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Any traditional theatre has to engage the changing world to avoid becoming a living fossil. How has Beijing opera—a highly stylized theatre with breath-taking acrobatics and martial arts, fabulous costumes and striking makeup—survived into the new millennium while coping with a century of great upheavals and competition from new entertainment forms? Li Ruru's The Soul of Beijing Opera answers that question, looking at the evolution of singing and performance styles, make-up and costume, audience demands, as well as stage and street presentation modes amid tumultuous social and political changes. Li's study follows a number of major artists'careers in mainland China and Taiwan, drawing on extensive primary print sources as well as personal interviews with performers and their cultural peers. One chapter focuses on the illustrious career of Li's own mother and how she adapted to changes in Communist ideology. In addition, she explores how performers as social beings have responded to conflicts between tradition and modernity, and between convention and innovation. Through performers'negotiation and compromises, Beijing opera has undergone constant re-examination of its inner artistic logic and adjusted to the demands of the external world.

This book explores the life and work of Ruan Yuan (1764–1849), a scholar-official of renown in mid-Qing China prior to the Opium War, before traditional institutions and values became altered by incursions from the West. His distinction as an official, scholar, and patron of learning has been recognized by both his contemporaries and modern scholars. He was also exulted as an honest official and an exemplary man of the ‘Confucian persuasion'. His name is mentioned in almost all the works on Qing history or Chinese classics because of the wide range of his research and publications. A number of these publications are still being reprinted today. This is the first full-length biography of Ruan Yuan in English, and the only one focusing on all aspects of the man's life and work in the context of his time. It follows Ruan Yuan from his childhood in Yangzhou, expansion of his intellectual horizons and political network in Beijing, his long service in the provinces handling some of the most thorny issues of the day in security and control, to the glory as a senior statesman in the capital, and retirement in Yangzhou.