Penned and read across centuries and all over the Chinese-speaking world, Chinese literary classics tell us compelling narratives derived from lived experiences. They weave cultural tapestries of languages, artistic expressions, histories and politics, opening up windows of the soul to the diverse thoughts and conflicts of the past, present and beyond.

Building upon the literary craftsmanship and philosophical contemplation embodied within the classics, present-day artists of varying backgrounds have been infusing adaptations with theatrical aesthetics and contemporary reflections of their own, renewing the resonance of Chinese literary classics for multifarious audiences across the globe.

Read on to learn about eight seminal texts through the ages and their enduring significance, as well as the artists and companies who have livened up these timeless classics on stage.

1 | Tang Xianzu’s Record of the Southern Bough

More than just a dream

Based on the chuanqi short story The Governor of Nanke by Tang dynasty novelist Li Gongzuo, Ming dynasty official-turned-playwright Tang Xianzu’s Record of the Southern Bough chronicles the fantastical reverie of Chunyu Fen, who falls into a deep slumber under an ancient Sophora tree.

In the illusory two-decade long journey that follows, he marries the princess and becomes the governor of the Southern Bough, advancing through the years to become the prime minister. However, the sudden demise of the princess and his repatriation fuelled by political enemies spiral him back to the beginning—he awakes to realise that it was a daydream.

Disillusioned by corrupt politics, Tang retired from the administration and spent his remaining years penning plays in his hometown Linchuan, four of which (including Southern Bough) are usually performed as Kun opera and are popularly anthologised as the “Four Dreams of Linchuan”, minting his reputation as “Shakespeare of the East”. Chunyu Fen’s tale of honour and disgrace not only mirrors Tang’s own experience, but also parallels the ups and downs of everyday life, illustrating the age-old adage that life is like a fleeting dream.

Singapore bilingual theatre company Toy Factory Productions turned this dream into a reality with a rare, expansive trilogy A Dream Under the Southern Bough, and a pandemic edition, at the Singapore International Festival of Arts (SIFA) from 2018–2021. While Tang’s evocative verses were largely preserved and rendered in their original form, the classical Chinese text was interjected with modern-day elements and near-futuristic aesthetics, which aided in bridging the play across time and space while the audience pondered their realities and dreams.

2 | Pu Songling’s Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio

Stranger than strange

Believed to be based on the true stories of strangers he had encountered, Qing dynasty fiction writer Pu Songling’s Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio (commonly referred to as Liaozhai) is a sprawling collection of nearly 500 supernatural stories—an eclectic mix of romance between scholars and spirits, social fiction and anecdotal tales of fantastic beings—amassed over decades of his life, exploring notions of qing (feeling) and humanity.

Having failed the imperial examination repeatedly, Pu remained an impoverished scholar and worked as a private tutor for the majority of his life, only rising to literary prominence when his works were published posthumously. His Strange Tales offer allegories of love and human nature that have reverberated through the centuries, long-existing as modern myths and in mainstream media. Nie Xiaoqian and Painted Skin are two tales that have undergone multiple filmic reincarnations, spinning scores of ghostly gorgeous leads—including the likes of Hong Kong based-Taiwanese actress Joey Wong and Chinese actress Zhou Xun—who continue to haunt the popular imagination.

Various Singapore arts groups have sought through the years to retell Pu’s parables to hold a mirror to society. Socially-engaged theatre company Drama Box presented Liao Zhai – Of Man, Spirits and The Others at Huayi – Chinese Festival of Arts in 2004, drawing alarming parallels between Pu’s spirits and women, Muslims and immigrants in the contemporary world, highlighting the prejudices faced by marginalised groups. Six years later in 2010, musical powerhouse The Theatre Practice reinvented Pu’s classic as a Mandarin rock musical Liao Zhai Rocks!, marrying period drama with Mandopop. And last year at Huayi 2024, puppetry theatre company The Finger Players joined hands with Vedic metal band RUDRA on Transplant, a sonic subversion of Pu’s cautionary Confucian fables coupled with incisive visual displays of man’s greed, hatred and ignorance.

3 | Cao Xueqin’s Dream of the Red Chamber

Life is a bed of red

Born into a reputable clan that later fell out of favour with the Manchu royalty they manufactured and procured textiles for, Qing dynasty novelist and poet Cao Xueqin experienced the tragic degeneration of his family’s fortunes, and lived the bulk of his life in poverty and desolation. His 120-chapter novel Dream of the Red Chamber (otherwise known as The Story of the Stone), which is highly-regarded as one of the Four Great Chinese Classics, echoes the rise and decline of his family and the political dynasty through the tribulations of the Jia clan and its 400-odd characters.

Baoyu, the heir of the clan, takes centrestage in this poetic tragedy, where his youthfulness and sentimentality clash with patriarchy and authority. Notwithstanding the debate clouding the authorship of its final 40 chapters, Cao’s semi-autobiographical portrait probes upper-class aesthetics and power relations during the early Qing dynasty, and continues to intrigue contemporary readers—each read of the text rewards with lyrical delights and philosophical insights on human relationships.

The allure of Cao’s epic is hard to resist for theatre practitioners across the globe as they ruminate on his words time and again. Renowned Hong Kong theatre company Edward Lam Dance Theatre travelled to Singapore in 2015 with their rendition What Is Sex? at Huayi, which featured a near all-male cast—a dozen of them fully-suited and playing (mostly) unfortunate female characters from selected episodes, in a bid to contemplate the 18th-century text using modern-day lenses of patriarchy, sex and gender. More recently in 2024, The Finger Players distilled Cao’s literary essence with their eponymous puppetry adaptation, an English-language transcreation which saw masked actors and string puppets performing on a Vietnamese water puppetry stage-inspired set, adorning Cao’s timeless themes of “love, family dynamics, social stratification and the transience of life” with their signature visual poetry.

4 | Selected works of Eileen Chang

Seeking the extraordinary

Born in Shanghai during China’s Republican era to an opium-addicted father and new-age independent-minded mother, transnational novelist and essayist Eileen Chang briefly relocated to Hong Kong twice in the late 1930s and early 1950s, before moving to the United States in 1955. Chang is known for her ambivalent literary style, where semi-traditional narrative language meets a modern milieu. Possibly influenced by compounding shifts in politics across time and space, her bevy of essays and novels notably reflect the contrasting historical periods across her momentous life—Chang reads like a novel of her own.

Well-celebrated for her early fiction penned in Japanese-occupied Shanghai during the mid-1940s, most of which are set in the metropolis, Chang’s acute observation of modern life and keen sense of contemporary fashion lend themselves to the seemingly mundane romances of ordinary men and women against a backdrop of simmering political and social turbulence. In her own words, as evoked in Chang’s debut fiction collection Romances (chuanqi, literally “legends”), she writes “to seek the ordinary in the legendary, and to seek the legendary in the ordinary”. It is no wonder then that her stories embody enduring qualities of love and humanity which continue to appeal to urbanites some 30 years after her passing in 1995. Many of her classics have been remade into films, most notably Hong Kong director Ann Hui’s Love in a Fallen City and Oscar-winning Taiwanese filmmaker Ang Lee’s Lust, Caution.

Chang remains a creative muse to her literary lineage of contemporary women writers and theatre makers alike. Beijing-based theatre company National Theatre of China first presented an eponymous stage adaptation of Chang’s novella Red Rose & White Rose in 2008, later restaging it at Huayi in 2011. Celebrated Chinese director Tian Qinxin’s direction featured six actors being double-casted across three principal roles—the modern Chinese male lead Tong Zhenbao, his pristine wife Meng Yanli and his impassioned lover Wang Jiaorui—reflecting the multiplicity of modern love.

In 2012, Hong Kong experimental theatre company Zuni Icosahedron reimagined Chang’s serialised novel Half a Lifelong Romance with their multimedia music theatre piece Eighteen Springs in 2012, which was subsequently presented at Huayi in 2013. Drawing inspiration from Chinese narrative folk art, renowned Hong Kong artist Mathias Woo’s rework featured live vocals by Hong Kong-based Taiwanese actress Elaine Jin accompanied with Suzhou pingtan music, alongside a line up of seven actors, in this distillation of human imperfection. In addition, Zuni Icosahedron commemorated the centenary of her birth with Read Sing Eileen Chang in 2020, where they melded Chang’s oeuvre with storytelling and song, juxtaposing the live performance with sonic and visual archives of their past productions, accenting Chang’s timeless charm. A film screening of the production was later presented as part of Huayi 2022.

Meanwhile, acclaimed Taiwan theatre company Performance Workshop staged Eileen Chang’s Last Evening in 2024, which imagined the last moments of her life in the form of readers theatre—in which actors perform dramatised readings of literary texts. Seven actors played characters from three of her famed novels The Golden Cangue, Love in a Fallen City and Red Rose, White Rose—paying tribute to the literary icon who showed them how to love and live.

5 | Cao Yu’s Thunderstorm

Tempest of hearts

Having watched and studied plays by the likes of Norwegian theatre maker Henrik Ibsen and American playwright Eugene O’Neill in his youth, alongside the usual fare of traditional Chinese operas, Cao Yu is widely regarded as one of China’s most prominent playwrights, whose largely Western-influenced works gave rise to the literary significance of modern Chinese drama (huaju, literally “spoken drama”) in the mid-1930s. 

Cao’s debut dramatic work Thunderstorm frames its subject matter using the three Aristotelian unities of action, time and space—centring on the psychological and physical implosion of an incestuous and corrupt family headed by patriarch Zhou Puyuan. The plot generally unfolds over the course of a day within the confines of the Zhou mansion. Partly informed by his upbringing in an upper-class bureaucratic household, Cao presents a gripping portrayal of the Westernised bourgeoisie and class struggles in modern China. Written nearly a century ago, the emotional turmoil underscoring Cao’s characters echoes the complexities of the human heart today.

Cao’s fateful melodrama has since sparked the wildest imaginations of artists—including Chinese composer Mo Fan’s two-act concert opera adaptation of Thunderstorm at Huayi in 2005, which saw Singapore Chinese Orchestra, Shanghai Opera House Chorus, leading globe-trotting opera singers and more joining forces under the baton of conductor Tsung Yeh and director Goh Boon Teck for a theatrical storm. Eight years later at Huayi in 2013, Hong Kong’s Tang Shu-wing Theatre Studio adopted a wordless, dance theatre interpretation of Thunderstorm, sketching the intricate web of relationships through a blend of Chinese classical, folk and modern dance. In 2025, Beijing’s Li Liuyi Theatre Studio will stage Thunderstorm with the full glory of Cao’s script at Esplanade, with a star-studded cast that includes Chinese film star Hu Jun.

6 | Lao She’s Rickshaw Boy

The push and pull of life

Born of Manchurian descent during the late-Qing imperial rule, and believed to have died by suicide following his public humiliation during the Cultural Revolution, Chinese novelist and dramatist Lao She’s life spanned the various stages of modern China—the Qing dynasty, the Republic and then Communism. Having spent the greater part of his life in Beijing, Lao She is famed for the authentic dose of Beijing dialect and cultural expressions in his works, which bring grassroots voices to life, accentuating the social realities of the capital city.

His classic novel Rickshaw Boy (also known as Camel Xiangzi) charts the ups and downs of the eponymous rickshaw puller Xiangzi, who dreams of earning enough to buy his own rickshaw through sheer hard work and determination. However, his ambition is repeatedly thwarted by the warlord soldiers, officers from the secret police and manipulative individuals he encounters, eventually pushing him into a downward spiral of mental distress and physical destruction. Despite its historical specificity, Lao She’s psychological portrait of Xiangzi mirrors the aspiration and desperation of contemporary city-dwellers in the face of dream-crushing realities.

Having long invested himself in the study and adaptation of Lao She’s works, Beijing-born theatre practitioner Fang Xu pulled Rickshaw Boy from page to stage with a premiere in the Chinese capital at the end of 2023. Produced by Beijing Performance Arts Group Co., Ltd., Rickshaw Boy will travel to Esplanade as part of Huayi 2025. Fang’s interpretation sees three actors playing Xiangzi across different stages of his life—from youthful dreamer to ambitious man and eventual tragic figure—highlighting at once the temporality and universality of human struggles.

7 | Pai Hsien-yung’s Crystal Boys

Birds of a feather

Born to a stern, Confucian father, who was also a Kuomintang general, Pai Hsien-yung is an openly gay Taiwanese author beloved for his brand of sentimentality that permeates his literary and modernist works. His only full-length novel Crystal Boys (niezi, literally “sons of sin”) depicts the marginalisation and stigmatisation faced by the gay community in 1970s Taiwan, which begins with the protagonist A-Qing being kicked out by his father. As he frequents Taipei New Park (now renamed 228 Peace Memorial Park), a prominent gay cruising spot, A-Qing encounters a few other primary characters—each concealing turmoil-ridden relationships with their lovers and fathers beneath their youthful facades.

Pai’s novel was considered to be controversial and ground-breaking when it was first serialised in 1977. It remains pre-eminent in the Taiwanese gay canon for fleshing out the crystal boys’ desires and hopes of self-redemption. It continues to tug at the heartstrings of those within the circle, while gaining wider public appeal in the light of growing recognition of queer rights and Taiwan’s legalisation of same-sex marriage in 2019.

Pai’s seminal work has since been adapted for film and television, including a 1986 movie Outcasts by Taiwanese director Yu Kan-Ping and a 2003 eponymous TV series produced by the Taiwan Public Television Service Foundation. In addition, a theatrical adaptation of Crystal Boys premiered at National Theatre and Concert Hall, Taipei as part of the Taiwan International Festival of Arts in 2014, which was subsequently restaged in 2020 by Taiwanese theatre company Creative Society. Leading a highly-acclaimed line up of cast and creatives spanning theatre, film, television, music and dance, director Tsao Jui-Yuan infused Pai’s expressive text with contemporary dance and musical aesthetics—spectacularly baring the struggles and desires of the crystal boys on stage.

8 | Yeng Pway Ngon’s Art Studio

Artists of the floating world

Having studied contemporary works by the likes of Taiwanese poets Ya Hsien and Yang Mu, Czech-French novelist Milan Kundera and Italian writer-journalist Italo Calvino, Singaporean Chinese-language poet, novelist, playwright and critic Yeng Pway Ngon formulated his distinctive blend of modernist poetics, philosophical introspection and socio-political critiques in a body of genre-crossing works.

Partly drawing on his struggle with prostate cancer, Yeng’s Singapore Literature Prize-winning epic novel Art Studio paints the lives of artists against the political uncertainty of a young nation, weaving their continent-crossing trajectories across four tumultuous decades—a razor sharp examination of the art of the human condition. Published in 2011, the Cultural Medallion recipient’s masterpiece spares no ink in drawing up psychological portraits of its characters, framing them within the histories of Singapore and the region, and feeding readers and artists curious about the forgotten past of outcasts. Yeng’s historical fiction continues to appeal to those living in these ever-changing times—just like his transient artists.

Singapore Mandarin theatre company Nine Years Theatre produced a stage adaptation of Art Studio, which opened the Singapore International Festival of Arts (SIFA) in 2017. Well-oiled with the company’s signature Suzuki Method of actor training and Viewpoints, the 12-member ensemble moved like clockwork—sketching dramatic tensions with abstract physicality while painting character conflicts with realistic brush strokes—finely illustrating the art of humanity.

Catch these Chinese classics, reinvented for the stage.

Fang Xu’s Rickshaw Boy will make its Singapore debut at Esplanade Theatre from 7–8 February 2025 as part of Huayi – Chinese Festival of Arts. Li Liuyi Theatre Studio’s Thunderstorm will complete its Asian tour at Esplanade Theatre from 28–30 March 2025.