Staging the world in late-Qing China: Globe, nation, and race in a 1904 Beijing Opera

This essay takes the first Beijing Opera of China's early twentieth-century reformist opera movement as an exemplary text and performative context through which to analyze the production of a new historical consciousness in late-Qing China (1895-1911). Performed in Shanghai in 1904, the opera is centrally concerned with the modern partition of Poland. The essay argues that the opera's interpretation of history is a deliberate intervention into China's turbulent socio-political atmosphere and helps mark an attempt to popularize through performance a new synchronic global consciousness that links China's contemporary history to the non-Western world of global transformation at the turn of the twentieth century.