The story of the Bar Kokhba revolt in the 2nd century CE culminates in the rabbi Judah ben Baba initiates 5 new rabbis and sends them away before being killed himself. (The Talmud, Arsène Darmesteter, 1897.) This story bears some similarity to the 5 disciples of Shaolin who fled the burning temple and went on [...]

There's a lot of radioactive waste coming out in the form of shows and movies. They take our favorite childhood shows and movies, turn them inside out, impale our heroes, and produce radioactive beasts. These shows don't want us to love them. They want our attention. They do this through a clever gimmick that I [...]

Two different Wushu books written in China both have not-so-covert criticism of Mao's Cultural Revolution, both written near the end of the Deng Xiaoping era of 1979-1997. This period seemed to produce some actual history and science surrounding Wushu. Meanwhile, Maoists were still defending Mao's efforts to crush the "Four Olds: Old Ideas, Old Culture, [...]

A humorous quote from a late 19th century editor Fitch who compared Cantonese Opera to the "clatter of the train". Cantonese Opera had come stateside and he and other commentators judged it as far below the likes of a Shakespeare play. There are two contexts for this: first off, this was an era of US [...]

The Qianlong court in the late 1700s banned women from performing live theater in China in an effort to "uphold morality." Men therefore impersonated females in the "Huadan" role, like the one played by Lam Ching Ying in The Prodigal Son (1981). European theater has a similar tradition of men performing female roles, a tradition [...]

Some of the early pioneers that helped in transitioning southern opera from Mandarin to Cantonese. Also note that there were various "amateur troupes... referred to as zhishi ban, they advocated a reformist if not a pro-revolutionary agenda, hoping to harness popular theater for the sake of political and social change in China." These were the [...]

Chinese history is full of myths that are difficult to disentangle, and often Buddhist myths that are intertwined with Taoism so much that you don't know where one influence ends and the other begins. Fortunately there was a host of skeptics, such as this Hu Yin of the Sun dynasty, which following the very superstitious [...]