"Celebrating and Rewarding Shengping" is a collection of the National Library of China, with two volumes and 97 painted opera characters, showing the makeup of 9 different theatrical performances. The drawings are beautifully drawn and colorful. This album has neither a written record of the age nor the name of the painter, and is generally recorded as a calligrapher and painter of the Qing Dynasty Inner Mansion Calligraphy and Painting Office. According to the analysis, it should be painted in the Qing Xianfeng and Tongzhi periods (1851-1874). Painted on silk, each side is 32.8 cm high and 23.6 cm wide. Each figure is 26.4 centimeters high and 21.1 centimeters wide.
The Shengping Department was the institution in charge of the court in charge of the opera troupe in the Qing Dynasty. The former site of the Shengping Department includes the former Beijing No. 6 Middle School and No. 28 Middle School, which are now Beijing No. 161 Middle School. Shengping Department Theater is a well-preserved group of buildings, construction area of about 200 square meters, this theater is a group of courtyards, there is a north-facing theater, the north room of the courtyard out of the Xuan, suitable for performances. It is a key cultural relic under protection in Beijing.
The Qing court drama followed the Ming system, and was undertaken by the female music of the teaching workshop. In the eighth year of Shunzhi (1651), it was changed to an internal supervisor. Since the twentieth year of Kangxi (1681), it has gradually been called "Nanfu" and "Jingshan". In the middle of the Kangxi Dynasty, Nanfu and Jingshan had become formal acting institutions. During the Qianlong period, Nanfu set up internal and external schools. Jingshan has a chief manager, a foreign school, and a new small class, whose members are the male and female elites brought back to the palace from Suzhou during Emperor Qianlong's southern tour. The internal school is composed of eunuchs who practice art in the palace, and the outer school is composed of children of civil nationality, mainly composed of artists selected from Suzhou and Hangzhou and other places to enter the palace, and there are also a few children of the Eight Banners who practice art. The internal and external schools perform in the palace all year round, with a total number of about 1,450 people, and the grand occasion is unprecedented.
All the repertoire painted in "Celebration and Shengping" belongs to random bullets, including 12 pieces of "Sizhou City", 8 pieces of "Taiping Bridge", 10 pieces of "Empty City Strategy", 6 pieces of "Jade Linglong", 10 pieces of "Luoma Lake", 23 pieces of "Putianle", 6 pieces of "Qianqiu Ridge", 12 pieces of "Cai Tianhua" and 10 pieces of "Anti-Xiliang". The Palace Museum and the Mei Lanfang Memorial Hall have a number of paintings of opera characters from the Shengping Administration, but the difference is that the National Library and the Mei Lanfang Memorial Hall have a line of small letters under the names of the characters in each play: "Wear your face like this." But the Forbidden City does not. Mr. Zhu Jiaming's research believes that the Mei Lanfang Memorial Hall and the national map part of Pu Yi were scattered from the palace before leaving the palace, and the first buyer saw that there was no painter's signature on the painting, and there was no description of the purpose, so he could not prove that it came from the palace, so he added such a line of text, hoping to make people naturally think that this is the standard dress and makeup for acting in the palace, because its historical value has greatly increased.
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