The Captive’s Revenge: The Taiping Civil War as Drama

Introduction Huang Shuhua (style name Wanli, 1847–64), the protagonist of Xu E’s (style name Wuge, 1844–1903, juren 1885) play Lihua xue (Snow on the Pear Blos­ som/The Pear Blossom Rights Wrongs, completed 1886 and published 1887) is an exile in three stages: originally a flower-spirit expelled from heaven, she grows up in a scholar’s family in the outskirts of the Taiping capital Tianjing (Nanjing).1 In her childhood the family kept a low profile, maintaining loyalty to the Qing while living in the Taiping capital and making a living by farming. They thus were displaced in both social class position and in political allegiance. During the Qing reconquest of Nanjing, a soldier slaughters her family and takes her far from home. In an inn in Hunan she leaves a written record of her plight, and subsequently succeeds in killing her abductors and herself. She thus becomes a martyr of the Taiping civil war after the time for