Introduction

        This is an example of a Suzhou  tanci chantefable script.  Though stories were handed down orally from master to disciple, over the at least the last one hundred years, writing has played an increasing role in how pingtan stories are handed down, adapted, and performed.  Today, most tanci storytellers work from some sort of a written script, though in the act of performance innovate and adapt the story for the needs of the moment. After the storytellers were organized into troupes in the 1950s, large numbers of older stories and were revised and many new ones written.  The example below is based on the famous drama, West Wing (Xi xiang ji), which was in turn based on an earlier prosimetric storytelling form.  Several versions of the story have been performed by Suzhou tanci storytellers since the late 19^th century, including ones by Huang Yi’an and the duo, Yang Zhenxiong and Yang Zhenyan. 

       The excerpt is an example of a duanpian, or “short-form” story, in that it can be told in only one storytelling session.  The scene, greatly elaborated in this storyteller’s version, is one of the most famous from the West Wing story, and concerns the growing feelings of the young lady Ying-ying for the scholar, Zhang Sheng.  She plays a refined stringed instrument similar to the Japanese koto or the Korean kamungo, called a qin, or “lute.” The minor characters Hong Niang (Red Maid) and Fa Chong add a comic dimension to the emotional scenes. This version was written as a performance script in a mixture of standard Chinese and Suzhou dialect characters.  It was published in the early 1960s and in a series of selections from  pingtan stories entitled  Pingtan Storytelling Series (Pingtan congkan).  It was translated in 1982 (unpublished until now) at Guangxi University by Mark Bender and Sun Jingyao, with helpful comments by John Deeney and Wang Jiaxian.

go to the story of:  Ying-ying Plays the Qin