Tan Yuanshou

02-0501Peking OperaTraditional OperaBeijingBatch 2 (2008)

Lineage & School of Heritage

Tan Yuanshou came from a family of opera performers: his great-grandfather Tan Xinpei was the founder of the Tan school of Peking Opera, and both his grandfather Tan Xiaopei and his father Tan Fuying carried on the Tan school's laosheng, or older male, art.

Mastery, Signature Works & Repertoire

Male, Han ethnicity, born in 1929 in Wuchang, Hubei. He is a national representative bearer of Peking Opera, a second-batch national intangible cultural heritage project, a Peking Opera performing artist and a first-grade actor. He entered the Fuliancheng training school at the age of nine, studying the civil laosheng repertory under Lei Xifu, Zhang Lianfu and Liu Shengtong and the martial wusheng repertory under Wang Lianping and Ru Fulan; he later took Li Shaochun as his master and further refined his skills. A principal performer of the Beijing Peking Opera Company, Tan Yuanshou fully inherited, over a stage career of seventy years, the entire body of Tan school classic repertory and performance art handed down in his family. He was the fifth-generation transmitter of the Tan school and trained a large number of outstanding talents in Tan school performance. His acting grasped the essence of the Tan school: his characterizations are vivid and sharply defined, and his singing has a rich, mellow savor, with meticulous attention to diction and melodic phrasing. His representative works include Kong Cheng Ji (The Empty City Stratagem), Dingjun Shan (Mount Dingjun), Yubei Ting (The Imperial Stele Pavilion) and Shajiabang.

References & Archival Sources

Tan Yuanshou · National Representative Bearer Archive

Representative Items of This Bearer

Profile

Representative item: Peking Opera
Item code: Ⅳ-28
Category: Traditional Opera
Region: Beijing
Born: 1929.01.04
Batch: Batch 2 (2008)

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