Autumn in the Han Palace

Wang Zhaojun, the palace beauty, is sent as a bride to the Xiongnu khan; the Han emperor can only watch. Autumn in the Han Palace is a short, sorrowful Yuan drama of love, politics and the frontier. Ma Zhiyuan's arias for the grieving emperor and the wild geese crossing the autumn sky are among the most famous in Yuan drama. This is a complete new English translation, with names in modern pinyin and the text rendered as plain, readable English prose. Stage directions and role names are kept, and the sung arias are rendered as verse, so the play can be read like a script or imagined on the stage. Chinese drama mixes speech, song, comedy and spectacle; the plays were performed for centuries, and their stories are still known to every Chinese reader.