Mr. Mei—whose family character means “peach blossom” and who is related to us to the extent of including an orchid in his given name—is China’s most famous and most popular actor. Like his father and grandfather before him he plays only female rôles, and while even his falsettos may grate on a Western ear, many is the foreigner who pursues him from theater to theater merely to watch his graceful movements, his inimitable dancing or simply the manipulation of his beautiful hands. Scrawl the three characters by which he is known on the bill-board or the newspaper space of any theater, inside Ch’ien-men or out, anywhere in China for that matter, though he has no need to tour the provinces, and the man in the box-office has only to order any suggestion of vacant space filled with chairs and lean back in perfect contentment. Mei Lan-fang carries his own troupe, like a Spanish _matador_ his _cuadrilla_, even his own orchestra, and the arrangement of Chinese performances is such that he can play in several theaters on the same night, from eleven to midnight inside the Tartar City perhaps, where the doors close ridiculously early, the rest of the night among the better establishments outside the main wall. Seldom does he deign to appear earlier than that, unless at some special matinée in the Forbidden City or at the presidential palace, and he is under no necessity of appearing every night merely to keep the wolf from his door. By Chinese standards his income rivals that of any opera singer.
The Chinese are fond of complications of character in their plays, and some of Mr. Mei’s greatest successes are as a man playing a girl who in turn disguises herself as a man; but there is never a moment in which the basic femininity of the part does not stand clearly forth in the hands of this consummate artist. I had the pleasure of spending an afternoon with him once. His house out in the heart of the Chinese City is outwardly commonplace; but the touch of the genuinely artistic temperament is nowhere missing inside the door. The delicate, almost white-faced man still in his twenties, sometimes looking as if he had barely reached them, proved to be one of the most gracious and at the same time most unobtrusive hosts I have ever met. His manner had not a suggestion of the financially successful, the popular idol, as it would manifest itself in the West. He was as simple, as unassuming, as wholly untheatrical as are the objects of Chinese art on which he spends his surplus wealth and time inconspicuous with real distinction. Among his treasures were many thin-paper volumes of classics, of old plays, some of them several centuries old, with annotations in the margins by bygone but not forgotten actors indicating tones, gestures, movements down to the crooking of a little finger. Mr. Mei makes much use of these, though not for slavish imitation. His entourage includes a scholar of standing whose task it is to weave new stories about the old themes, and from them the actor evolves new dances—which is not the word, but let it stand—and new ways of entertaining his crowded audiences without losing touch with the distant centuries to which they prefer to be transported within the theater. Mei Lan-fang does not drink tea on the stage. It is an arrogance of the profession to which his famous family never descended. Nor, one notes, do property-men trip unnecessarily about under his feet when he is performing. I have Mr. Mei’s word for it that the throat does not suffer from the constant unnatural tasks put upon it by his profession; but only from a man of such self-evident truthfulness could I believe it. Certainly there was nothing in his soft home-side speech to belie that surprising statement, as there was nothing in his modest manner to suggest that wherever he plays the streets are filled as far at least as the eye can see by night with waiting rickshaws.