Shows in China: A Show Is a Place's Evening

01A Place’s Evening

Why does every Chinese city have a show on tonight?

In China a good show does not come to town. It belongs to the town, and it is on tonight.

That is the whole difference from the way a visitor plans a night out at home. There is no tour to catch and no festival pass to buy. A theatre, a teahouse, a city gate or a lake stages the same show at the same hour, most nights of the year, and has done for years. Our survey holds some two hundred and fifty of them in over a hundred cities, and it was built through four gates in a row: a fixed place, a fixed time, a run that continues, and a door a visitor can walk through, by ticket, by booking, or for nothing. Anything that failed one gate is not here: the star concert, the one-off festival, the theatre company that plays a city for a week.

How this came about is a short story the survey tells with dates. In 2004 a director staged a show on the Li River 漓江 at Yangshuo 阳朔 with the karst peaks as the set and several hundred local farmers as the cast, and the nightly landscape spectacle became an industry. From 2018 the scenic areas 景区 were told to run like theme parks, with printed daily timetables. From 2019 the night-economy push and, from 2022, one viral Tang-themed street in Xi'an 西安 led old cities across the country to hire permanent casts for the evening. The result is that the visitor's question is never "what performances exist in China" but "in this city, tonight, at what hour, and will I understand it".

The second half of that question is the axis of this page. Six in ten of the shows we hold need no language at all: acrobatics, face-changing 变脸, lion dance 醒狮, ethnic dance, a lake full of light. A quarter need one paragraph of background. The rest, the full-length operas and the historical dramas, are better with Chinese, and the page says which and how to get round it. The ticket is rarely the barrier. The words sometimes are.

So each block below is a kind of show, with its hour, its price band, its language and its best examples, and the last two blocks are the ones that do not run nightly: the annual rites, and what we arrange.

02Do You Need the Words?

Can a foreigner enjoy a Chinese show without understanding Chinese?

Every show in this survey carries a language level, and it predicts your evening better than the price.

Level one needs nothing. Acrobatics, martial-arts drama, face-changing 变脸 and fire-spitting, lion dance 醒狮 on poles, string puppets, ethnic song and dance, the lakeside spectacles, the street shows in the old cities, the light shows. A hundred and fifty of the shows we hold are here, and the survey's advice for a first night in China is to pick from this shelf. Acrobatics is the safest of all: no story, no words, and the survey scores it highest of the nine kinds.

Level two needs a paragraph. Traditional instruments, a teahouse variety bill, the Naxi 纳西族 ancient music of Lijiang 丽江, the nanyin 南音 of Quanzhou 泉州, the walking dramas of Dunhuang 敦煌 and Pingyao 平遥. A visitor who reads one paragraph before the lights go down, which is what this site's context cards are for, gets most of it. Sixty-odd shows sit here, and the best of them score as high as anything on the page.

Level three is opera, and the words matter. A full-length Peking, Kunqu 昆曲 or Sichuan 四川 opera is sung in a form of Chinese that many Chinese need surtitles for. The survey's fix, which we follow in the opera block, is to choose the excerpt 折子戏 programme rather than the full play: a bill of famous set-pieces, a martial scene with no singing at all, an English subtitle board at the side of the stage. The opera houses that do this score twenty points above the ones that do not.

Level four is not on this page. Crosstalk, stand-up, modern drama, any show whose jokes are in the language: the survey excluded them and so do we, not because they are poor, but because without Chinese there is nothing to watch.

One rule of thumb from all this. If the poster shows a body doing something, go. If it shows a face singing, read a paragraph first, or find the excerpt night.

03The 19:30 Rule

What time do shows start in China, and how do you book them?

The Chinese show starts after dinner, and the timetable is the most reliable thing in the survey.

Half past seven is the national hour. Nearly half the shows we hold are tagged for the slot after dinner, and the curtain times cluster between seven and half past eight: the kung fu 功夫 drama in Beijing at half past seven, the Sichuan 四川 opera bill in Chengdu 成都 at eight, the lake spectacle at Huaqing Palace 华清宫 at ten past eight, the Tibetan epic in Lhasa 拉萨 at nine because the sun sets late on the plateau. The big resident shows add afternoon performances and, in the peak months, a second and third evening show. A fifth of the survey is daytime: the lion dance 醒狮 at ten and two, the village welcomes, the mountain spectacle at Lijiang 丽江 at eleven and two because the stage is at three thousand metres.

The season is the second thing to check. The outdoor spectacles mostly run from March to November or December and stop for winter, and their cards say so month by month. The survey pairs several with indoor stand-ins: when the Huaqing Palace lake is closed, Xi'an 西安's rotating auditorium show runs all year; when the Li River 漓江 show pauses, the Guilin 桂林 resident theatre does not. Monday is the other trap. The Kashgar 喀什 gate ceremony, the Pingyao 平遥 walking drama, the Wuhan 武汉 river-boat show and, on Monday and Tuesday, the Quanzhou 泉州 puppets are dark.

Booking is by phone, and mostly Chinese phone. The channels named most often on the cards are the two big Chinese travel apps, then the ticketing platform Damai 大麦, then the venue's own WeChat 微信 account; only a dozen shows are sold on an international platform with an English page, and those are the famous ones. Arrive half an hour early, the cards say almost without exception, and an hour for the outdoor spectacles with unreserved seating. What the survey does not answer is whether a foreign passport works on the Chinese ticketing apps, which use real-name registration, and until it does this site treats booking as something we do for a guest rather than something we explain.

And eleven shows happen on a date rather than a night. These are mostly rites, and this page treats them as performances only: the Tibetan opera in Lhasa's parks for about five days in mid-August, free; the masked dance and the unfurling of the giant thangka 唐卡 at Kumbum 塔尔寺 outside Xining 西宁 four times a year on fixed lunar dates; Labrang 拉卜楞寺's dances in the first lunar month; the public rite at Tianshui 天水 on the twenty-first of June; the float parade at Shawan 沙湾 in mid-April. The seasonal residencies are the longer list: Hohhot 呼和浩特's horse epic 千古马颂 from May to October, Chengde 承德's imperial spectacle from April to October, Harbin 哈尔滨's balcony concert 马迭尔阳台音乐会 on summer evenings and its ice show 哈冰秀 on winter times, the Snow Village 雪乡 drama from mid-November to the end of March. Build the month around the show, not the show around the month; the cards carry the dates, and the festivals themselves are another page.

Prices, in bands. The street shows are free. A teahouse bill or a puppet theatre is the price of a meal. A resident theatre show is a few hundred yuan. The lake and mountain spectacles run from a few hundred to over a thousand for the best seats, and the cards give the ranges.

04Acrobatics

Where should a first-time visitor see Chinese acrobatics?

If a visitor sees one show in China, the survey and this site both say: make it acrobatics, and make it the first night.

The reason is in the scores. Acrobatics is the only kind of show in the survey where every entry is language level one, and it has the highest median score of the nine kinds. There is no story to lose. The survey traces the form to the Han 汉, 2nd century BC to 3rd century AD dynasty's "hundred entertainments", which bundled tumbling, martial arts, conjuring and animal acts two thousand years ago, and that is its claim rather than ours; what is ours is that the Beijing shows still bundle exactly those things.

Beijing has three. The kung fu 功夫 drama at the Red Theatre 红剧场 near the Temple of Heaven 天坛, seventy minutes with no dialogue, at a quarter past five and half past seven in the peak months and half past seven alone in winter, sold on the international platforms and the safest single ticket in the country. The Chaoyang Theatre 朝阳剧场, the China Acrobatic Troupe's home, at seven. And the one the survey calls hidden: the Wansheng Theatre 万胜剧场 in the old Tianqiao 天桥 district, a ninety-year-old house run by the Beijing troupe as the keeper of the street acrobatics that were once performed on that ground, with five shows a day in summer and far fewer tourists.

Shanghai has the modern one. The multimedia acrobatic show at the Circus World 上海马戏城 has run in one form or another since 2005, Tuesday to Sunday at half past seven with weekend matinees, with an English ticketing page of its own.

And the birthplace is a county town. Wuqiao 吴桥, in Hebei 河北, calls itself the home of Chinese acrobatics, and its acrobatics park runs troupes in old courtyards all day from half past eight, with a seventy-minute gala in the evening in season; the park ticket is a little over a hundred yuan and the gala a little less. The survey puts it second on its hidden list and gives it a full day, and it is two and a half hours from Beijing by road. The sleight-of-hand act called "three immortals return to the cave 三仙归洞", performed in one courtyard there, is the thing the cards say not to miss.

How to sit. Arrive twenty to thirty minutes early; the cheaper seats in these houses are fine because the acts are large; children are the intended audience as much as anyone.

05The Teahouse Table

Where can you see Sichuan face-changing and a teahouse show?

The small shows are the ones a visitor remembers, and most of them come with tea.

Chengdu 成都's Sichuan 四川 opera bill is the model. At the Shufeng Yayun 蜀风雅韵 theatre in the culture park on Qintai Road 琴台路, nightly at eight for ninety minutes, the programme is a variety bill: the face-changing 变脸 that swaps masks faster than the eye can follow, fire-spitting, the rolling-lamp balancing act, hand-shadow puppetry, long-spout tea pouring, and a short opera excerpt 折子戏, with bilingual announcements and a lidded bowl 盖碗 of tea at your seat. It is the most foreigner-ready opera house in the city by the survey's count, and a ticket is the price of a good dinner. Inside Kuanzhai Alley 宽窄巷子 a courtyard theatre runs the same bill five times a day from half past eleven, for anyone who cannot wait for evening.

Beijing's version is the teahouse. The Lao She Teahouse 老舍茶馆 at Qianmen 前门 stages a Beijing variety show nightly at ten to eight, with a weekend matinee: opera excerpts, acrobatics, magic, face-changing borrowed from Sichuan, folk dance and tea ceremony, served with tea and Qing-style snacks at square tables, from a little over a hundred yuan. Tianjin 天津's teahouse does drum-song nightly for the price of a bowl of noodles, and needs Chinese; the survey lists it for the atmosphere.

The heritage acts are shorter and cheaper still. In Xi'an 西安's Muslim Quarter 回民街 a four-hundred- year-old courtyard runs shadow puppetry on the hour from eleven in the morning to nine at night for a few tens of yuan. In Quanzhou 泉州 the marionette 提线木偶 theatre, whose puppets opened the 2008 Olympics, plays three sixty-minute programmes a day from Wednesday to Sunday for thirty to eighty yuan, and sells out. In Foshan 佛山 the southern lion dances on poles three times a day in the courtyard of the ancestral temple 祖庙, inside a twenty-yuan museum ticket, rain permitting; the hall that hosts it closed for renovation in May 2026, so check before going. In Nuanquan 暖泉, a day from Beijing, smiths fling molten iron 打树花 against a fort wall on Friday and Saturday evenings from April to October, and an indoor version runs all year. In Huayin 华阴, at the foot of Huashan 华山, the old men of the Laoqiang 老腔 slam benches and shout a boatmen's chant in a theatre twice a day and, in the warm months, on the riverside square for free.

Where this page hands over to the leisure page is the ticket. The amateur opera club in the park, the free Cantonese opera 粤剧 stage in Guangzhou 广州, the storytelling session for the price of a bus fare: those are leisure. Everything in this block sells a seat.

06Landscape as Stage

What are the Impression shows and the other outdoor spectacles in China?

The show China invented is the one where the mountain is the set, and it runs every night in season.

It began in 2004 on the Li River 漓江. At Yangshuo 阳朔, on the water, with a dozen karst peaks lit as the backdrop and several hundred local fishermen and farmers as the cast, a director staged a sixty-minute poem of light, boats and song about a Zhuang 壮族 folk heroine. It still plays nightly at half past seven, with a second show in season, and the survey calls it the origin of the form. The same team then did the same in a dozen places, and the "Impression 印象" name on a poster now means: outdoors, hundreds of performers, a real landscape, no dialogue. At Wuyi Mountain 武夷山 the audience sits on a platform that rotates through the tea country. At Lijiang 丽江 the stage is at three thousand one hundred metres under the snow mountain, at eleven and two in the day, with oxygen recommended. On West Lake 西湖, from March to December, the dancers perform on the water at twenty to eight.

The second family is the resident epic. The Songcheng 宋城 theme parks stage a sixty-minute history-of-the-city spectacle on a rotating stage, and have since 1997; the survey counts five of them, from Hangzhou 杭州 to Sanya 三亚, and notes that they are the most standardised shows in the country and therefore the most certain. The Huaqing Palace 华清宫 show at Xi'an 西安 is staged on the actual lake where the Tang 唐, 7th to early 10th century emperor and his consort lived, nightly at ten past eight from March to October, with an ice-and-fire winter version. The Lhasa 拉萨 one is performed at three thousand six hundred and fifty metres by eight hundred people with the Potala 布达拉宫 across the river, at nine at night, from late March to the end of the year, and the card's advice is a thick coat.

The third family walks. At Dunhuang 敦煌 and at Pingyao 平遥 the audience moves through the sets for ninety minutes before sitting for the last act; the Dunhuang one is best seen before the caves, the survey says, and the Pingyao one is dark on Mondays. In Zhengzhou 郑州 a drama city 戏剧幻城 of twenty-one theatres in a wheat field takes a day or two and, unusually for this block, is better with some Chinese. In Wuhan 武汉 the theatre is a 1930s steamship 知音号 that cruises the Yangtze while a hundred performers play out a night in the old concessions around you; costume hire is on the pier.

What to know before booking. These are the most expensive tickets on the page, a few hundred yuan and up. They are outdoors, so the season and the weather rule. And because they are chains and institutions, they are the shows most likely to be exactly as described.

07The Ethnic Evening

Where can a visitor watch Chinese ethnic minority dance?

China has fifty-five recognised minorities, and the survey's largest shelf is the evening where one of them dances.

The biggest is in Xinjiang. The survey's top-scoring show in the whole country is the Silk Road spectacle at the Xinjiang Grand Theatre 新疆大剧院 outside Urumqi 乌鲁木齐, an indoor production with camels, horses and eagles on stage, a water curtain and holograms, in six chapters that fold in the Uyghur 维吾尔族 muqam 木卡姆 and the meshrep. There is a fifty-minute lunchtime version at half past twelve and the full eighty minutes at seven, every day, all year, from a hundred yuan up to more than a thousand for the best seat. In the city itself the Grand Bazaar 国际大巴扎's dinner show does the same in an hour with a buffet, nightly from seven, with whirling dance, Kazakh 哈萨克族 eagle dance and a highwire act, for a few hundred yuan including the meal.

Yunnan 云南's is the one built from villages. The dance collection staged nightly at eight in Kunming 昆明's arts theatre was created by the province's most famous dancer, and by the card three quarters of its performers are farmers from minority villages; seven acts, drums, no words. Zhangjiajie 张家界's show, twenty-four years running by the card, puts the Yao courtship climb and the Tujia 土家族 crying bride on stage nightly with a bonfire and stunts outside.

The villages themselves run a timetable now. At the great Miao 苗族 village of Xijiang 西江千户苗寨 the villagers dance on the reed-pipe ground 芦笙场 at two every afternoon, free within the entry ticket, and pour the "high mountain flowing water 高山流水" toast from half past three. In the Dong 侗族 village of Zhaoxing 肇兴 the grand chorus 侗族大歌, the many-part singing without instruments or conductor, is sung at the drum towers 鼓楼 for nothing, at times the sources disagree about. At Huzhu 互助 in Qinghai 青海 the Tu people 土族, a group of a few hundred thousand found nowhere else, run three two-hour shows a day with a wheel-swing 轮子秋 act the card calls jaw-dropping, and almost no foreign visitor has heard of it. At Basha 岜沙 in Guizhou 贵州 the welcome is a volley from black-powder muskets. At the foot of Changbai Mountain 长白山 a Manchu 满族 shaman 萨满 parade leaves the square at six every evening, free, followed by a fire dance on the water stage.

Two honest notes. The weddings, courtships and rituals in these shows are performed, not happening; the cards say so and so do we. And the difference between this block and the leisure page's circle dances is the same ticket line as everywhere else: there you join the ring; here you watch it, and the survey scores the watching very high.

08Opera Without the Words

How does a foreigner watch Peking opera without the language?

Chinese opera is the hardest thing on this page to watch and the easiest to walk out of, and the survey's fix is to buy the excerpt 折子戏 night.

The problem is stated plainly in the scores. Of the nine kinds of show, traditional opera has the lowest median, and the reason is a single column: most of it is language level three. A full-length Peking, Kunqu 昆曲 or Cantonese opera 粤剧 is sung in a stage Chinese that many Chinese follow by surtitle. The survey counts some three hundred and fifty living regional forms, by a 2015 census it cites, and nearly every one of them is a full evening of words.

The excerpt programme solves it. Beijing's Liyuan Theatre 梨园剧场 at Qianmen 前门 has sold Peking opera 京剧 to foreign visitors since 1990: a sixty-minute bill of famous scenes, Wednesday to Saturday at half past seven and nightly in summer, with an English subtitle board beside the stage and the actors putting on their make-up in the lobby beforehand, for a few hundred yuan. Across the road the Tianleyuan 天乐园 house does six classic scenes in ninety minutes with modern staging. The survey's advice is to look for the martial scenes: a fight in the dark between two men who cannot see each other needs no translation.

The serious houses are cheaper and need more of you. Shanghai's Tianchan Yifu 天蟾逸夫舞台 stage, a hundred years old in 2026, runs full-length Peking and Kunqu on Friday and Saturday nights and weekend afternoons for anything from eighty to several hundred yuan, and some programmes carry an English synopsis. In Harbin 哈尔滨 the provincial Peking opera company plays a weekly subsidised show for the price of a coffee. In Suzhou 苏州, in Jiangsu 江苏, the Kunqu museum on Pingjiang Road 平江路 plays excerpts at half past two at weekends all year and daily in the peak months, next door to the storytelling museum, for under a hundred yuan.

Quanzhou 泉州 is where the oldest sound is. The nanyin 南音 hall stages seventy-minute concerts of a music the survey traces to the Han 汉, 2nd century BC to 3rd century AD court, on dates published monthly, from twenty yuan; the Liyuan opera 梨园戏 theatre nearby plays a Song-and-Yuan form that most Chinese cannot follow either, and the card's honest advice is a synopsis first. Neither is nightly, and both are on the survey's hidden list for that reason.

Where the amateurs are is the leisure page. The opera club in the park, the Qin opera 秦腔 shouted in the moat park 环城公园 on Tuesday nights, the free Cantonese stage in Guangzhou 广州 at two every afternoon: those have no ticket, and this page ends at the box office.

09The Street Show Is Free

Which Chinese shows are free?

A third of the shows in this survey cost nothing, and most of those happen in the street of an old city at a fixed hour.

Xi'an 西安 set the pattern. The Tang-themed pedestrian street below the Big Wild Goose Pagoda 大雁塔 runs a rota of short free acts every evening: the "tumbler girl 不倒翁" swaying on her pivot at half past seven, half past eight and half past nine in summer, two costumed hosts challenging passers-by to complete Tang 唐, 7th to early 10th century poems on the hour, whirling dance, a pipa piece, each eight to fifteen minutes, all year with earlier starts in winter. The survey credits the viral success of one such street in 2022 with sending permanent costumed casts into old cities across the country, and the cards bear that out.

Kashgar 喀什's is a gate. At the east gate 东门 of the old city, at half past ten and at six, every day except Monday, dancers, musicians and actors playing a Han 汉, 2nd century BC to 3rd century AD general and a Qing 清, 17th to early 20th century concubine open the city, and the finish is a collective dance that the crowd is pulled into. It is free, twenty to thirty minutes, and the survey's own phrase is that it has become the way to arrive in the city.

Qufu 曲阜's is a morning. At eight the city gate below the Confucius temple 府文庙 opens with ritual dancers in Han dress, free from outside the wall; at eleven the worship ritual is performed in the temple's main hall, inside the ticket. Kaifeng 开封's martial-arts park 万岁山 runs over a hundred short acts a day from nine for the price of a cheap ticket, with a cavalry battle at eleven and five and molten iron 打树花 thrown into the night sky at half past seven and nine. Datong 大同, in Shanxi 山西, runs stilts, lion dance 醒狮, aerial silk and puppetry in its restored southeast quarter from four until half past nine in season. In Huayin 华阴 the bench-slamming chant is played on the riverside square for nothing on warm evenings, and in Jingdezhen 景德镇 an orchestra plays instruments made entirely of porcelain six or seven times a day inside the old kiln museum 古窑民俗博览区's ticket.

What free costs. A place at the front, which means arriving fifteen to thirty minutes early at the gate ceremonies. And the Monday check. Otherwise these are the easiest shows in the country to see, and the survey scores the best of them alongside the ticketed spectacles.

10The Hidden Hundred

Which Chinese shows do foreigners never hear about?

Half the shows in this survey are marked "hidden", and the word has a precise meaning: every Chinese guide knows them and no English one does.

The survey's hidden list is a hundred long, and its top is a puppet theatre. The Quanzhou 泉州 marionettes 提线木偶, string puppets that pour wine, write calligraphy and play the drunken demon queller, opened the Beijing Olympics and yet sit on no foreign itinerary; three shows a day, Wednesday to Sunday, sold out most nights, for the price of a coffee. Second is the acrobatics park in the county town of Wuqiao 吴桥. Third is the Tu people 土族's park at Huzhu 互助, forty minutes from Xining 西宁, where a group of a few hundred thousand people found in one corner of Qinghai 青海 performs its wheel-swing 轮子秋, its circle dance 锅庄 and its wedding three times a day.

Several of the hidden shows are simply the old form in its home. The Laoqiang 老腔 of Huayin 华阴, a two-thousand-year-old shouted chant with benches for percussion that the survey calls the country's oldest rock and roll, in a hall at the foot of Huashan 华山. The ground opera 地戏 of the Tunbao 屯堡 villages near Anshun 安顺, where masked descendants of a Ming garrison sing war epics to a drum, twice a day on weekdays and hourly at weekends, for the price of the village ticket. The shadow puppets in the Xi'an 西安 courtyard, on the hour all day. The Yingge 英歌 warrior dance and the great drums of Chaozhou 潮州 in the restored prefecture yamen 府署 at weekends. Beijing's own Tianqiao 天桥 theatre.

Others are hidden because they are in the wrong building. The porcelain orchestra 瓷乐 plays in a kiln museum 古窑民俗博览区. The Manchu 满族 shaman 萨满 ritual is performed in a museum in Jilin City 吉林市. The Peking opera 京剧 in Harbin 哈尔滨 is a subsidised weekly show that no foreign site lists because nobody thought to.

What hidden does not mean. Not unverified: most of these cards carry two or three official or ticketing sources, though the survey grades more of them B than A. Not remote: Wuqiao is a morning from Beijing, Huzhu an hour from Xining. It means the English internet has not arrived, which is the gap this site exists to fill, and the reason this block is here rather than folded into the others.

11The Interactive Park

What are China's interactive NPC parks, and how does a foreigner use one?

The newest kind of Chinese show is not a show at all. It is a park where the cast never leaves, and the ticket buys the whole day of them.

The form has a name in Chinese, which is the NPC NPC 常驻演员. Borrowed from video games, it means the costumed characters who wander a walled town or a themed park all day, on a printed timetable, stopping passers-by, staging fights, weddings and court cases on the hour, and pulling the crowd into the last dance. The survey scattered these across its other categories and in September 2026 gave them one of their own, because for a visitor they behave differently: you do not arrive for a curtain, you arrive for an afternoon, and the language barrier is the lowest on the page.

Kaifeng 开封 has three. The martial-arts town on Wansui Mountain 万岁山 runs over a hundred short acts a day from nine in the morning for the price of a cheap ticket, with a cavalry battle at eleven and five and molten iron 打树花 thrown against the night sky at half past seven and nine. The reconstructed Song prefecture opens its gates at nine with drums and guards and holds a court case at half past nine and half past two. The Song garden 清明上河园 on the lake, whose night spectacle is described earlier, runs more than fifty acts by day inside the ordinary ticket: a magistrate's welcome at nine, held once, a cavalry duel with fireworks at half past ten and half past three, a river battle with charges in the water, and a comedy in which a rich man throws an embroidered ball to choose a son-in-law. A night-show ticket lets you in at half past eight in the morning for nothing extra.

Xi'an 西安 has the indoor one. The Tang-dynasty street beside the Tang 唐, 7th to early 10th century mall is under one roof, based on a television drama, with fixed performances through the day and a farewell scene at nine before the doors close at ten; hanfu 汉服 is hired at the door. Zhengzhou 郑州 has the film town 建业电影小镇, with a stunt show and a night walk under projections at eight, and fifteen minutes away the drama city 戏剧幻城 in the wheat field, the ambitious end of the form and the one that rewards some Chinese. At the foot of Changbai Mountain 长白山 a Jin-dynasty market runs thirty acts a day with delivery-rider NPCs and a mecha parade.

Five more entered the survey in September 2026. Hengdian 横店, the film-studio town in Zhejiang, where the survey had taken only the two night spectacles, runs over a hundred acts a day across its palace and street sets, from an enthronement at ten in the Qin palace to gunfights on the Canton street and a night show at seven in which the audience is filmed; a one-day ticket covers two sets. The second drama city, at Langfang 廊坊 an hour from Beijing, is built on the Dream of the Red Chamber: four main theatres, dozens of small ones, one main play in the day ticket, and, like its sister in Zhengzhou, better with some Chinese. The old town at Linyi 临沂 in Shandong 山东 sells its hour-long indoor epic at three and five separately and puts the horse show, the water show and the Han ceremony at a quarter past eight inside a basic ticket good for three days. The Tang-dynasty night street at Tangshan 唐山 opens at two and throws molten iron from spring to November. And the zoo in Changchun 长春 becomes a Journey to the West at half past four from late April to October, parade at seven, finale at eight; its star turn is a monkey's stand-up in north-eastern dialect, the one act here that needs Chinese.

How to use one. Enter at four for the afternoon acts and the night parade, or at nine for the full day; read the timetable at the gate, which every one of these parks prints; and expect to be spoken to. The reply "no Chinese" is understood everywhere, and the cast will still put the sword in your hand.

12PreeChina, and What It Is Not

What does PreeChina arrange for shows in China?

• The one thing on this page that is hard for a visitor is the ticket, and that is the thing we do.
• A Beijing night. Dinner at Qianmen 前门, the kung fu 功夫 drama at half past seven, and the teahouse bill the next night; or the excerpt 折子戏 opera with the subtitle board and the make-up room first.
• A Xi'an 西安 night. Snacks at Yongxingfang 永兴坊, the Qin opera 秦腔 variety bill at the century-old opera society 易俗社 for the price of a coffee at half past seven, the Tang street 大唐不夜城's free acts from nine, and the Muslim Quarter 回民街 for a late bowl.
• A Chengdu 成都 night. Qintai Road 琴台路 at seven, the Sichuan 四川 opera bill at eight with the tea and the seeds, and the snack street after.
• A Quanzhou 泉州 night. West Street 西街 for dinner, the marionettes 提线木偶 at half past seven, Zhongshan Road 中山路 for peanut soup after; Wednesday to Sunday only.
• A Kashgar 喀什 evening. The gate at six, the night market, the immersive Kashgar show at nine, and the old-city square where the locals dance on summer nights.
• A Lijiang 丽江 day. The snow-mountain spectacle at two, dinner in a Naxi 纳西族 courtyard, and the Naxi ancient music hall after.
• Seven days, ten shows. The survey's own route, Beijing to Xi'an to Chengdu to Yangshuo 阳朔 to Shanghai, is nine tenths language level one and every date on it is verifiable; we use it as the spine and swap the winter stand-ins.
• And the ticket itself. Until this site can confirm how a foreign passport works on the Chinese ticketing apps, we buy the tickets, and we do it a week ahead for the lake shows in season.
• What this page is not.
• Not concerts, tours or festivals. Nothing here moves; nothing here happens once.
• Not comedy or drama. Crosstalk, stand-up and the modern stage are in the language; the survey excluded them and this page follows.
• Not the park singers. The amateurs with no ticket are on this site's page on leisure.
• Not the venue. The lake, the palace, the temple, the museum and the old street have their own pages; this page only says what happens on them at half past seven.
• Not the meaning of a rite. The calendar block gives dates and what you will see, and stops.
• Not Hong Kong or Macau. The survey covers them; this site does not.