How Beijing opera eclipsed Kun opera in Chinese sociocultural and sociopolitical contexts.

摘要

Kun opera, or kunqu, is a form of Chinese musical-theatrical tradition, or xiqu, rising to a dominant social position around the mid-sixteenth century when the Ming dynasty reached its cultural and political pinnacle. The Ming imperial rulers were then defeated by the Manchu, who established the Qing dynasty. As an ethnic minority, the Manchu willingly upheld China's cultural traditions to triumph their domination; hence, kunqu managed to survive the Manchu rule into the nineteenth century.;However, sociocultural and sociopolitical chaos in the mid-nineteenth century fatally challenged the Manchu rule, destroying kunqu's patronages, yet around the same time a new musical-theatrical tradition evolved in Beijing, and gradually-eclipsed kunqu's national dominance, as it was favored first by the common people and later by the Qing court. This new xiqu genre is known as jingju or Beijing opera, and its rising popularity represented an aesthetic and symbolic shift in the traditional Chinese culture.;Using archival-historical researches and text analyses, this research aims to examine this cultural shift, while considering how the historical political struggling and cultural intermingling between the Manchu and the Han had resulted in the rapid spreading of a new art, and how cultural identity- and political relativism could be attained through the necessary institutive use of a shared aesthetic and symbolic system. Hence, the research question is: How did Beijing opera eclipse Kun opera in China against socioculturally and sociopolitically charged contexts?