Mei Lanfang’s visit and performances abroad brought him to Japan in 1919, to the United States in 1930, and to the Soviet Union in 1935. While these performances helped introduce Peking Opera abroad and earned Mei Lanfang universal praise and admiration, they more importantly gave Peking opera an opportunity to highlight, for international audiences, its new cultural identity, to present its art as a modern aesthetic system, and to project its claim to historical authenticity. The Peking opera presented there was not a form preserved from time immemorial, but the outcome of an intense ideological debate among the younger generation of the cultural elite within China as to the validity of traditional Chinese theater with the most radical opinion denouncing Peking opera as the dregs of traditional society, bond up with everything dispicable of the old social order and values, and their opponents boldly claiming the modern relevancy of the form by actively engaging with international performing arts as present in Europe, the US and Japan. Mei Lanfang’s carefully prepared international tours with the radically reformed Peking opera were to decide this debate and the domestic fate of genre altogether through international recognition by audiences that included foreign cultural elite and much of the international avant-garde. In this sense, these tours were the catalyst and the crowning glory of the modernization of the genre. The talk will explore these tours in the context of the shifting self- definition, self-narration and self-historization of Peking opera in its struggle to become China’s “national opera.”

*Image:“Mei Lan-fang, China’s Greatest Actor Here for His American Premiere.” Drawing, 1930. Published in New York Herald Triune, February, 1930.