There is the “Shang Ting Chi” (Ruse of the Nail). A wife killed her husband because she was in love with another man. The police were unable to learn the cause of the man’s sudden death, but the examining magistrate was told by his superior that he must fathom the mystery or be himself beheaded. When he went home sorrowfully to tell his wife of his plight, the latter asked whether he had examined the part of the head covered with hair. The officer hastened to investigate the back of the victim’s head and found that a nail had been driven into it. When the superior learned of this he ordered the officer’s wife to be arrested. She confessed that she had known of the ruse because she had put her former husband to death by driving a nail into his head and braiding the queue over the wound. Thereupon both women were put to death. The play is forbidden lest women learn how to rid themselves of their husbands! Another forbidden play is “Sha Tze Pao”, the story of a young woman who loved a monk. One day her young son discovered them _in flagranti_. The mother feared that the boy would tell of her shame and therefore she killed him. His sister suspected a crime, told the boy’s teacher about it, and he in turn reported it to the authorities. As a result, both the woman and the monk were put to death. The play is based on an actual incident that happened in the province of Hunan about forty years ago. The sister, later in life, at one time visited a theater where this very play was being staged and received a shock comparable to the one an honest son of a famous murderer might receive if he went to visit Madame Tussaud’s Waxworks and suddenly beheld his own father reënacting his crime in wax. The Chinese authorities forbid the play because the killing of the child by the mother is realistically acted out. The mother’s face is covered with blood as she cuts the body into many pieces and places them in a wine vat. It is a curious thing that on the Chinese stage where fixed conventions leave so much to the imagination one finds occasionally the most revolting realism in plays of the “shuddering” variety. I have seen, for example, the victim of an assault dragging his entrails across the stage—a nauseating imitation of the real thing. The Chinese love their “horrors” just as much as our medieval ancestors did.