Xiao Qilingtong, Master of China's Southern-School Monkey Opera, Dies at 84
Zhang Jinyun, the Shaoxing opera master known as Xiao Qilingtong and a standard-bearer of the 'Southern School' monkey-opera tradition behind China's most famous TV role, has died at 84 — announced in a farewell from his cousin and student, the actor Liu Xiao Ling Tong.
The obituary was posted, as this one had to be, by Liu Xiao Ling Tong: the actor universally known in China for playing the Monkey King in the 1986 television adaptation of "Journey to the West", still one of the most rerun series in Chinese TV history. His announcement said that his cousin and "second elder brother", Zhang Jinyun — on stage, Xiao Qilingtong — had died in their hometown of Shaoxing on September 12 at the age of 84, after treatment for illness failed. His own post, liked more than 36,000 times within hours, called Zhang "one of the outstanding representatives of the 'Southern School' of monkey opera, a grand master of Shaoju — and my teacher."
A family that has played the Monkey for generations
To an outsider, the names read like a riddle; they are in fact a family tree. The Zhang family of Shaoxing has performed monkey opera — Sun Wukong stories staged in the local Shaoju style — for generations, and each performer's stage name records when he began: Liu Xiao Ling Tong's father, Zhang Zongyi, who founded the "Southern School" style of acrobatic, lifelike monkey performance, was known as Liu Ling Tong, "the six-year-old child". His son took "little Liu Ling Tong". Xiao Qilingtong, "little seven-year-old child", was the son of Liu Ling Tong's elder brother Seven-Year-Old Child, and carried the same lineage onto Shaoju stages for decades. When the elder Zhang's "Monkey King Thrice Strikes the White Bone Demon" was filmed in 1961, the role became nationally famous — Mao Zedong is said to have written his best-known poem on the Monkey King after seeing the troupe's play.
The farewell ceremony is set for the morning of September 15 at the Shaoxing funeral parlour, the venue confirmed to reporters after the announcement. The family's statement noted that Zhang had undergone knee-replacement surgery in recent years for the sake of returning to the stage — the sort of detail that explains what a life in this art costs the body.
The stage tradition behind a TV immortal
The reaction on Weibo was less about one performer than about what his death thins out. For most Chinese viewers under fifty, the definitive Monkey King is Liu's televisual one — a character so fixed in memory that his actor spent four decades as its custodian. Xiao Qilingtong belonged to the older, regional art from which that image was built: live Shaoju, stage combat, the Monkey's physical grammar passed down inside one family in one city. His generation's deaths are recorded, locally, as the loss of an entire school of performance rather than of individual artists.
That is why an obituary for an 84-year-old opera master trended at all. It arrives as a reminder that China's most-seen mythological figure has a birthplace in a provincial opera house, and that the men who kept the original alive are, one obituary at a time, leaving the stage.