Help: General Introduction

Welcome to the TEXTCOURT website, where the database of Chinese court drama scripts and foreign records digitized through the TEXTCOURT project is made available freely to the public.

As PI Prof. Tan Tian Yuan has demonstrated in his article “Ming Qing gongting yanju de wenben shijie” 明清宮廷演劇的文本世界 (Textual Worlds of Court Theater in Late Imperial China), court drama texts are by their very nature “untidy”. They are often casually titled- different scripts can share the same title, while conversely the same content may be found under drastically different titles. The majority are transmitted through manuscripts without the controlling supervision of an author or editor, and so we often find the same play exists in multiple different versions: some may differ only in the variant characters used, while others may have more significant differences affecting the substance of the play itself. Some manuscripts are literally untidy, the calligraphy being so wild as to be barely decipherable! This inherent “untidiness” is part of the reason why such a rich body of performance texts have not yet received the scholarly attention they are due. Enabling scholars to access these texts easily and so facilitating the drawing of internal links within the tangled web of court drama texts, external links to individuals, occasions, and objects, and cross-cultural links to court drama’s global context is the primary objective of the TEXTCOURT project and the reason we are making these texts available on the web in digitized format.

These “untidy” texts do not make for a natural fit with the clean, ordered, binary world of the digital domain. In our database, we aim to represent the complexity and interconnectedness of the textual web of court drama scripts in such a way as to highlight the links between them for the researcher. Given the vast number of texts out there, we have selected a core database of 363 scripts and an extended database of 176 scripts to publish on our website.

Mirroring this textual web digitally in a way that is faithful and has integrity necessarily implies a certain degree of complexity and the use of specifically defined terminology. We would recommend that you familiarize yourself with these terms and definitions using the Glossary in order to get the most out of the website. You may also find it useful to refer to the Navigation and Searching section for tips on how to efficiently search the website and retrieve the information you are looking for, alongside an overview of what the website can and cannot do.

We hope that this database is of use to you in your research. If you have any suggestions, bug reports, or errors to report, please email us in the first instance.