Heaven is High and the Emperor Far Away, a Play

by Hock G. Tjoa

Overview

This is the story of Shopkeeper Wang and the friends, the regulars, and the transients who visit the Yutai (Abundant Peace) Teahouse, a Beijing neighborhood institution, during the decades of the early twentieth century. The setting is intimate and the atmosphere, action and themes, Dickensian. The play is adapted from Teahouse by Lao She (Shu Qingchun) Chinese original published in 1957. The original has been reduced from three acts, set over fifty years, with nearly seventy characters to a play in two acts set about twenty-five years apart with a cast of twenty (some multiple casting). It tries to reproduce as much as possible the characters and actions that Lao She created for a world of those living at the bottom edge of civility and into which corruption and exploitation roughly intrude. This is a world of the poor caught up in the spin-cycle of world historical change.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940032861546
Publisher:	Hock G. Tjoa
Publication date:	11/11/2011
Sold by:	Smashwords
Format:	eBook
File size:	187 KB
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Hock was born in Singapore to Chinese parents. He studied history and classics at Brandeis and Harvard and taught the History of Modern Europe and of Asian Political Thought at the University of Malaya. He has published George Henry Lewes, a Victorian mind and "The Social and Political ideas of Tan Cheng Lock." He is married with two adult daughters and now lives in the foothills of the Sierra Nevadas. In 2010, he published a selection and translation of the Chinese classic, The Romance of the Three Kingdoms under the title "The Battle of Chibi." In 2011, he is publishing an adaptation of Lao She's "Teahouse" as "Heaven is High and the Emperor Far Away, a Play." He published "The Chinese Spymaster," the first of a planned three volume series, and "The Ingenious Judge Dee" in 2013