Still, the subject has attracted a fair number of Occidental writers. Du Halde was the first; in his monumental description of China published in 1735 he printed a translation by a Jesuit missionary of the Yuan Dynasty drama, “The Orphan of the Chao Family.” It was this translation that inspired Voltaire’s “L’Orphelin de la Chine.” Other translations followed in the nineteenth century, together with some critical material and various descriptions of Chinese staging. In the last few years the interest in the Chinese stage has evidently become greater than ever, both in China and in Western lands. A history of the Chinese drama, however, has never been written; largely because the Chinese themselves have no such work. Only a few present-day innovators among Celestial scholars consider the drama as literature. Thus the information we possess on this vast subject is very meager, and much of it is also out of print. This book is an attempt to gather together what is known on the subject, as well as to present in a volume supplied with vivid illustrations the results of five years’ experience with the Peking theater by a student of comparative literature possessed of a modest knowledge of the Peking dialect. Those who have so far written on the subject have always spoken of a decadence of the drama which set in immediately after the first period of bloom in the Yuan Dynasty (1280-1368). In the course of the revaluation of values now going on in China this opinion is being changed. Mr. Wang Kuo-wei has recently compiled a dramatical catalogue which shows that numerically, at least, there is no decrease in the production of dramas. A trenchant critic, Doctor Hu Shih, holds that only technically can the drama of the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644) be said to be inferior, because the compact and unified plays of the Yuan period become diffuse and of serpentine length; but that in the matter of characterization, poetic diction, and content they are far superior. Furthermore, modern Chinese criticism considers the very highest point of the drama to have been reached in two historical tragedies of the Ching Dynasty (1644-1911). As can readily be seen, there is an enormous amount of work to be done in this field; and if the gaps and errors in this book shall impel a competent scholar to write the long overdue history of the Chinese drama this work will have served its purpose.