| The flower registers mentioned in this article are texts that evaluated the talents of opera actors, especially those who perform the dan role, that is, boy actors who cross-dress to play the part of young women characters in Kun Opera and other regional styles of opera. These kind of texts were called huapu in traditional Chinese society. Tracing the development of the meaning of "huapu", the vocabulary was first used to refer to agricultural works which recorded the variety, the history of cultivation and evaluation of flowers. Later in the Sung Dynasty, huapu began to stand for the texts of comment on courtesans. Not until the second half of the eighteenth century, texts of evaluating opera actors were called huapu.Previous scholarship mainly focus on the use of huapu. They regarded huapu as ordinary materials to discuss history of Chinese drama or some other social problems. In a word, scholars have look through, but never look at the huapu. Here, in contrast, I will treat huapu as special literatures which have their own system. Besides philological research method, other research methods such as society history, psychological history and new cultural history are also used.Through my research, I found that, the huapu texts were in the long-standing tradition of connoisscurship texts that claimed to rank and evaluate flowers and courtesans. Except comparing actors to flowers, rhetorical strategies the author applied to describe the actors also borrow from the earlier texts on courtesans. Most of the autors them were sojourners to Peking and they were frequently from Jiangnan or farther south. Their real identities varied from candidates for the imperial examinations, the local officials who came to Peking for a better position to those who were featherbed in the capital. Also some of them had been rejected by the "official life". The motivations for writing huapu were various. They wrote not only for entertainment or commercial sales, but also for a more practical purpose. The huapu texts were treated as a social medium. The authors could make new friends and establish a social network during the process of creating the huapu texts. It provided them a easier way to obtain the political resourcs, as well as shape a social status equal to the one which success in the imperial examinations could bring with. As soon as the author finished the creation, the huapu texts would go into circulation. The circulation of huapu was in the form of manuscript at first. But the texts might be printed quikly due to the authors’desire for fame and the bookshop owners’desire for money. Publication of the huapu texts made the circulation of huapu beyond certain groups and certain areas, which let the authors’ reputation be not confined to a particular time or region.Besides the practical purpose, the contexts of creating huapu texts were also affected by the condition of Peking. As the national political and cultural center, Peking became a major scocial base of literati. The developed commercial economy and the prosperityof performance market made Peking be a theatric center. The popularity of the commercial theater and the expansion of the audiences’social class made the actors’ performance erotic. The dan role became the main character in the stage, which povided the literati large amout of "beauty". The special pattern of urban space also had an effect on the literati’s lifestyle, which promoted the interaction bettween the literati and the actors.As the actors didn’t attach to the literati any longer, and the power of businessmen became stronger and stronger, the romantic and ideal relationship bettween the literati and the actors was changed. In order to reconstruction the status of literatus, literati applied series of writing strategies to enforce the literati tastes, reinvent the distinction bettween them and the wealthy merchants. |
