“Good heavens, Percy,” I said. “What are you doing to your eyes?” “I have to put Chinese ink into them to make my pupils large and black.” “Doesn’t it hurt like the very Satan?” “Oh, yes, it hurts pretty badly, but when it’s done it looks lovely.” How I wished that Percy’s missionary sponsors might have seen the show! As imitator of Mei Lan-fang he played the rôle of the maid, and he certainly looked beautiful. The maid in this particular farce (“Yi Tsai Hua”, one of the plays forbidden by the police!) is sent by her mistress—who is minded to improve her husband’s absence—to induce a handsome young man to come to the lady’s boudoir. But the maid prefers, unlike John Alden, to speak for herself! So she sets about destroying the young man’s virtue, while the efforts of the youth to escape her coquettish wiles supply the comic element. It was a bedroom farce, and I noticed with pride the effects of Percy’s Christian training—he used sheets on his bed! But in recent years other groups of amateurs have arisen with the definite purpose of reforming the Chinese theater. In 1915 a group of returned students from Japan who had derived their inspiration from modern European dramas they had seen in Tokyo founded a dramatic club in Shanghai called “The Spring Willow Dramatic Society.” Their aim was to educate the taste of the public both as regards modern drama and modern staging. They introduced non-musical, spoken drama acted on a stage with footlights and scenery. “La Dame aux Camélias” and “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” formed part of their repertoire. But they found only a small following composed of students and people who had been abroad, and therefore this effort was discontinued after one year. Shanghai is the logical spot for such modern theaters—there have been quite a number of others since—because Occidental influence is stronger in this city than anywhere else in China, and the Southerners on the whole are less conservative than the Northerners.