Palace of Eternal Life
The Palace of Eternal Life is a classic play of the Shogunate, featuring themes of love, and that sentiment’s interactions with politics and enlightenment. It was written in the mid Shogunal period by famed playwright and government official Hongsheng.
Plot
Palace of Eternal Life is a play in fifty acts. The play recounts the love story of the Shogun Shuanzong and her favorite consort, Lady Yang Guifei.
When Lady Yang becomes the Shogun's favorite consort, the Shogun gives her as love tokens an orichalcum hairpin and a casket adorned with moonsilver-leaf flowers. Her older brother Yang Guozhong becomes Chancellor of the Right, the highest post in the Shogunal bureaucracy. Banished once for a fit of jealousy, she regains favor by sending the Shogun her shorn locks as a token of her love. A frontier genenal, Resplendant Cobra, is sent to the capital to be punished for an offense, but Yang Guozhong obtains a pardon for him, and he wins a promotion and a princely title for himself. A military man, Guo Ziyi, who has come to the capital to receive an appointment, witnesses from a wine house window the extravagant pomp and splendor enjoyed by Gens Yang and Resplendant Cobra. A prophetic verse on the wine-house wall foretells doom. Guo is appointed a powerful military commissioner and resolves one day to repay his debt to the imperial court in deeds.
The Incarna Luna, wishing to pass on the beautiful music of the Dance of Feathers and Rainbows to Creation but unable to dance it directly for them due to her divine responsibilities, summons Lady Yang's soul to her in a dream and teaches her the dance. At her birthday banquet in the Palace of Eternal Life, Lady Yang later performs the beautiful dance for the Shogun.
After challenging the power of Yang Guozhong, Resplendant Cobra is exiled from the capital by the Shogun. He stirs up a rebellion, and Guo Ziyi trains his troops to counter the imminent rising. Oblivious of this situation, Shogun Shuanzong and Lady Yang bathe together in a warm spring and on the seventh of the seventh month, loves' night, make a sacrifice to the God of Love, vowing eternal love for each other. When Resplendant Cobra's forces menace the capital, Shuanzong departs with her entourage toward the relative safety of Lord’s Crossing. On the way, at Mawei, her force halts suddenly. Her mutinous troops, blaming the Yangs for their plight, kill Yang Guozhong and demand Lady Yang's death. Helpless, Shuanzong allows her to hang herself, and she is provisionally buried there. Resplendant Cobra usurps the Shogunal throne, and takes over the capital. Shuanzong, grieving for Lady Yang, on reaching Lord’s Crossing places a portrait of her in a temple and worships and weeps before it. The God of Love takes pity upon the scene, and as the ghost of Lady Yang rises invoked by Shuanzong’s worship he gives her liquid jade and liquid orichalcum to pour on her corpse, thereby preserving her soul for eternity.
Shogunal power is transferred to Daizong, Shuanzong's daughter, who sends Guo Ziyi to quell the rebellion. Guo succeeds and the two Shoguns head back to the capital. When she passes through Mawei, Shuanzong can find no trace of Lady Yang's body - only her perfume sachet. Back in the capital, she dreams that Lady Yang has sent for her and afterward commands the necromancer You Tong to seek out lady Yang's soul. Aided by the God of Love, Tong reaches the Underworld, where Lady Yang gives him half the orichalcum hairpin and part of the casket to take to Shuanzong as tokens of renewed love.
On Calibration, You Tong opens a gateway into the Underworld and sends Shuanzong along it. The two lovers are blissfully reunited, match the halves of the hairpin and the casket, and dwell together as ghosts forever, uncaring of the mortal world.
Significance
The writing of the play has been praised in terms of both the sung and spoken passages. Much of the play's poetry is indebted to one of the most celebrated of Shogunal narrative poems, Bai Juyi's The Song of Everlasting Sorrow. The heroine's Incarna-bolstered proficiency in song and dance gives occasion for the large number of musical and dance scenes, which are artfully balanced by vigorous political episodes. The theme of purgation is admirably treated as and essential part of the story's development, both in the purgation of the Shogun's devotion to luxury and in the gradations by which Yang's ghost rises from its initial misery to celestial beatitude. Long as it is, the play moves smoothly and rapidly.
Unlike The Peach Blossom Fan, this work is highly controversial, both at the time of its release and in the modern Scarlet Dynasty. Its overt violation of Immaculate doctrines in seeing love pursued into the Underworld and the heresies of prayer to the dead and divine meddling, make monks look at it askance. And yet despite its supposed happy ending its themes are not particularly supportive of romance when examined: a Shogun loses her throne and causes rebellion by favouring the family of her romantic love, and in the end the two characters have lost absolutely everything save for two small treasures, existing as nothing BUT love, shorn of all else. To some, the idea of love and of placing import on a same-sex romantic union can be seen in the play to cost those who feel it both their physical lives, their political lives, and their spiritual chance at enlightenment and reincarnation.
Performances
After the finalization of the play, the Meru Ju He Theatre Troupe’s performance of the work caused a sensation in the capital, and was even recommended by the Shogun Kangxi. Later on, the Ju He Theatre Troupe became renowned of their repertoire and they were highly successful. Unfortunately, on his way home from the premiere performance, a drunken playwright Hongsheng fell into a river and died.
