As a literary genre, Sanqu flourished in the Yuan Dynasty, and after the fall of the Yuan Dynasty, it declined rapidly, Rao is now, when it comes to Chinese literature, the sense of existence of Yuanqu is far less than that of Tang poetry and Song Poetry.
But in the West, yuanqu has a profound impact, and it can even be said that Chinese yuanqu has reshaped Western culture.
This is not my nonsense, and look at the big coffee fans of Chinese yuanqu -
The French thinker Voltaire and the British playwright Mou Fei are all fans of Ji Junxiang, the German drama master Schiller most wanted to go in his life to China, and the plough used by Chinese farmers for farming has even been described by Western writers as "an enlightenment tool for thousands of people to create happiness." ”
However, in the current era of Western cultural centrism, the history of learning from China in the West has been deliberately covered up.
The American scholar Welleck once ridiculed the Western practice of "keeping cultural accounts": all the research of Western comparative literature is only to prove the "influence" of the country on the literature of other countries.
As a result, people only see that Chinese literature owes the "cultural account" to the West, but They turn a blind eye to The Shaping of Western literature in Chinese literature, which can also be regarded as another cultural double standard.
How bullish is the Chinese Yuanqu?
Let's turn the finger of history back to around the 17th century.
A Chinese meta-drama that sensationalized the whole of Europe.
Schools of thought, including classicism, enlightenment, and romanticism, have all become fans of Chinese miscellaneous dramas, including Voltaire.
He lived in isolation for several months and adapted the miscellaneous drama "The Orphan of Zhao" by Ji Junxiang, a Chinese yuanqu master, and named it "Chinese Orphan". On August 20, 1755, the orphans of Zhao performed in Paris, and the Paper in Luoyang was expensive and it was difficult to find a ticket, creating a miracle in the history of Parisian theater.
Please also note that Voltaire will also add a subtitle of "The Morality of Confucius" to this play, in his eyes, Confucius is an Enlightenment thinker, and his humanism is the most needed civilization spirit in Europe.
Further back, as early as 1736, the English translation of "The Orphan of Zhao", which was included in Duhed's "General History of China", triggered a great shock of ideas on the European continent.
After Voltaire, the British playwright Mou Fei also adapted "The Orphan of Zhao", which was also named "Orphan of China". For a time, the two "Orphans of China", which dominated the screen in Europe and the west, were all the rage, and also made Chinese drama write a brilliant page in Europe, and laid the groundwork for the "Muzhonghua" of European drama after it.
In 1802, the German drama master Schiller's Turandot, the Princess of China, was performed in Weimar.
Even hundreds of years later, the show is still enduring, and even a while ago, it was put on the screen by Chinese.
It should be noted that Turandot did not take Chinese scripts, but wrote them entirely on the basis of European imaginations about China. For Europeans at this time, China was like an ideal country, and Chinese culture was called "the most benign civilization." ”
However, Turandot's imaginary Chinese story is very unChinese. In simple terms, the Chinese princess Turandot came up with three riddles, the guesser could propose to the princess, and the wrong guess was killed, and finally, the Tatar prince Karaf answered the riddle and finally impressed the princess.
In fact, according to scholars' research, this story is based on the "One Thousand and One Nights" in the Arab world, schiller is obviously zhang guan Li wear, and it can be seen from the side that Schiller has a lot of respect for Chinese culture!
Schiller created Turandot with the fundamental purpose of using Chinese wisdom to enlighten European thought. The mysteries of "Turandot's Three Mysteries" are: the eye, the plough, and the rainbow. Among them, the "plough" was given the symbolic meaning of Chinese civilization by Schiller.
The European Enlightenment, represented by Quesnay, highly admired China's political system and agricultural production, believing that agriculture was the foundation of the national economy, and that "if Europe wants a better civilization, it must take up the plough like a Chinese."
As we all know, ancient emperors, at the beginning of the new year, personally helped the plough to plough, in the 18th century in Europe, the European kings even had a model - in 1756, the French king Louis XV imitated the Chinese emperor and led the team to cultivate the fields.
It can also be seen that Yuanqu and even Chinese culture have a great influence on the West.
In the past few thousand years, China has been the leader of the world most of the time, but after modern times, Western cultural centrism is rampant, and Europeans who once admired China have also dressed up history, and this history of European star-chasing China has been buried in the old paper pile.