Recently, Winter Begonia, a television drama about Peking Opera artists, has roused many young viewers’ curiosity about men acting as the young female role in traditional Peking Opera plays. Some viewers even wonder how male artists can appear more effeminate than women.

In the past, men acted as a young female in Peking Opera and the tradition started in the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911). It was a stop-gap measure of Peking Opera troupes in a response to the ban imposed by the government that females were not allowed to appear in the Peking Opera and that women were not allowed to watch Peking Opera performances. All-men Peking Opera troupes had to cultivate some young men into artists who looked and acted and sang as young women on stage.

After the Qing Dynasty fell, Peking Opera troupes had young women appear as young women on stage. In advertisements, however, these troupes indicated whether the young female role in a play was impersonated by a man or a woman.

Mei Lanfang (1894-1961) is widely considered the greatest Peking Opera male artist acting in young woman roles. Mei was the first artist who spread Peking Opera to foreign countries. He visited many foreign countries and staged performances in Japan, the United States, and Soviet Union. He was a superstar of Peking Opera largely because he introduced innovation to Peking Opera and to the female roles he played successfully.

Mei Baojiu (1934-2016), son of Mei Lanfang, was a Peking Opera artist who inherited his father’s tradition and acted as women in Peking Opera plays. He once talked about men acting as women on Peking Opera stage. “Female Peking Opera artists have conveniences to act as women. On the other hand, male Peking Opera artists need to study women more deeply and work harder in order to perform female roles well. There is a balance. If you are overly effeminate, you fail. If you are inadequately effeminate, you fail. There is a beauty in the perfect balance between male and female,” observed Mei Baojiu.

The success of men acting as young women on Peking Opera stage has nothing to do with mere outer resemblance. The success yields from vivid portrayal of women, as explained by Ren Mingyao, a 99-year-old professor of Zhejiang University. “Impersonating a woman in Peking Opera plays requires more than likeness in appearance. If one focuses only on appearance, the result would be artificial and overly effeminate. That would not add up to the Peking Opera aesthetics. Mei Lanfang was successful essentially because audiences loved the female characters he created artistically, not his stage appearance as women,” remarks the professor.

When Mei was visiting the United States, he was misunderstood by some people who thought the Peking Opera master was a man with an extreme obsession of imitating the opposite gender. After learning he was a normal and married man with children that the theater circles of the United States embraced him and appreciated his characterization of women, which highlighted the inner beauty, elegance, charm, volition, sentiment of women.

Mei Lanfang energetically concerned himself with innovation. At 20, he visited Shanghai and opened his eyes for the first time in his life to the Shanghai-style Peking Opera. Artists in Shanghai had introduced new things from the west to the traditional Peking Opera performance. After his return to Beijing in 1913, he applied new techniques he learned from drama and film to makeup in Peking Opera. The small changes he introduced made the eyes and mouth look better. And he introduced a new facial makeup method. The new method attaches seven semicircular fringes onto the forehead, adding vividness to the face. On either side of the face, a slender band is used to make the face have a narrower and better outline. Mei’s makeup innovation has long been adopted as a new normal. And the innovation to the makeup of the young women role soon spread to other facial makeup of the stereotypical roles in Peking Opera. It also spread to other regional opera genres.

Why did Mei introduce this new makeup to the face? Chi Jun, a vice secretary-in-general of China Mei Lanfang Institute, has an explanation. No matter how a man looks like, he looks like a man. In order to look like a woman on the stage, a series of technical changes must be done in makeup. The shape of the face, the hairstyle, the facial features, and the skin color must be altered. A man’s face is like a piece of blank paper and makeup is applied to turn the face into an artwork. Such a face isn’t a female face one sees in everyday life, but it is a romanticized face best for Peking Opera performance. And now theatergoers across the country have long been accustomed to such a face. And young female Peking Opera artists of today also love this facial makeup, an innovation introduced by Mei Lanfang about 100 years ago.