For the painted
role, the different colors of the faces represent different characters
and personality. Yellow and white represent cunning, red stands
for uprightness and loyalty, black means valor and wisdom, blue
and green indicate the vigorous and enterprising character of
rebellious heroes and gold and silver represent mystic or super-natural
power.
A plastic art peculiar to the Chinese stage, the facial makeups
are various designs of lines and coloured patches painted on the
faces of certain operatic characters. They follow traditionally
fixed patterns for specific types to highlight the disposition
and quality in the personages so that the audience may immediately
know whether they are heroes or villains, whether they are kind
or treacherous and wicked. The following describes briefly the
major categories of facial makeups:
The
red face shows bravery, uprightness and loyalty. A typical "red
face" is Guan Yu, general of the period of the Three Kingdoms
(220-280) , famed for his faithfulness to his Emperor, Liu Bei.
The
reddish purple face likewise shows a just and noble character,
for instance, Lian Po in the well-known play Jiang Xiang He (The
General Reconciled with the Chief Minister), in which General
Lian was proud and impetuous and quarrelled with the chief minister
to whom he was ultimately reconciled.
The
black face indicates either a rough and bold character or an impartial
and selfless personality. Typical of the former are General Zhang
Fei (of the Romance of the Three Kingdoms) and Li Kui (of Water
Margin), and of the latter is Bao Gong (alias Bao Zheng), the
semi-legendary fearless and impartial judge of the Song Dynasty.
Commonly
seen on the stage is the white face for the powerful villain.
It highlights all that is bad in human nature: cunning, craftiness,
treachery. Typical characters are Cao Cao, powerful and cruel
prime minister in the time of the Three Kingdoms, and Qin Hui,
treacherous Song Dynasty prime minister who put the national hero
Yue Fei to death.
All the above facial
makeups belong to a category of characters collectively called
Jing--all
males with pronounced personal traits.
For the clowns
of traditional drama, there is a special makeup called
Xiaohualian (the petty painted face), i.e., a small patch of chalk
on and around the nose to show a mean and secretive character,
such as Jiang Gan of the Three Kingdoms who fawned upon Cao Cao.
It is also occasionally painted on a young page or an ordinary
workingman, often to enhance his wit, humour or jesting and to
enliven up the performance.
Another
type of players , called "acrobatic clowns" (wuchou), are also
touched up with a tiny patch of white on the tip of the nose to
show an astute mind, a keen and quick wit. Several of the stage
heroes from the novel Water Margin are made up in this way.
The facial makeups
date a long time back to the Song (960-1279) and Yuan (1271-1368)
dynasties at least. Simple patterns of painted faces are found
in tomb murals of that age. During the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644),
improvements were made in the skills of drawing and in preparing
the paints, leading to the whole set of colourful facial patterns
that we see in today's Peking Opera.