The (Male) Divas of Beijing: Trade Networks, Professional Ties, and the Road to Stardom in 18th-Century China

Theater in eighteenth-century Beijing was both a demanding art, and a business—an evolving service trade often staffed by migrants from other parts of the extensive Qing empire. This paper uses one such group of sojourners to examine the sometimes surprising links by which the imperial capital was culturally and economically intertwined with its hinterlands. In 1780, the reigning queen of the public theaters of Beijing was a thirty-six-year-old man from a village in distant Sichuan province: Wei Changsheng, trained since childhood to perform women's roles in a northwestern style of Chinese opera called qinqiang. Arriving in 1779, he soon set the stages of the city afire with his innovative (and provocative) portrayals of young coquettes and brave martial heroines, drawing unprecedented crowds and inspiring countless imitators. In his wake, a wave of young qinqiang performers from Sichuan swept to fame and riches. What artistic and professional strategies and broader cultural trends carried these performers from a comparatively remote region to the top of the new world of public, commercial theaters? And conversely, why by the early 1800s were connoisseurs already writing about the "actors from Shu [Sichuan]" as a nostalgic memory—why was their collective success so short-lived compared to later groups of emigrant performers? This paper looks beyond the standard histories of traditional art forms to place the Sichuanese actors and their rise (and fall) in conversation with studies on economic geography and professional and social networks. The actors’ experiences in this period of increasing geographic mobility and economic growth reveal much about the ripple effects of transregional trade networks, and about the strategies by which sojourning workers survived, thrived, and shaped the larger patterns within which they moved.