During the Han Dynasty records show the existence of jugglers, magicians, rope-walkers, sword-swallowers, and also of plays in which masked actors disguised as gods, fearful leopards, cruel tigers, white bears, and gray dragons had their parts. Dwarfs and giants were made to play together in humorous pieces. Singing girls in costumes of feathers executed artful dances. Some of these performances are said to have been so indecent that passers-by covered their eyes. However, such performances were sharply censored at the time, just as they would be in present-day China. All of these performances were very much favored by the rulers, but they consisted mostly of singing and dancing, while there was very little that might be called drama. In the northern Ch’i Dynasty (550-570 A.D.) however, there arose what might be called a historical play based on an episode in the life of a heroic warrior, Duke Lan Lu. This warrior had a somewhat effeminate aspect, and therefore he wore a mask in battle to inspire fear in the hearts of his enemies. His story was dramatized and became a very popular play, probably similar to the present-day “military plays” in which the play with swords and spears forms the _pièce de résistance_. There is a record about the same time of a comedy also based on an actual occurrence, called “The Drunkard.” A certain man, Su Pao-pi (a name alluding to red spots on his nose) was a very heavy drinker and after each spree would beat his wife in the village street until she wept pitifully. Two actors, one dressed as a woman and the other as a man, would amuse the people by a popular farce portraying this quarrel between husband and wife. The playlet must have been one of extraordinary vitality, for there are records of it in the Chi, Chou, and Sui dynasties—to be sure, three short dynasties that followed one closely upon the other. Music and dancing also played a part in these two early dramatic presentations, so that they were probably of the melodramatic (in the etymological sense of the term) variety, such as is most of the Chinese drama of to-day. The dramas in China are classified according to the style of music they employ. Another play of the same, or perhaps a little earlier period, called “The Tiger,” is thought by Mr. Wang, because of the music of foreign tribes employed in it, to have been brought into China from “The Western Regions” (central Asia).[8] It is the story of a man who was killed by a tiger and whose son then set out on a search for the wild beast, fought with it and avenged his father by killing it in turn. Mr. Wang even hazards the suggestion that the two plays mentioned above, “The Mask” and “The Drunkard,” were in their music and manner of presentation imitations of “The Tiger,” in which case this form of drama would be a borrowing from a foreign country and not indigenous to China.