A musical challenges Chinese history

In the opening moments of his daring new musical drama, "Yuanmingyuan," the director Zhang Guangtian rises from a back row seat in Beijing's Pioneer Theater as a synthesized rock version of the Marseillaise is performed on stage. As the last notes of the music fade away, Zhang reads aloud from Victor Hugo's impassioned description of the fabled Qing Dynasty palace:

"Art has two principles, the Idea, which produces European art, and the Chimera, which produces oriental art. Yuanmingyuan was to chimerical art what the Parthenon is to ideal art. ... Build a dream with marble, jade, bronze and porcelain. ... cover it with precious stones, drape it with silk, make it here a sanctuary, there a harem. ... have architects who are poets build the thousand and one dreams of the thousand and one nights, add gardens, basins, gushing water. ... suppose in a word a sort of dazzling cavern of human fantasy with the face of a temple and palace, such was this building." He then poses a deliberately inflammatory question: Who really destroyed Yuanmingyuan? The standard response is that troops from France and Britain plundered and burned it in 1860, the most villainous act of the infamous Opium Wars. Hugo called it a despoiling by "two bandits" and the Chinese government regularly refers to it as a prime example of the "national humiliation" to which foreign imperialists subjected China before the Communist Party took power in 1949. But Zhang who is also a poet, composer, singer and writer widely known for such controversial theatrical hits as "Che Guevara" and "Saint Confucius" gives a far more complex answer. While he does not dispute the dastardly nature of the destruction it required 3,500 troops just to light the fires that caused the palace-garden complex to burn for three days he shifts the emphasis from foreign imperialism and portrays the ruination as an ongoing process in which Chinese are complicit. This is done through a series of often comic vignettes, interspersed by ballads and rock songs, that begin in 1860 and continue to the present. In the first, we see three lower-class Chinese people chopping meat, performing acupuncture and complaining that the emperor does nothing for them, and in fact has already fled for safety. When a foreign soldier wrapped in a Union Jack comes along, the disgruntled threesome leads him into the palace and encourages him to rob it so they can loot it themselves. The action then moves forward to 1900. Starry-eyed Chinese students vandalize the palace's "feudal" ruins to show their support of democratic ideals. The students the same three actors who played the looters in the first scene then morph into rabid Cultural Revolution-era Red Guards who plant rice in the ruins to demonstrate their revolutionary credentials. The Red Guards give way to greedy 1980s bureaucrats so eager to enrich themselves from tourism that they turn parts of the sacred ruins into an amusement park. The bureaucrats in turn become the local officials who in 2005 lined Yuanmingyuan's lakes with plastic so they could save money on water, an action that caused an outcry and led to China's first public environmental hearing. Underlying this unorthodox interpretation of history is the idea that Yuanmingyuan symbolizes the dreams, faith and values of the Chinese people and that these, like the palace, have been ruined by a combination of greed and misguided ideals. The Chinese public is represented by mock protesters who flood the theater in the second act. Perched on balconies and stairs, they unfurl banners with official slogans like "Development is the irrefutable argument" and unofficial slogans, like one suggesting that science can be a form of superstition. The "protesters" stay on to watch the destruction of Yuanmingyuan unfold on stage and to debate the value of economic development that comes at the expense of the environment, culture, and human happiness. Dying coal miners crawl through the protesters' midst, trailed by helplessly sobbing women. The officials are at first unmoved by all the emotion, placidly wondering why everyone looks so unhappy when China is getting so much richer (and theater tickets have sold so well). But, at play's end, one official finally acknowledges his role in desecrating Yuanmingyuan and then shouts at the audience, "If I am guilty, what about you?"

Having raised so many provocative questions, it is only fitting that each performance of "Yuanmingyuan" which opened on July 14 and runs until Aug. 4 is followed by a dialogue between director and audience. On opening night one of the first questions concerned the sensitive nature of this political and social critique: Wasn't Zhang afraid that he could get in trouble?

Indeed, the regularly salted wounds of Yuanmingyuan remain so raw that a Beijing newspaper supplement was shut down for a month this year after it ran an essay suggesting China's own diplomatic missteps played a part in the palace's destruction. Zhang didn't answer the question directly, though an elderly man in the VIP section assured his fellow audience members that, while such topics could never be broached on television, it was safe to raise them in a small theater. But in a later interview with a reporter, Zhang who was jailed for three years in the mid-1980s for organizing student protests suggested that he is protected by his status as an independent director who raises money for his own productions.

"Everybody is afraid when there is danger," he explained. "But I am independent, so there is no danger."

Zhang's independent status and his willingness to speak out on generally verboten topics make him something of a maverick in China's intellectual and artistic circles.

"All intellectuals criticize me," he said. "They don't like me. I offend people sometimes I do it on purpose."

But Zhang's fans are as outspoken in their admiration as his detractors are in their criticism, and in the post-performance dialogue he was on friendly ground. The issue to which he steered his audience with increasing passion was his opposition to the blind pursuit of economic growth and personal wealth. "Life is not only about earning money, it's also about being happy," Zhang said. "Economic development alone will not rescue us. We need to have values and faith as our foundation."

(C) 2006 International Herald Tribune. via ProQuest Information and Learning Company; All Rights Reserved