It is a custom on the Chinese stage to play on the occasion of various seasonal festivals pieces pertaining to the holiday in question. The best known of the seasonal plays is perhaps the “Ta Yin Ho” (Crossing the Milky Way), played on the seventh day of the seventh month of the Chinese calendar, that is to say, generally some time during our month of July. This story is an old legend, varying somewhat in different versions, related in the quotation from William Stanton in Chapter One, where Yang Kuei-fei in the T’ang Dynasty makes allusion to it. It can be seen on a number of stages in Peking at the time of this festival, and is staged in an especially colorful manner by Mei Lan-fang. The same actor plays another mythological fancy on the occasion of the mid-autumn festival, “Ch’ang-O Pin Yüeh” (Ch’ang-O’s Flight to the Moon).[24] This custom of seasonal plays shows a very close connection existing between the popular beliefs and the theater which recalls in a manner the medieval mysteries of the Easter and Christmas seasons. The fact that some of the plays have been written within recent years only indicates that the Chinese theater is in no way declining as a typical Chinese institution, as is, for example, the popular theater of India. What the visitor sees in the native theaters of Calcutta or Bombay, as has been stated above, is a diluted imitation of our weakest and worst melodrama with all its mannerisms. In contrast to this the Chinese theater of Peking is continuing as a living popular art, introducing some external features from our stage, but on the whole remaining true to its own genius. [Illustration] CHAPTER SEVEN THE CONVENTIONS