The Peony Pavilion in 10 Minutes: A Love So Absolute It Brought the Dead Back to Life

The Opening: A Garden in Bloom Starts It All

Did you ever have a moment like this as a kid: the backyard, the edge of the school field, some path you'd walked a hundred times — and suddenly the flowers are blooming so hard you just stop and stare, something wordless in you gets struck dead center, and the whole world hits pause. The opening scene of The Peony Pavilion is that moment blown up a thousand times. Du Liniang, the young daughter of the prefect, is half pushed, half coaxed by her maid Chunxiang into the family's back garden for the very first time — the one place her father, Du Bao, has always forbidden her to enter. Peonies, herbaceous peonies, crab apple blossoms, spring piled up so thick it seems about to spill over the walls. She stands there, and something in her stops. She goes back inside and falls ill. It sounds like a stock opening — girl catches spring fever. But Tang Xianzu's real feat is turning that fever into a woman's actual awakening, her actual death, and her actual resurrection.

What Kind of Book Is This: The Great Romantic Drama of the Ming

The Peony Pavilion — in full, The Peony Pavilion, or The Return of the Soul — was written in the late sixteenth century by the Ming dynasty playwright Tang Xianzu. He was about forty-eight, had just resigned his post as magistrate of Suichang, Zhejiang, and gone home to write it in his study, the Yuming Hall, in Linchuan, Jiangxi. It is the crown jewel of what's known as the Four Dreams of Linchuan, Tang Xianzu's four major plays, and the high-water mark of romanticism in the whole history of Chinese theater. It was written within a few years of Shakespeare's own prime, and the two are often paired: Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet on one side, Tang Xianzu's Du Liniang and Liu Mengmei on the other. For six hundred years the Kunqu opera stage has kept this play alive, and scenes like the Garden Stroll and Interrupted Dream, or Finding the Portrait, still get performed on their own today. One sentence for why it's remembered: it made love outweigh death, outweigh propriety, and outweigh the emperor himself.

People and World: The Prefect's Daughter, the Poor Scholar, the Rigid Old Father

The story is set in the Southern Song, with fighting between north and south never really stopping and the shadow of the invading Jin armies hanging over everyone — that undertone of a world at war runs quietly beneath the second half of the story. There are only a handful of people who matter here. Du Liniang, the treasured only daughter of Du Bao, the prefect of Nan'an. She's been kept shut in her own chambers since childhood, reading the Book of Songs, and has never even seen what her family's back garden looks like. She is the kind of woman propriety has clamped down on hardest, and whose inner fire burns hottest for it. Liu Mengmei, a poor scholar from Lingnan, stops over in Nan'an on his way to sit the imperial examinations in Lin'an. He took the name Mengmei — dreaming of a plum tree — after a strange dream in which a woman stood beneath a plum tree; he changed his name because of it. Chunxiang, Liniang's personal maid, blunt and gutsier than her mistress. She's the one who drags Liniang into the back garden in the first place — without Chunxiang, the story never even starts. Du Bao, Liniang's father and the prefect of Nan'an, a middle-aged man with the word propriety branded into his forehead. He's later promoted to Pacification Commissioner of Huaiyang and put in command of troops fighting the Jin — which is exactly what makes him such a hard case when the story reaches the imperial court.

How the Plot Runs: The Garden, the Dream, the Resurrection, the Imperial Court

The Garden Stroll and the Interrupted Dream: Struck by Spring

In the end, the highest power in the land steps in. The emperor himself presides over the case of Du Liniang's return from the dead, right there in the imperial court. He hears every piece of evidence — the painting, the poem, the epitaph Du Bao wrote in his own hand, Sister Stone's testimony — and then Liniang herself appears in court to testify. The emperor brings down the gavel: this is real, and this marriage stands. However unwilling Du Bao is, the words imperial decree leave him no choice but to accept his son-in-law. What the writing is doing: Tang Xianzu's sly move here is making imperial authority itself vouch for true love. The emperor isn't cast as an antagonist — he's cast as an authority higher than Du Bao, and that higher authority's ruling comes down on the side of feeling. In effect, Tang Xianzu borrows the emperor's own voice to announce that propriety has bowed to love. Liniang and Liu Mengmei are finally recognized as husband and wife, and the family closes out on a reunion in which true love has overridden propriety.