communal identity based on a shared reading
experiences that evokes imagination of oral performances, thus the making of modern reading subject.73
By the same token, nianhua prints that include or imitate the cries of the peddlers transformed the voiceless visual materials, as well as the act of viewing into the
communal sharing of the street theatre. The chestnut peddler sang, “Chestnuts are roasted with sugar, they taste sweet and savory. A portion costs only 14 wen; be cautious,
eyebrows will fall (tuo meimao脫眉毛) after eating.” Here the “tuo meimao” was a local expression to describe the deliciousness of food, as well as a humorous communication between the peddler and his customers. Use of local dialects also shows nianhua of the type helped define the readership sharing the same language. As with any commercial
71 For a reproduction of the photograph see Lu 1999, p. 216. 72 Bai 1997, p. 79.
73 Paize Keulemans, Sound Rising from the Paper: Nineteenth-century Martial Arts Fiction and the Chinese Acoustic Imagination (Cambridge, London: Harvard University Press, 2014).
practice, peddlers’ advertising calls were not mere description of actual goods. They used pleasant and exaggerated words to promote their goods – the chestnut peddlers’ song suggests that his chestnuts are so delicious that the eaters would lose their eyebrows. Others added rhymes to their calls, as Samuel Victor Constant observed in 1937, “some call out their wares in a musical voice or song calculated to please the hearer.”74 Unlike Keulemans’ subjects of fiction, nianhua prints of the street theatre enlivened the lived everyday experiences of the urban community.
Together, the “petty traders” including peddlers, artisans and laborers, and professional street performers took the street as the stage to display their arts, crafts and goods. Even the “ugly poor,” the pickpockets for example, were “performing” their tricks on the street stage for the city people and nianhua viewers.