A half-hour drive from the center of Taipei brings you to the suburb of Neihu, where, nestled beside lushly verdant hills facing a small lake, you find the campus of one of the world's most unusual schools: the National Fu Hsing Dramatic Arts Academy. Here, in modern buildings and spacious parklike grounds, some three hundred girls and boys train to carry on the centuries-old tradition of a unique art form: Chinese opera.
As with Western drama, the origins of Chinese theater can be traced back to religious ceremonies, which developed in prehistory. Although historical records are limited, it has been fairly well established nonetheless that as far back as the Chou dynasty (1122 B.C.) religious festivals were held where priests and soothsayers chanted and mimed as they presented stylized short plays for the faithful. On these occasions, dancers, acrobats, and jugglers performed as well.
Drama proper really began to develop during the Tang dynasty (A.D. 618-907), when the famous Emperor Ming Huang (A.D. 713-755) founded a school of dramatic art known as the Pear Garden to train actors and singers to perform at court. The greatest development in Chinese drama and opera came, however, with the Mongol invasions from the north and the Yuan dynasty in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. This northern infusion brought energy and a warlike vigor along with wild, shrill music performed on stringed instruments, which enhanced the more sophisticated existing tradition.
In 1790, on the eve of the modern age, the best of regional theater companies from all over China converged in Beijing to celebrate the eightieth birthday of the Emperor Chi'en-lung. After the festivities ended, many companies chose to stay on in the capital. They learned from each other, absorbing into their repertoire plays and techniques whose origins went back to before Confucius. The resulting form, a culmination of a continuous development, has justly been termed "one of the oldest, most rarefied operatic traditions in the world." This form was called Ching hsi--"Ching" meaning capital and "hsi" meaning play. Ching hsi is what is known today in the West as Beijing opera, a lively, colorful, utterly unique art form performed by intensely disciplined skilled artists. This is the theater that influenced the giants of modern drama in the West: Stanislavaky, Gordon Craig, Bertolt Brecht.
An actor or actress in Chinese opera must be trained from early childhood, for the demands of the profession are greater than perhaps that of any other theatrical activity in the world. He or she must be able to sing like Pavarotti, dance like Baryshnikov, mime like Marceau, do acrobatics like Mary Lou Retton, and act like Olivier.
At the beginning of the century, before the establishment of acting schools in China, young would-be actors were subjected to unusually harsh conditions during training. Seven-year-old children would be contracted to an actor by their often poor parents. During the next seven years the child would live in the actor's home, where he was frequently treated as a servant as much as a student, and was often cruelly beaten for the least infraction. Once the young student-actor was sufficiently trained, he would turn over all the money he earned performing in theaters and at private parties to his tutor. This kind of situation was usually exploited to the fullest, with the terms of the contract often being prolonged for
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