長生殿 (The Palace of Eternal Life)

In the bloom of China's golden age, Emperor Xuanzong neglects his empire for the enchanting Yang Guifei. They swear eternal devotion in the Palace of Eternal Life, their love becoming the envy of heaven itself. But when rebellion tears the Tang dynasty apart, the emperor faces an impossible choice at Mawei Ridge: his throne or his beloved. What follows is a haunting meditation on desire, power, and the price of passion. Unlike earlier tellings of this legendary tragedy, Sheng Hong gives Yang Guifei a voice that resonates across centuries, painting her not as a mere victim of history but as a woman of fierce interiority and quiet dignity. The emperor, too, emerges as something rarer in Chinese literature: a ruler undone not by enemies, but by the weight of his own heart. Poetic, devastating, and gorgeously strange, this seventeenth-century zaju play asks what survives when everything else is lost.