The Stage in the Temple: Ritual Opera in Village Shanxi continues David Johnson’s admirable work of foregrounding the importance of village life in the study of Chinese social history. Rather than serving as a backdrop for urban societies, Johnson argues, Chinese villages were their own worlds, and denizens of those worlds had considerable cultural agency within them. This book complements his earlier monograph Spectacle and Sacrifice: The Ritual Foundations of Village Life in North China (2009), which argues for the “ritual autarky” of Chinese villages vis-à-vis China’s metropoles from the Song (960–1271) through the modern periods. The Stage in the Temple extends the argument for villages’ enduring cultural independence to ritual opera through an analysis of scripts of southwestern Shanxi Za opera (zaju 雜劇 or zaxi 雜戲, a localized form of ritual opera not to be confused with the famous Yuan zaju), alongside a consideration of their historical and social contexts.

As Johnson explains in his introduction, The Stage in the Temple fills an archival gap in Spectacle and Sacrifice, which is organized around the temples and villages of southeastern Shanxi province for which early ritual texts (dating to the sixteenth century) are extant but opera scripts are not. The Stage in the Temple addresses this lacuna with scripts that government teams collected from villages in southwestern Shanxi during periods of official interest in folk culture in the 1950s and 1980s. Out of dozens of available scripts, Johnson selects eight dated to the 1770s to 1906 and arranges the resulting analysis into three core chapters and a conclusion. The first chapter, “Scripts of Za Opera,” discusses the eight scripts in relation to their potential sources of literary influence and social contexts. The second, “A History of Za Opera,” situates this form of ritual opera within a longer history of zaju (“variety shows,” again, not to be confused with Yuan zaju) dating back to the Song period. The third, “Village Opera in Performance,” describes the performance contexts for Za opera and other forms of ritual opera and presents evidence for northern village operas’ common ancestry. Johnson’s conclusion reflects on the broader significance of ritual opera (as opposed to popular performance traditions such as yangge 秧歌) for understanding traditional Chinese village culture. The book also features three appendices, including a list of 38 early stages in Shanxi (dates of construction ranging from 1005 to 1364), a note on the historical authenticity of the scripts selected for the book, and a list of 43 Za opera manuscripts.

Za operas, also known as gong-and-drum Za operas (luogu zaxi 鑼鼓雜戲) or cymbal-and-drum Za operas (naogu zaxi 鐃鼓雜戲), are identifiable as a genre based on their performance context and their close affiliation with village identity and cultural patrimony. As Johnson explains, “the roles were played by villagers, the music and stagecraft were unsophisticated and probably very old, and they were performed on temple stages. They belonged to a deeply rooted conservative tradition in which substantial local variation was the norm” (pp. 33–34). It is in this combination of ritual tradition and local variation that Johnson identifies villages’ “operatic autarky,” by which he means not that villages were entirely culturally independent, but rather that “there was immense variation in the symbolic culture of Chinese villages” (p. 34), and, by extension, between the symbolic cultures of Chinese villages and Chinese metropoles. As I understand it, the key takeaway of Johnson’s argument is that at no point during the historical period under discussion—from the Song to the modern period—should we generalize about “Chinese thought” based on archives inherited from urban centers of cultural production. Johnson’s analyses of Za opera scripts show that villages were also significant cultural producers, and their cultural products were not merely derived from those of urban elites.

The scripts surveyed in this book reveal that Za opera focused on many of the same historical scenarios underpinning more “mainstream” narratives that appear in novels such as Enfeoffment of the Gods (Fengshen yanyi 封神演義) and Romance of the Three Kingdoms (Sanguo yanyi 三國演義) with which several of Johnson’s scripts share material. But such overlap should not be understood as mere influence, for ritual operas developed their own forms of social significance from these popular plots, both by altering or substantially adding to their content and by staging them in local ritual contexts. Johnson’s generously detailed analyses of these scripts in chapter 1 occupy one-third of the book’s total length and raise fascinating questions that should inspire future research. The chapter is divided into two parts. The first summarizes five scripts collected from among different villages in southwestern Shanxi in the 1950s and 1980s to introduce Za opera as a ritual (rather than textual or literary) genre; the second examines three scripts collected in the 1950s from Xinzhuang Village, the ritual contexts for which are better known. Broadly speaking, the eight scripts share features that serve to distinguish them from forms of nonritual opera that developed in northern China, ranging from clapper opera (bangzi xi 梆子戲) to Yuan zaju. Compared with these more formalized genres of performance, Za operas are formally inconsistent, aesthetically crude, and sometimes morally unorthodox or ambiguous in a way that maps onto neither Confucian orthodoxy nor popular norms.

For Johnson, emphasizing Za opera’s lack of formal conventions and “crude” aesthetics is not a value judgment but a means of asserting the genre’s archaism and adherence to received tradition, a historical claim he supports at length in chapter 2. Therein, he acknowledges that the history of Za opera itself is largely invisible, but he situates its development against a backdrop of performance traditions, some of which were called zaju, dating to the Song period, when the earliest temple stages (one dating to c. 1005 CE) appeared in Shanxi. The important place these stages held in village culture and ritual is attested by epigraphic evidence as well as excavations of tombs from the Northern Song (960–1127) and Jin periods (1115–1234) that Johnson discusses at some length (pp. 78–87). The idea that Za opera might be rooted in village performance traditions of the Song (or earlier!) is based on the research of Chinese village opera specialists whom Johnson cites at length in this chapter, providing a valuable entrée into this area of study. Ultimately, proving Za opera’s status as a genuinely archaic art form is difficult, if not impossible, but the discussions in this section offer compelling details, such as the fact that villagers of the early twentieth century were stubbornly unwilling to alter scripts, even where lines made no sense to them (91–92); and that a local actor in 1948 referred to Yuan zaju as “New Za opera” distinct from the “Old Za opera” performed in his village (93). Johnson supports the case for Za opera’s antiquity by turning to Anhui’s “parallel tradition” of Nuo ritual opera (nuoxi 儺戲), which Johnson surmises might be a southern descendant of early zaju. Johnson highlights the findings of researchers Anne McLaren and Wang Zhaoqian 王兆乾, which reveal that 3 out of 13 chantefable texts (dating to the 1470s) excavated from a Ming-dynasty tomb closely resemble Nuo opera scripts collected in the second half of the twentieth century (105–107).

As compelling as these details are, Johnson’s claim that Za operas “belonged to an archaic, ritualized tradition that was quite separate from the main line of development of opera in north China,” and that the scripts of ritual operas “descended through many centuries with little change” feels somewhat overstated. In the second part of chapter 1, Johnson’s analysis of colophons appended to two opera scripts from Xinzhuang Village in Shanxi suggests that these scripts served simultaneously as sites of village authority and of negotiation with an orthodox mainstream that bridged villages and sites of imperial authority. In the early twentieth century (1925–26 and 1932, respectively), these two scripts were copied and edited by two educated locals. As it turns out, their “editing” was not necessarily limited to fixing miswritten characters and may have contradicted some of their fellow villagers’ operatic sensibilities. In the case of one script first edited in 1925, a second colophon appended in 1926 explains that “when the [revised] script was returned after the performance it was discovered that additions and deletions had been made, and they were so smeared that they were illegible,” so it was “recopied” yet again (37). Johnson observes that the script in question evinces a more “orthodox slant” than many other Za operas, and deduces that sometime earlier, “an educated resident of Xinzhuang Village radically revised one of its traditional operas by adding material from [Romance of the Three Kingdoms]” (43). Such evidence contradicts the claim that these scripts were transmitted to the twentieth century without change but does not undermine Johnson’s important point about villages’ operatic autarky. Instead, these examples of cultural negotiation suggest that what is interesting about cultural autarky is not so much the fact of villages’ independence from other centers of cultural production, but rather their tense and complex, agentive position in relation to these other centers.

Johnson offers an interpretive figure that might allow us to construe Za opera’s formal inconsistency and crude aesthetics as evidence of something other than the genre’s antiquity. This is his concept of tableaux, “moments of high drama in popular operas that formed a cultural vocabulary for people in all walks of life” (58), including in ritual contexts where they serve as “talismanic scenes” (28). As Johnson notes, such scenes often appeared in Lunar New Year prints (28), which could likewise serve talismanic functions. In an earlier publication, Johnson offers the tableau as an alternative to identifying ideas as inherent in a text that in fact signifies very differently in divergent sociocultural contexts. Johnson there suggests prioritizing the social significance of the image itself over attempts to extract a stable underlying idea therefrom.Footnote ¹ Along these lines, what matters for ritual opera might not be literary form (apart from the fact that it must adhere to tradition), but the ritual efficacy of the operatic image itself. Returning to the analogy of New Year prints, exquisite aesthetic execution might be appreciated, but simple prints will not fail to invite good fortune or ward off pernicious influences. Rudimentary or crude aesthetic form is not necessarily evidence of an archaic tradition but may simply indicate that producers and consumers lacked the resources, and perhaps the need, for something finely wrought. Likewise, in the context of village ritual, the efficacious tableau and its association with village patrimony are what bind a community to and identify a community with its gods. Regardless of when a script was first produced, rarified aesthetic concerns probably have little bearing here, except among those educated villagers whose identities were also partly anchored in literary training and the Confucian canon.

The figure of the tableau also assists in making sense of Za opera’s moral ambiguities. Johnson identifies moral quandaries in two scripts from Xinzhuang Village that might have been original village creations. The first, a historical drama set between the Tang and Song dynasties entitled Attacking Yanzhou, is rife with official disloyalty, and the only virtuous character in the play ends up committing suicide with no recognition for his good deeds, leaving the reader with “a profoundly nihilistic vision of high politics” (55). In the second, Xue Gang Assaults the Court, “there is no moral high ground—one atrocity leads to a greater atrocity, and the most powerful motive is a desire for revenge” (66). Interestingly, morally problematic scenarios of this sort are also depicted in late Qing Chinese New Year prints, including ultraviolent scenes of the bandit Wu Song slaughtering women and children alongside corrupt officials.Footnote ² From the standpoint of orthodox morality, such images would seem inappropriate as New Year decorations, but as talismanic images that might invoke rage-filled gods to protect a household or village from deleterious forces, they present no moral quandary. As Johnson observes frequently in his third chapter and his conclusion, ritual opera served a similar ritual role. This conclusion, however, effects not a closure but an opening, for Johnson’s detailed observations throughout this excellent survey open onto numerous paths for exciting future research into village culture and its complex relations with imperial and urban sites of cultural production in premodern China.