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       In the Song Dynasty, in Peach Blossoms Village, Mr. Liu and his wife deeply loved their only daughter, Yu-Yan. When Yu-Yan grew up to a suitable age to be betrothed, Mr. and Mrs. Liu decided to let Yu-Yan go to the Hua-Tian Festival in the company of her maid, Chun-Lan, so that she could meet a suitable young man. 

        At Du-Xian Bridge, Yu-Yan and her maid met a poor scholar, Bian Ji, who made a living by selling his paintings and calligraphy works. The scholar was good looking and well mannered, so Chun-Lan tried to match Yu Yan with him by asking Bian Ji to adorn Yu Yan’s fan, and thus the two really fell in love. Chun-Lan then told Bian Ji that she would tell her master and mistress about him when they got home and advised Bian to wait at his stall until the master sent someone for him. However, Bian Ji for some reason needed to leave for a while, and it turned out that Zhou Tong, a local rogue, came to his stall when he was gone. Meanwhile, the old servant of the Lius arrived and wanted to bring the villain home. Zhou Tong grasped the chance and announced that he was obliged to marry Yu-Yan even after the Lius found out that they had made a mistake. As the Lius became increasingly anxious and worried over this, Chun-Lan hurried back to Bridge Du-Xian and asked Bian Ji to disguise himself as a woman and go to the Liu’s house at night to try to work out a solution. Chun-Lan then went home, and with the help of Yu-Yan, gathered some costumes to use for Bian Ji’s disguise. They needed a pair of shoes that would fit him, and so the two hurriedly tried to make a pair of shoes. But as they could not make the pair of new shoes for Bian Ji in time, they were forced to give him Mrs. Liu’s slippers for him to disguise as a woman and come to Liu’s house. Unexpectedly, a long string of incidents occur…
 

        Mistakes at Hua-Tian is a wonderful comedy which focuses on a series of coincidences and mistakes, thus another title of the opera is Eight Mistakes at Hua-Tian. It originated from a bangzi opera featuring the role of huadan (a lively female role), but the original opera ends at the point at which Zhou Tong mistakenly kidnaps Bian Ji. Xun Huei-Sheng added a beginning and an ending to the opera according to the chapter: “The rogue gets drunk and lies under the golden tent, and the rude officer makes a mess at Peach Blossoms Village” in The Water Margin for the Chinese opera which became a representative performance of the Xun School. Many parts of the opera feature the maid, Chun-Lan, who has been played by many famous actors specializing in huadan roles. This performance, like the original play, ends when Zhou Tong takes Bian Ji away by mistake, and the character Chun-Lan is played by two different actors, one for the first half, and the other for the second half, so the audience can see the two interpretations of the same character by two actors with different characteristics.

        When watching the performance, one should pay close attention to the speeches, steps, and gestures of the huadan role, who appears in three major scenes. First, in the scene “Selecting a Husband at Hua-Tian”, Chun-Lan demonstrates her innocent and fun personality when she tries to pass on some messages between Bian Ji and Yu Yan, and when the two become attracted to each other, Chun-Lan has to catch the attention of both as if she were pulling some threads connecting them. So when she moves with the “threads”, the two move involuntarily as well. This is a fun scene to watch. Then when the rogue was taken into the Liu house by mistake, Chun-Lan has to hurry back to Hua-Tian to discuss how to fix things with Bian Ji.   She first plays a joke on him by telling him a lie that her young mistress fell from the second floor. Then, to test his love for Yu-Yan, she explains the situation and discusses with him the strategy of disguising himself as a woman. The actor who plays this role has to speak rhythmically to allow the audience to appreciate the beauty of her language. Before she leaves the stage, she chants the lively and smooth-sounding tune of xipi-liu-shui: “It is not that I like nagging and giving advice…” bringing the scene to its climax. In the final scene, when she is in a hurry to make a pair of embroidered shoes for Bian Ji, she first pounds a nail into a wall with a small hammer, than she pulls out a tangled mass of string and sorts it out before putting it on the nail and twisting the string into a thick thread before threading a needle and starting to sew. The two women show the detailed process of sewing shoes without a needle or thread.