Edwardian Theatre and the Lost Shape of Asia: Some Remarks on Behalf of a Cinderella Subject

The decade following the Boxer movement in China, up to the revolution of 1911, embodies a major period of change. The ‘Chinese Constitutional Mission of 1905-1906’, or ‘The Five Great Ministers’ Mission Abroad’, was a response to this change, where a small study group was selected to study the examples of foreign governments. The purpose of the entire exercise was to investigate the possibilities of constitutional government on behalf of the dynasty. However, cultural activities such as trips to the theatre were also incorporated into their programme, and it is one such visit upon which the paper focuses, in an effort to penetrate the ‘film of events’ and discover something of contemporary Chinese views of European culture. The paper finds certain overlaps between an official's record of the Edwardian theatre and the folktale collected by Duan Chengshi, and through this overlap, aims to challenge some existing assumptions — that modern materials, especially in English, are self-evidently more interesting and informative than those in the Classical Chinese of bygone ages. [George Ernest Morrison Lecture on Ethnography, 1999, The Contemporary China Centre]