Peking Opera roles are classified according to the age and personality of the characters. All female roles are known as dan , which is subdivided into qing yi (the quiet and gentle), hua da . (the vivacious or dissolute type), wu dan (women with martial skills), dao ma da . (sword and horse type, women skilled in fighting with weapons) and lao dan (old woman). All male roles are called sheng , which is subdivided into lao sheng (old man), xiao sheng (young man) and wu sheng (the warrior type). The third role-type, known as jing (the painted-face), portrays either people who are frank and open-minded but rough, or those who are crafty and dangerous. These are again subdivided into the principal painted-face and the minor painted-face, the civilian painted-face and the warrior painted- face. Some jing roles are devoted more to singing while othersstress acting. The audience is able to distinguish the loyal from the treacherous, the good from the wicked by studying the make- up and costumes. Chou , a clown, is depicted by a dab of white on the face. He is funny and humorous. This role is again sub- divided into "civilian clowns" and "warrior clowns".
Each of these different role-types has a style and rules of its own. Although all performers sing the tunes of xi pi and er huang , the talented, past and present, have been able to create their own style of singing and recitation with variations to suit their own voices and thus could bring out even more clearly the sentiments and emotions of the characters they portray.
Some people think that the Peking Opera method of presenta- tion is not true to the "rules" of drama. For instance, they point out, the struggle between the hero and the villain in modern theatre or on the screen is invariably unfolded in a series of actions and the villain will be found out only at the end of the story. By contrast, in Peking Opera, the hero or villain intro- duces himself to the audience at the very beginning, and is usual- ly recognized without difficulty by the way his face is painted or the costume he wears. Like a modern play or film, Peking Opera has a script. But generally speaking, what attracts the Peking Opera fan is not so much the story itself, which he knows only too well, but the artistic performance of an actor or actress. The Peking Opera fan follows closely the gestures and move- ments of the players, some scenes of combat on the stage, or listens attentively to certain parts of the singing or recitation in which he is particularly interested. Moreover, he never gets tired of seeing or listening to it, ten or twenty times over. This is also the case with people of the West who go to an opera house to listen to the same opera, or to a theatre to see the same play or ballet over and over again.
