Recently, I received a comment on my Romeo and Juliet in China post. Y Chan wrote that there were two Chinese tragic love stories similar to Romeo and Juliet.
Chan said, “You probably cannot be regarded as knowing Chinese culture if you do not know these two love stories.”
One of the stories Chan mentioned was The Butterfly Lovers. The other was “the story of Lady White Snake“, which first appeared in 618 AD during the Tang Dynasty.
I’ve heard of The Butterfly Lovers before. The basic premise is of a young woman in China wanting to go to school. Since boys were the only ones allowed to attend school, this young woman, like Barbara Streisand in the movie Yentl (1983), disguised herself as a boy.
Yentl was based on Isaac Bashevis Singer’s (1902 – 1991) short story Yentl the Yeshiva Boy.
When I mentioned what Chan wrote in the comment, my wife found her copy of a popular theme song of The Butterfly Lovers played as a violin solo by Yu Lina. As the house filled with the music, which may also be found on the following embedded YouTube video, my wife started to dance.
She said, “This is one of my favorites. I cannot resist dancing when I hear it.”
In fact, Yentl the Yeshiva Boy and Shakespeare’s (1564 – 1616) Romeo and Juliet must be combined to become The Butterfly Lovers. In The Butterfly Lovers what begins as a charade becomes a love story ending in the suicide of two young lovers.
The legend of The Butterfly Lovers first appeared during the Jin Dynasty 1600 years ago. The love story of Liang Shanbo and Zhu Yingtai is one of four Chinese folk legends and one of the most influential and best known in China.
China has traded with the West since the Han Dynasty (206 BC – 219 AD). There was an overland route in the north and a sea route in the south, which the Roman Empire used around the time of Christ.
Since China has traded with the West for more than two thousand years, it is conceivable The Butterfly Lovers reached the West and was adapted by Shakespeare and Singer after being exposed to the plot.
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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too.
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Yes, I remember reading the story of the Lady White Snake in my childhood, in the form of a comic book – very intriguing and tragic, and I know every song in The Butterfly Lovers by heart.