Zhang Ran Photo: Courtesy of Zhang Ran

At 4 years old, Zhang Ran could not yet read. Cassette tapes played in the house back then, and she mimicked the Peking Opera aria from Broken Bridge. 

On holidays, adults lifted her onto a table and said, "Sing." She sang. Each time when performing Broken Bridge, tears fell. The family thought the child was simply getting particularly involved in the story. 

Years later, however, she understood what was happening to her then: It was the first time beauty had struck her: not plot, not language, but feeling carried on a voice.

The sorrow and steel in the classic opera Legend of the White Snake, which includes the Broken Bridge excerpt, Bai Suzhen's line traveled through the tape, through an unlettered child's heart, and took root.

Reading entered her life thanks to her grandmother, who largely raised Zhang Ran herself and who spent a lifetime hand-copying Dream of the Red Chamber, one of China's four classic novels. Those careful, devout strokes formed Zhang's earliest memory of books. Later she read the novel herself. 

After that, she moved on to Madame Bovary, then Jane Eyre. The fates of those women flowed into her heart like a slow stream. She did not know then that the names would return decades later, surfacing in the quiet moments when she shaped a character on stage.

On the stage 

At 11, she made her first appearance, as Zhou Daqi in the Cheng-school Peking Opera Suolinnang, or The Jewelry Purse. Zhang performed diligently, yet admitted she "didn't really understand" when being interviewed by the Global Times. 

Teachers explained the character line by line. She memorized and delivered. Only years afterward did life itself teach her the weight of the line "Do not linger over vanished waters; turn back from the sea of bitterness."  

At 15, she entered the Shanghai Theatre Academy's traditional opera performance program. A year later, she opened a book at random in the library - The Peony Pavilion. She read, "I have always loved beauty; it is my nature." 

That line from Du Liniang's "Strolling in the Garden" remains her favorite. She remembers standing between two white magnolia trees on the academy grounds, the same age as the heroine in the text. 

The sentence struck her cleanly: I love beautiful things; this is how I am made. Four centuries earlier a young woman had spoken it not as a confession but as a declaration of an inborn right. 

The 16-year-old Zhang was simply moved by its beauty. 

Two decades and more than 400 performances later, she sees the line as the seed of everything that follows in the story - the dream, the search, the death, the defiance, the return to life. 

"Every time I sing it on stage, I still remember that spring, the fine rain, the magnolias, and the girl I was," she said in the interview with the Global Times.

No two performances of Du Liniang, the heroine of the play, are the same. 

Experience deepens, of course, yet before every show Zhang returns to the text and reads a passage again. In her youth the famous couplet "What a riot of purple and crimson blooms - all left to broken wells and crumbling walls" filled her imagination with color.  

However, after 20 years she hears the second half of the couplet more clearly: Even the richest spring must face its own ruin. 

Performers stage a scene from a Kunqu Opera production. Photo: VCG

Patient reading

For roles such as Chen Miaochang and Yang Guifei, she relies on two constants: her teachers and the script. Her mentor, Zhang Xunpeng, passed the living tradition on.

Beyond that inheritance lies patient reading. 

"Characters live inside the play," Zhang says. "Only when you read them thoroughly can you catch their living breath."

One book in particular completely opened up the character of Du Liniang for her: The Combined Commentary on The Peony Pavilion by the three wives of Wu Wushan, a scholar in the Qing Dynasty. The three women who never met passed a single annotated text to each other. 

In an age of arranged marriages, a girl who finds her own beloved was radical. For these commentators the dream was not fantasy but the most honest desire. 

After finishing the volume, Zhang understood: Du Liniang was not born courageous. Her garden walk, startled dream, search for the dream, departure of the soul - each step represents a young woman's struggle with fate. "They made Du Liniang live," she says.

In recent years, she has carried Kunqu Opera to London, Paris, Vienna, Osaka, Hamburg, and twice to the UN headquarters in New York. Audiences rarely understand the lyrics. What reaches them, she has discovered, is not translation or subtitles but the transmission of feeling through voice, gesture, and gaze. 

"Kunqu does not always need to be translated," she says. "Beauty and emotion are a shared language." 

When Du L­iniang weeps on stage, spectators from any culture grow quiet. For that moment the text steps back, and the feeling that has flowed through it for centuries stands present.

When it comes to her favorite reading tools, she prefers paper. Electronic text is convenient, but paper slows the hand and the mind. 

"Fewer people may read physical books now," she says, "but I believe they will remain. That experience cannot be replaced." 

Her method is simple: one volume after another. During intense rehearsal periods she reads mainly scripts. Otherwise, she reads before sleep, on high-speed trains, on planes. 

No book has marked her more deeply than The Peony Pavilion. "Not because I have performed it most, but because it has walked with me for 20 years. Every time I open it, I find out something new about Du Liniang."

She also loves William Somerset Maugham, his The Moon and Sixpence and nearly everything else he has written. 

Acting takes most of her hours; reading is therefore precious. "Each time I open a book, it is as if I step out of Du Liniang for a while. When I return to the stage, she sometimes seems ­different."