Quite a different performance can be observed in one of the “new” theaters, a blight which has come to Peking via Shanghai. One evening I went to the one in the “New World”, a four-story concrete building, an amusement palace offering for the single admission fee of thirty cents, old-style plays, “new” drama, story-tellers, singsong girls, moving pictures, performances by acrobats, jugglers, and sword-swallowers, restaurants both for foreign and Chinese food, tea room, billiard tables, and bowling alleys, convex and concave mirrors, and penny slotmachines showing pictures of various sorts. (“A number of these pictures were of rather coarse nature,” observes Mr. Sidney Gamble in his “Peking, A Social Survey”, “but none of them could be called immoral.”) My goal was the “new” theater, namely plays staged in what the Chinese fondly believe to be the manner of the Occidental theaters. Before a very crowded auditorium a play was being performed by actors dressed in European style, or perhaps better, the style of the mail-order-house type of clothing. The play was in spoken Chinese, and no music accompanied the action. Only in the intermissions between the rather short scenes the band from the Boys’ Industrial School, sitting in a corner in the rear of the hall, played “John Brown’s Body” and other appropriate dirges. The play dealt with a woman who had lured men into her house in order to have them robbed there by her accomplices. This woman was dressed in a red silk waist and a lavender skirt; she no doubt seemed very Western to the audience, because she wore a corset and allowed the contour of her body to show instead of being bound so as to look flat-chested like the Chinese women. The part, however, was acted by a man who spoke in a high falsetto. There was a great deal of love-making of a kind unknown to the Chinese stage—the men kissed the woman’s hand and even put their arms about her. At times the vampire left the stage for a short time with one of the victims, in a significant manner. Most applause was accorded the actor who played the ruffian, when he strode “toughly” across the stage with his coat collar turned up and his cap pulled down over his eyes. By way of giving a good imitation of the manners of Europeans the actors, when speaking to the lady, consistently took off their coats, held them on their arms, and displayed brand-new red suspenders! The scenery was changed with every act and showed crude imitations of our painted interiors or street scenes with lamp posts. The play was endless and the action extremely slow. This heart-breaking imitation of our worst melodramas is, I am glad to say, not making the rapid progress it has made in India, where it has driven out completely the native drama, at least in Calcutta and Bombay.