Chinese film has a natural link with Peking Opera. Dingjun Mountain (1905), the first Chinese produced film, was in fact the recording of selected arias from the Peking Opera of the same name. In the following decades, more such films were made and finally formed a branch called xiqupian, motion-picture adaptations of a traditional or local opera.

Beginning in the mid-Qing Dynasty, the Anhui and Hubei melodies composed mainly of the xipi and erhuang tones found their way to Beijing and their fusion resulted in the birth of the pihuang opera, or Peking Opera. In the past 200-odd years, a galaxy of Peking Opera talents have emerged, among who was the master Mei Lanfang (1894-1961).

Born into an artist's family, Mei learned Peking Opera at the age of eight. Guided by his teacher Wu Lingxian, he started to perform on the stage at 10 and soon became one of the four famous actors who played female roles. In 1920, Mei was invited by the cinema department of The Commercial Press to make the films Maid Chunxiang Disturbs Class and The Goddess of Heaven Scatters Flowers, both Mei's representative pieces.

It is no easy job to put a Peking Opera into film since the two are quite different art forms. In film-making, the scenes and props must be true to real life. However, in Peking Opera performances, all the stage scenes and props are symbolic or suppositional. For example, a blank stage curtain can be imagined as a vast sky or a small courtyard. A whip symbolizes a horse and an oar stands for a boat.

As a pioneering artist, Mei bravely accepted the challenge. In shooting Maid Chunxiang Disturbs Class, Mei used quite a few facial close-ups to portray Chunxiang, a pretty, naughty girl who helps her female master to chase a gifted scholar. In the original script, the plot of Chunxiang playing in the garden is not acted out on stage but explained through dialogues. In the film however, Mei chose a real garden as the set, in which the maid plays on the swing and runs after butterflies in the flowering shrubs. Such vivid detail gave the film more life.

In January 1930 when Mei visited the United States, Paramount Pictures invited him to shoot the film Tiger Hunting, which was the first sound motion picture starring a Chinese actor and thus created a sensation in US film circles.

(China Daily 03/17/2006 page6)