What is the Beijing School and the Mei School

The Beijing School is a unique literary school of a group of liberal writers who continued to stay in Beijing after the center of new literature moved south to Shanghai around the 1930s, and whose main members were, Abolitionist, Shen Congwen, Li Jingu, Zhu Guangqian, and so on. It was called the "Beijing School" because its authors carried out their literary activities in Beijing and Tianjin at that time. Their works were more often published in Beijing and Tianjin publications, and their artistic styles were more consistent in nature. The main publications were Literary Magazine, Literary Quarterly, and Ta Kung Pao - Literature and Art. The basic characteristic of the "Beijing School" was that it was concerned with life, but kept a distance from political struggles and emphasized the unique character of art. They emphasized the unique character of art. Their ideology was the ontological view of literature embodied in the pursuit of "pure literary interest" and the aesthetic sense of "harmony", "moderation" and "appropriateness" as the basic principles. Shen Congwen was the first writer of the Beijing School. He made the novel poetic and loose culture, realism but with romanticism.

Mei Lanfang founded the "Mei School" of Peking Opera, which was the first to be formed in the Peking Opera Dan line, and had an extremely far-reaching influence on the Peking Opera school. The "Mei School" mainly synthesizes the performance styles of Qingyi, Hua Dan and Dagger and Horse Dan, and carries out continuous innovation and development in all aspects of singing, reciting, acting, dancing, music, costumes, and disguises, etc. It raises the singing and performing art of Peking Opera's Dan line to a brand-new level, and achieves the realm of perfection.

The characteristics of the "Mei School" are reflected in the lack of emphasis on features. Mei Lanfang founded the "Mei School", and other schools of Peking Opera, in the inheritance of the master of the previous generation of artists on the basis of their own innovation and development of the road. The plays that Mei Lanfang learned from Wu Lingxian were basically the beginning of the Peking Opera Qingyi, and the plays that he learned from Chen Delin and Wang Yaoqing were all old traditional plays with rules and regulations. Mei Lanfang was not only proficient in singing, reciting, acting and playing, but also innovative and developed in inheriting the artistic style of his predecessors, forming a unique school of Peking Opera Dan Xing - the Mei School, and reforming and creating in the areas of performance, costumes, music, make-up, dance, stage lighting, etc. He was a master of the art of singing, reciting, acting and playing.