Guan Hanqing China’s own Shakespeare
3 min readGuan Hanqing is widely regarded as one of the greatestplaywrights in Chinese history and is known as China’s Shakespeare.
Little of Guan’s family background is known except that he was born and lived in Dadu（today’s Beijing），capital of the Yuan Dynasty（1271-1368），founded by the Mongol leader Kublai Khan.
Although the new rulers had adopted many customs from the earlier Chinese dynasties ruled by the Han people，they suspended the imperial civil service examinations for as long as 80 years.The imperial examination was based on the Con-fucian concept that”the pursuit of knowledge is superior to all other walks of life”and was first introduced in 605 AD during the Sui Dynasty as a means for the imperial rulers to select administrative officials. It was widely deemed by intellectuals then as the only path that would lead them to social status, wealth and fame.
So, during Guan’s time, intellectuals were ranked at the same level as beggars and prostitutes.
Guan as a scholar saw no future in pursuing a career in the officialdom, so he spent a lot of his time at low-class venues. At one time, he worked as a doctor in the imperial hospital. But he was not interested in medicine; instead he was very enthusiastic about play writing.
He wrote about 65 plays in his lifetime and most of them are about the lives, passions and suffering of the ordinary peo-ple. All his plays were written in the vernacular Chinese at that time. Today,18 of his plays are extant and some are still per-formed.
According to rare and sketchy records, Guan was a witty, knowledgeable and humorous person and a versatile artist.
He was deeply versed in poetry, music, dancing, chess and hunting. He called himself”the leader of all hobos in the world”and described himself as”a copper bean that can neverbe crushed.”And his plays were popular with people from all walks of life.
The”Injustice to Dou’e”is one of the most popular plays of Guan. The story goes like this: Dou’e was sold by her father,a poor scholar, to a familyas a child bride when she was young. Her father used the proceeds to pay for travel to the capital to sit the imperial civil service examinations.
Dou’e’s husband died two years after their formal mar-riage and the young widow had to live with her mother-in-law.
By that time,a rascal called Mule Zhang and his father appeared. The rascal wanted to marry the young widow, butshe refused. The peeved rascal planned to poison Dou’e’s mother-in-law and then force the widow to marry him. How-ever, during the process, the rascal accidently poisoned his own father to death.
Mule Zhang was so angry that he accused the young widow of murdering his father and Dou’e was later wrongly convicted of the crime. Before her execution, Dou’e swore that three abnormal things would happen to prove her innocence: First, blood would rain down from the sky; second, it would snow in mid-summer(June); and third, the place whereshe was executed would be plagued by a three-year severe drought.
All of the three abnormal phenomena occurred after Dou’e was executed.
Later, she appeared in her father’s dream to tell her story.
Her father, who was then already a middle-ranking govern-ment official, eventually brought the corrupt court official and Mule Zhang to justice and had his daughter vindicated.
Even today, the phrase”snowing in June”is widely used as a synonym for miscarriage of justice.
