The Columbia Anthology of Yuan Drama

This anthology features translations of ten seminal plays written during the Yuan dynasty (1279-1368), a period considered the golden age of Chinese theater. By turns lyrical and earthy, sentimental and ironic, Yuan drama spans a broad emotional, linguistic, and stylistic range. Combining sung arias with declaimed verses and doggerels, dialogues and mime, and jokes and acrobatic feats, Yuan drama formed a vital part of China’s culture of performance and entertainment in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.

To date, few Yuan-dynasty plays have been translated into English. Well-known translators and scholars have supervised the making of this collection and add a short description to each play. A general introduction situates all selections within their cultural and historical contexts.

C. T. Hsia (1921-2013) is professor emeritus of Chinese at Columbia University. His books include The Classic Chinese Novel and A History of Modern Chinese Fiction. He is also the coeditor, with Joseph S. M. Lau and Leo O. Lee, of Modern Chinese Stories and Novellas, 1919-1949.

Wai-Yee Li is professor of Chinese literature at Harvard University. She is the author of Enchantment and Disenchantment: Love and Illusion in Chinese Literature; The Readability of the Past in Early Chinese Historiography; and Women and National Trauma in Late Imperial Chinese Literature. She is also the translator, with Stephen Durrant and David Schaberg, of Zuozhuan.

George Kao (1912-2008) was a Chinese American author, translator, and journalist who served as director of the West Coast office of China’s Government Information Office and as editor in chief of the Chinese Press.