Chinese opera is often described as actor centered, fueled perhaps by the star system that developed with the rise of Beijing Opera or jingju. Performance virtuosity within the tradition lay (and still lies) in the subtle negotiation between mastery of convention and actor innovation. Tracing this distance between customary practice and creative agency lies at the heart of Alexandra B. Bonds's study of the costumes of Beijing Opera in contemporary use. She shows that costume design for jingju has involved star actors and backstage professionals, such as dressers and wardrobe personnel, steeped in the tradition. Throw into that mix the garments that troupes have in stock and the modern introduction of design consultants and company managers, and that is the process of creating a visual aesthetic for the Chinese opera stage.

Bonds, a theater costume designer, brings an expert's eye for fabrics to her exposition of the visual semiotics of Beijing Opera costumes. Drawing on the English-language literature on Chinese opera, translations of contemporary Chinese studies, interviews with designers, dressers, and wardrobe assistants in Beijing, and the viewing of more than eighty plays, Bonds's work synthesizes the prevailing views on the conventions of jingju costuming. The study encompasses clothing, headdresses, hairstyling, shoes, makeup, and face painting. The first three chapters provide an overview of the history and conventions of jingju, a description of the visual clues through which character identity is projected, and an account of the forms and historical roots of clothing. Chapters 4 and 5 detail the symbolism of color and embroidery, which serves as the backdrop for the “Costume Compendium” in chapter 6, which elaborates, garment by garment, the various pieces worn on the body. A following chapter catalogues the makeup and accoutrements for the head. A final chapter explains the backstage roles of dressers and offers a comparison of the “costume plots”—the full list of dress changes for all characters for the entire show—for two contemporary productions of Feng huan chao (The Phoenix Returns to Its Nest). Color photographs matched to role types and design patterns lend a visual immediacy to the textual descriptions. An appendix of “Costume Pattern Drafts” concludes the volume.

Bonds's mastery of the conventions of jingju is impressive, especially in light of, as she acknowledges, her limited access to Chinese-language sources. Beijing Opera Costumes methodically describes, as the subtitle indicates, the “visual communication of character” through the costumes. Readers learn how six pairs of identifying characteristics—male/female, youth/age, high/low status, wealth/poverty, civil/military, and Han/alien—are reflected in costume colors, cuts, and patterns. Bonds demonstrates that costuming for jingju, although derived from historical clothing styles, has always been designed with an eye to theatricality—whether through its use of color to accentuate face and gesture or by its modification of historical fashions to facilitate movement.

When Bonds turns her attention to the second half of the subtitle, the visual communication of culture, the book is less compelling. The analysis tends to be too broad or lacking in a sense of change over time. In addressing the aesthetics of jingju, for example, Bonds asserts that everything about the form—movement, voice, visuals—must subscribe to the concept of beauty. This theory seems to project certain truisms about jingju that circulate in the Chinese scholarly literature and among opera professionals. The idea that beauty is the key aesthetic of traditional Chinese stagecraft can be traced to the Republican era and the packaging of the great twentieth-century female impersonator Mei Lanfang (1894–1961) for foreign and domestic audiences. Formulated by backers of Mei and intellectual devotees of jingju such as Qi Rushan (1877–1962), this notion was part of an effort to elevate Beijing Opera from a popular entertainment to an art form, thereby placing it (and China) on an equal stage with other great theatrical traditions (see Joshua Goldstein, Drama Kings: Players and Publics in the Recreation of Peking Opera, 1870–1937 [Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2006]). These nationalistic impulses underpinning the concept have since been elided in the theoretical literature, leaving behind an ahistorical genuflection for the beauty of jingju. While beauty was always an element of performance, jingju was about much more than beauty: it was about storytelling and sensory stimulation, too. The suppression of the messiness of Chinese opera history in favor of timeless aesthetic principles helps to turn jingju into a museum piece. This would undermine the very premise of Bonds's book, which aims to show Beijing Opera to be a living tradition.

This reservation aside, Bonds has provided a great service by cataloguing the symbolism and uses of traditional jingju costumes. With its encyclopedic breadth and exquisite production values, Beijing Opera Costumes will surely become a key reference on this topic. Without a doubt, it will be the first English source I turn to when I need to learn which role types wear olive green and maroon and which primary colors, or why some characters’ robes are embroidered with golden longevity roundels while others are decorated with running dragons.