Chen Bohua
Lineage & School of Heritage
At the age of eight Chen Bohua entered the Xinhua training class of Hanju Opera and studied under the celebrated female-role actor Liu Benyu. After completing the class she continued her training under Dong Yaojie, Li Caiyun and others, and by the age of fifteen she had become famous throughout the three towns of Wuhan under the stage name Xiao Mudanhua (Little Peony).
Mastery, Signature Works & Repertoire
Female, Han ethnicity, born in 1919, a native of Wuhan, Hubei. For many years Chen Bohua remained active on the stage. Building on the heritage of traditional Hanju art while drawing widely on the strengths of the various schools, she founded the Chen school of vocal delivery, sumptuous and supple, refined and rounded. In performance she excelled at conveying a character's thoughts and temperament through the eyes, the pointing gestures and the bodily movement, bringing her roles vividly to life. Her representative works include The Sword of the Universe (Yu Zhou Feng) and The Second Plum Blossom (Er Du Mei).
Honors & Recognition
National representative bearer of Hanju Opera, a second-batch national intangible cultural heritage project; director of the Wuhan Hanju Opera Theatre of Hubei Province; and a first-grade actor.
References & Archival Sources
Representative Items of This Bearer
- Hanju Opera Ⅳ-30
Profile
This static English edition is rendered at the edge for search engines, AI crawlers and readers without JavaScript. Compiled from official national representative bearer archival records, organized by topic and translated into English. 阅读中文版。