How 1920s Shanghai Birthed the Modern Female Idol

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Li Minghui and her father, the writer and director Li Jinhui, took on centuries of tradition to craft an image of the “new woman” that was both glamorous and wholesome. On a tranquil night in 1922, the stage of Shanghai’s Central Theater witnessed a quiet gender revolution. It was the premiere of the spoken drama “Ms. Orchid,” as produced by Shanghai Experiment Troupe, and an unlikely figure graced center stage as the eponymous heroine: a 12-year-old actress named Li Minghui. To audiences today, the alignment of sex between performer and character seems natural. Yet for director Li Jinhui — Li Minghui’s father — the casting was a daring experiment, if not an entirely iconoclastic act, as the appearance of a female performer in her biological sex challenged centuries of tradition of male impersonation in Chinese theater. In that tradition, all female characters onstage were played by men, and women were excluded from the world of drama. Unsurprisingly, almost from the in ………………………………