Guan Hanqing was an extremely talented and prolific playwright, responsible for more than sixty dramas of which eighteen are extant, plus many lyric pieces. He also participated in performances himself. Guan Hanqing’s dramas and theatrical activities typified the separate cultural orbit of Chinese intelligentsia under alien rule.
Background
Guan Hanqing lived most of his life in the Yuan capital. He has been described as among the most prolific and highly regarded dramatists of the Yuan period. Guan spent much of his later life in Dadu and produced about 65 plays, mostly in the vernacular of the time. Guan Hanqing led a turbulent and miserable life in his younger days. As a scholar he was well-versed in the classics, such as the Zhouyi and the ShangShu. He often used phrases from the classics in his plays. However, Guan Hanqing did not have a successful official career as the imperial examinations had been abolished and the status of scholars had deteriorated.
Career
Guan Hanqing’s dramas, written mostly in the vernacular and widely popular, covered a variety of subjects, including historical romances, legal cases, love stories and family and social incidents. Through his theatrical productions, Guan Hanqing became such a celebrity among contemporary Han Chinese that his name was a sobriquet for other successful dramatists. He was considered the founder of Yuan drama and the supreme exponent of the genre, the first fully fledged drama in Chinese literary history.
Views
Guan Hanqing is regarded as a pioneer feminist because of his dramas is his many sympathetic accounts of woman characters. He was born with an optimistic nature.