Hui Lan Ji (The Story of Chalk Circle

Li Xingdao (also Li Hsing-tao)

Li Xingdao was the author of Hui Lan Ji (The Story of the Chalk Circle). Very little is know about this Thirteenth Century Chinese playwright. We only know he was one of many playwrights in the Yuan dynasty. In the Lu Gui Bu, an annotated index of the Yuan dramas and their authors that was written in the Song dynasty, Li Xingdao's name appears among about hundred dramatists and his Chalk Circle play Hui Lan Ji was among more than six-hundred plays written in the Yuan period. However, little biographic record was left about this author.

As the playwrights of the Yuan time are concerned, we know that they became playwrights because the public examination system was swept and the intellectuals were deprived of pursuing official carrier under the Mongol rule. The intellectuals who once had been the sources of civil service now had to depend on themselves. They had to write for common people to survive. So they wrote plays. It was known that they playwrights at the Yuan time had a lowest social position. A playwright was considered lower than a beggar or prostitute who was under eight other professions. The playwrights at the Yuan time often took known topics from previous periods as the themes as their plays.

Because the playwrights were poets themselves and and poems and verses were considered better than plays, Yuan playwrights inserted many poems in their plays. Li Xingdao did the same thing. His play is heavily influenced by lyric-poetic elements. The playwrights must be also familiar with the judging system at that time. In his play he described two distinctively different trials, the one characteristic of ignorance and corruption and the other significant of wisdom and justice. His play, like the plays of other Yuan dramatists, can be considered as a mirror of life and dream, reality and ideal, of his time.

Last Updated on April 2, 1998, by Peter Yang