Copyright -- Title Page -- Dedication -- Contents -- List of Illustrations -- Reign Periods of the Ming and Qing Dynasties -- Acknowledgments -- Overture -- PART ONE: AUDIENCES AND ACTORS -- 1. Opera Aficionados and Guides to Boy Actresses -- The Texts -- The Connoisseurs -- The Lao Dou and Other Patrons -- Conclusion -- PART TWO: VENUES AND GENRES -- 2. Metropolitan Opera, Border Crossings, and the State -- The Playhouse -- The Temple Fair -- The Salon -- Conclusion -- 3. Musical Genre, Opera Hierarchy, and Court Patronage -- Yabu and Huabu -- Court Patronage and Regulation to circa 1860 -- Genre Delineation and the Opera Marketplace -- Court Patronage and Regulation after 1860 -- Conclusion -- PART THREE: PLAYS AND PERFORMANCES -- 4. Social Melodrama and the Sexing of Political Complaint -- The Garden of Turquoise and Jade and Its Sources -- Garden and the Ethics of the Early Qing Suzhou Playwrights -- Garden on the Commercial Stage -- Conclusion -- 5. Sex versus Violence in "I, Sister-in-Law" Operas -- The Stories -- From Page to Stage -- Kunju Performances in Context -- Eighteenth-Century Court Appropriation of "I, Sister-in-Law" Operas -- Violence and the Reinstantiation of Moral Order in the Pihuang Tradition -- Conclusion -- Coda -- Reference -- Appendix One -- Appendix Two -- Appendix Three -- List of Characters -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index.