The White-Haired Girl
백모녀
A Chinese opera first staged in Yan'an in 1945, with its film (1950), ballet (1964-65) and other versions. Xi'er, a peasant's daughter taken by a landlord over a debt, flees to the mountains, lives on until her hair turns white and is rescued by the Eighth Route Army. In the Cultural Revolution the ballet became one of the model operas.
In depth
What is the story?
On New Year's Eve the tenant farmer Yang Bailao creeps home after dodging his creditors. The landlord Huang Shiren demands his daughter Xi'er in place of the debt. Cornered, Yang kills himself that night by drinking the brine used for making tofu.
Dragged to the Huang house, Xi'er is raped by Huang, escapes and hides in a mountain cave. She lives on temple offerings until her hair turns entirely white, and the villagers who glimpse her take her for a white-haired fairy. Years later her sweetheart Dachun returns as an Eighth Route Army soldier and finds her in the cave. The villagers denounce the Huangs together with her, and she comes out of the dark into the sun.
The theme is known by one sentence, added to the chorus in late 1945: "The old society turned people into ghosts; the new society turns ghosts into people."
How was it made?
It began as folklore. In the late 1930s the Shanxi-Chahar-Hebei border region told of a white-haired immortal living in a cave, and in May 1944 a reporter wrote about it to Zhou Yang. After Mao's Yan'an Talks of 1942, artists were trying to retell peasants' stories in forms peasants understood. He Jingzhi and Ding Yi of the Lu Xun Academy wrote the libretto, and Ma Ke and others the score, built on folk tunes such as "Xiao baicai". It opened on 28 April 1945, the eve of the Seventh Party Congress, in the Central Party School hall in Yan'an.
It was a triumph, yet the stage kept changing. Early performances ended with the landlord's arrest, and party leaders sent the creators a note asking that the landlord be executed at the end. In the first version, pregnant from the rape, Xi'er briefly hopes to marry Huang and runs away only when she learns she is to be sold off. Such wavering faded in later versions.
What changed from version to version?
The 1950 film (directed by Shui Hua and Wang Bin, with Tian Hua) coincided with land reform and became a textbook for "speaking bitterness", and it won a special prize at Karlovy Vary in Czechoslovakia in 1951. Remarkably, Japanese staff left over from the Manchukuo film company worked on the crew under Chinese names. Japan's Matsuyama Ballet made a ballet from the film in 1955, opening a channel of Sino-Japanese "ballet diplomacy".
The Shanghai Ballet School's version (1964-65) became a model opera under Jiang Qing. Since suicide counted as political submission, Yang now resists with his shoulder pole and is shot dead; love between Xi'er and Dachun gives way to class feeling; and in the 1972 film Xi'er fights off the rape and escapes. As one assessment has it, the landlord could barely menace the peasants any more, which robbed the show of the original's emotional charge. Its appeal faded after reform began, a 1981 performance in Qingdao was booed, and in 2015 a revival tour, launched after Xi Jinping's speech at the forum on literature and art, began in Yan'an.