A Storyteller Remembered

Shan Tianfang became a household name for his storytelling of the classics

Only today we heard about the passing of Shan Tianfang, who was a well-known storyteller in China that many taxi drivers would listen to on the radio.

Shan died on September 11 of organ failure at the age of 83.

People enjoy listening to his renditions of classical Chinese novels over the airwaves -- he recorded over 110 stories for radio and television which means about 12,000 episodes spanning over 60,000 hours.

He told stories in the pingshu tradition, where the performer was dressed in a Chinese scholar gown and sat behind a desk on stage with a folding fan and a wooden block that was used like a gavel.

Shan performed pingshu, starting out in tea houses

In pingshu, the performer tells a legend from memory and uses different voices and exaggerated gestures, as well as a bit of commentary or historical context. That meant a pingshu performer had to do a lot of research to give the stories much more detail to make them more believable.

Usually these storytellers performed in tea houses, though Shan would adapt to gain an even wider audience with the introduction of radio and television.

But when Shan was growing up he didn't want to become a performer -- his mother was an actress, his father a musician who played the sanxian, a three-stringed Chinese lute. He along with his parents and four sisters lived an itinerant lifestyle which Shan was keen to avoid, along with the financial insecurity.

He wanted to study medicine, but in the early 1950s his father was wrongly imprisoned; his mother left the family and so Shan had to work, apprenticing under a pingshu master before he joined a folk arts troupe in 1956 in Anshan, a town in northeastern China known then for its tea houses and pingshu performers.


Shan did well in the tea house circuit until the Cultural Revolution began in 1966, and he was branded a "counterrevolutionary" and sent to northeastern China to do manual labour.

These are copies of his scripts

After the Cultural Revolution ended in 1976, he got back to performing and found audiences were keen on entertainment other than party-approved propaganda. He tried his luck in radio and quickly found it was very different from performing in tea houses.

There was no need to dress up and have props, and that there was no audience to give instant feedback. As a result Shan had to use the three recording technicians in the studio as his audience and adjusted his performance accordingly.

His first recording was debut on Chinese New Year in 1980 and it is believed some 100 million people tuned in to the 56 hours over which it was broadcast.

Over six decades Shan recorded such famous Chinese classics as "White Eyebrow Hero", and "Sanxia Wuyi". He also did dramatizations of historical figures like politician Zhuge Liang from the Three Kingdoms period and Lin Zexu, a scholar-official from the Qing dynasty who was a catalyst for the first Opium War.

Audiences liked to listen to his stories because he made complicated historical stories easier to follow and made the characters more relatable. "You feel you could relate to the characters in his stories, even though they lived a long time ago," said one Beijing taxi driver surnamed Zhao.

After his retirement in 2007, Shan tried to foster another generation of pingshu artists, even mentoring young people. But as more storytellers like Shan passing away, this oral art form may also die with them...