A City Inscribed event. Registration is strongly encouraged.
Reception @ 6 pm
Live performance of excerpts in full costumes @ 6:30 pm
Free and open to the public
The list of Cantonese operas includes thousands of titles. But only a handful of them stand the test of time. Amongst these gems, Tang Disheng’s The Flower Princess (Di nü hua 帝女花) is a particularly successful one. The playwright created a world where politics and ethics, patriotism and romantic love, intertwine. The work is far more than entertainment, with its cultural influence growing rather than waning over time. Adaptions of the opera in different art forms have been produced and reproduced frequently, contributing to the various cultural-political imaginations of Hong Kong.
Kwok Kou Leonard Chan is Chair Professor of Chinese Literature and Director of the Research Centre for Chinese Literature and Literary Culture at the Education University of Hong Kong. His fields of interest are: Chinese poetry and poetics, literary historiography, and Hong Kong literature. His recent works include The Conception of Lyrical China (2013) and Hong Kong in Its History of Lyricism (2016). He is also the chief editor of the Compendium of Hong Kong Literature 1919-1949 (12 vols; 2014–2016).
This lecture is organized by the Hong Kong Studies Initiative and co-sponsored by the Department of Asian Studies, the Modern Chinese Culture Seminar, the Centre for Chinese Research, the Department of History, the School of Music, the Asian Library, the Youth Collaborative for Chinatown, and the Vancouver Cantonese Opera.
