The Amorous Ghost, The Vengeful Ghost: Text, Body, and Cross-genre Adaptation in Huozhuo Sanlang (Taking Sanlang’s Life)

This thesis examines how Huozhuo Sanlang (Taking Sanlang’s Life), a widely circulated Chinese opera scene that descends from Xu Zichang’s late-Ming Shuihu Ji, transforms its ghost protagonist Yan Xijiao from an amorous to a vengeful ghost. It argues that this shift is not merely a thematic variation across regional stagings, but a structural logic embedded in the text and intensified through the page-to-stage migrations of late imperial theatre. Through close reading of Minggan and related textual versions, alongside comparative analysis of twenty-three modern recordings spanning multiple regional opera traditions, the thesis shows that passion and vengeance remain structurally entangled, yet are organized by a directional conversion through which amorous address tends toward vengeful closure. It further argues that performance is the primary site where this conversion becomes legible: through gesture, costume, and bodily contact, different traditions reinterpret and recreate the scene’s tonal orientations by staging two bodies moving along the unstable boundary between the living and the dead, making desire and coercion continuously negotiable onstage. By reading text and performance together, this thesis advances an embodied dramaturgical approach that places performance at the center of meaning-making in Chinese opera studies.