ABSTRACT
Yangzhou storytelling has an uninterrupted history of three hundred years , and thus accounts for one of the oldest traditional performing arts in China.' The first storyteller (pinghua storyteller) we know of is Liu Jingting (1587c. 1670) (see Wei Ren and Wei Minghua 1985: 261n.). His background, however, was not one of an ordinary entertainer. He initially served as a minor military official in the Nan-Ming army, and made contacts with gentry. Some of his occasional poems survived. After the defeat of Nan-Ming , he tried storytelling in Yangzhou, and learned it by imitating other performers; later he found himself a tutor in another town. He returned to Yangzhou in his advanced years, and became very popular for his performance of a pinghua cycle from local history of Sui and Tang. The names of two other pinghua storytellers who were contemporary with Liu Jingting are recorded: they were Kong Yunxiao and Han Guihu (Li Dou [1797] 1977: 257).
