Liao Chiung-chih: From a "Bound Opera Child" to Preserving the Method of Memory for Gezaixi

30-Second Overview: Born in Keelung in 1935, Liao Chiung-chih entered the Jinshan Music Society at age 15 as a "bound opera child" (a pawned apprentice), singing her way through indoor theater, outdoor stages, radio, and television. Her most important work may not be a specific play, but rather the deconstruction of Gezaixi—once lost from the stage—into vocal styles, physical movements, scripts, and teaching methods, handing them to the next generation for reuse. What she left behind is not just the legend of a tragic heroine, but a method ensuring that memory does not rest solely on the shoulders of the elderly.

In 1935, Liao Chiung-chih was born in Keelung. At age 15, she was pawned into the Jinshan Music Society to learn opera. The term "pawned" (典押) more accurately describes her actual means of securing livelihood and skills at the time than "apprenticeship." Records from the National Traditional Arts Center’s preservation projects note that she sat in training (zuoke) for three years and four months before joining troupes such as Jinhe and Longxiao Feng as a dan (female) role. ¹

She was later dubbed "Taiwan’s First Tragic Heroine" (Ku Dan), a label that risks reducing her life’s work to a single weeping vocal style. Yet what makes Liao Chiung-chih’s story truly memorable is that she experienced both the most vibrant stages of Gezaixi and the era of its gradual disappearance: indoor theater, outdoor stages, radio, television, and finally, classrooms and archives. ²³

The contrast in this path is stark: Gezaixi once lived through the bodies of artists like Liao Chiung-chih, but she later had to dismantle the memories in her body to teach those who had never seen that stage.

Early Lessons by the Kitchen Stove

Early opera troupes were not art schools as imagined today. Ministry of Culture introductions note that children from impoverished families were sent to troupes, which provided food, lodging, and training in a dialectal art form. Liao Chiung-chih began learning opera at 14 and was on stage during the golden age of indoor Gezaixi by age 18. ³

Her training at the Jinshan Music Society included boiling water, sweeping, practicing horse stances, splitting legs, vocalizing, and running circles. This system was not romantic; it was even exploitative and violent. But reducing it solely to suffering misses another point: vocal styles, eye movements, and physical gestures were honed precisely through these repetitive daily details. ²³

She was slender in build, yet her voice could hold a stage together. Awards data from the National Foundation for Arts and Culture Development notes that she later compiled scripts for Shixiji, Shanbo and Yingtai, Chen San and Wu Niang, and Cold Moon, leaving records of vocal styles, physical movements, and rehearsals. She did not merely perform on stage; she was also building an index for a craft that had originally relied on oral transmission. ²

When the Theater Tent Became a Radio

Liao Chiung-chih left indoor theater at age 21, entering the realms of outdoor stages and radio. She later performed in television Gezaixi. The National Traditional Arts Center’s archival data outlines this trajectory clearly: she joined Wang Siming’s Radio Drama Troupe, performed on Central Broadcasting System (CBS) and police radio dramas, and subsequently appeared on three television stations. ⁴

The shift in media was not merely about moving the stage into the living room. Indoor theater had fixed theaters and serialized performances; outdoor theater moved with deity-worship ceremonies and local events. Radio removed physical gestures, leaving only sound. Television demanded that performance submit to the camera lens. By crossing these media, the Gezaixi in Liao Chiung-chih’s body became not just a stage technique, but a language capable of being rearranged across different devices. ³⁴

Ministry of Culture data indicates that with the advent of radio and television, Gezaixi in traditional theaters gradually declined. Liao Chiung-chih, however, did not view new media as enemies. Her stance was that new plays and traditional ones were both important; one should not discard one side to develop the other. ³

For an artist who traversed four media, this was not an abstract compromise. She knew that radio demanded sound precede gesture, television demanded expressions close to the lens, and the stage still required the last row of the audience to understand a gesture. Media changed the scale of performance, but did not cancel the core of Gezaixi: the interplay between lyrics, melodies, gestures, and the audience. ³⁴

She also did not treat "tradition" as a fixed era. While compiling scripts, she absorbed gestures and performance methods from other opera genres, then integrated them back into Gezaixi’s melodies and language. This approach did not turn Gezaixi into Peking Opera; instead, it revealed the history of continuous exchange and transformation of a genre formed in Taiwan. ⁵

This explains why she deserves to be written about as an individual, not just as a "Gezaixi preserver": she knew that genres change, but also that change without memory leaves only stage effects.

A Tragic Heroine Is Not Just One Face

"Ku Dan" (Tragic Heroine) is often misunderstood as a character who simply cries constantly. The power of Liao Chiung-chih’s weeping style lies not only in her timbre, but in how she integrated eye movements, breath control, physical gestures, and life experience into a single action. A special article from the National Traditional Arts Center uses Frozen Water Peony (Dongshui Mudan) as an example, noting how she linked character performance back to memories of motherhood and childhood, reprocessing those life experiences. ⁶

Caution is required here. Equating her suffering directly with artistic talent risks romanticizing childhood orphanhood, poverty, and being sold into a troupe. Her life experiences provided material for performance, but cannot be reversed to explain that "suffering makes one worthy." What turned experience into art was her long-term accumulation of training, compilation, and selection. ²⁶

Frozen Water Peony premiered in 2008 and was later remade with new actors. In that production, students played the young Liao Chiung-chih, with teacher and student on stage together, making the biography not just a recollection, but a site of transmission. ⁶

Thus, Liao Chiung-chih’s "Ku Dan" carries a second layer of meaning: she sang the tragedy of the character, allowing the audience to see how a genre brought women’s loss, labor, and the experience of holding a family together onto the public stage. This judgment comes from her works and teaching path; there is no need to add a grand label to her.

At the same time, "Ku Dan" cannot become her only name. She also wrote scripts, compiled melodies, designed teaching materials, and taught students. If readers only remember her moving cries, they will miss how she pushed a tradition proud of improvisation and oral transmission toward forms that can be studied, rehearsed, and restaged. ²⁴

Her performance crossed eras because she constantly found new entry points for her craft: demonstration singing, campus clubs, transmission projects, script publications, and having students play her childhood in her works. ⁶⁵

Writing "Belly Knowledge" into Written Words

Traditional Gezaixi long relied on artists’ "belly knowledge" (funei)—actors remembering melodies, knowing gestures, and organizing lyrics and dialogue on the spot without complete fixed scripts. This ability was vital yet fragile: when one person left the stage, unrecorded parts could disappear. ⁴⁵

Liao Chiung-chih began organizing performance memories into scripts and teaching materials in the 1980s. National Foundation for Arts and Culture Development data records that in 1986, she taught traditional Gezaixi at the Taipei City Social Education Hall, later compiling scripts for Chen San and Wu Niang, Shixiji, and Shanbo and Yingtai. In 1997, she published gesture teaching materials with illustrations and videotapes. ²

She did not initially possess complete written tools. In a 2024 Central News Agency report on the publication of her script collection, Liao Chiung-chih said she worked hard to become literate to transmit Gezaixi, circling characters she didn’t know and asking experts for help. This detail explains her work better than "lifelong dedication": preservation is not just sealing the past in a glass case. She was willing to learn an originally unfamiliar method so others could read her memory. ⁷

A 2018 Museum Island activity introduction by the Ministry of Culture also recorded that her accumulated plays and vocal segments were systematically preserved through video, sound, text, and musical notation. The same page listed her 1983 demonstration singing invited by Hsu Chang-hui, the 1989 founding of the Xinchuan Gezaixi Troupe, the 1999 establishment of the Cultural and Educational Foundation, and subsequent transmission projects. ⁸

One Person Is Not Equal to a Genre

In the late 1980s and 1990s, Liao Chiung-chih successively founded the Xinchuan Gezaixi Troupe and the Liao Chiung-chih Gezaixi Cultural and Educational Foundation. These organizations marked her shift from "I can perform" to "how to make others able to perform"; they should not be treated merely as resume decorations. ¹⁸

This shift was not accomplished by her alone. Researchers like Hsu Chang-hui brought her into demonstration singing and cultural education fields; students brought her oral transmission experience into text, video, and courses. Her achievements cannot be explained solely by "genius." They are the result of long-term collaboration among artists, researchers, students, and cultural institutions. ²⁵

Gezaixi was once viewed by some audiences as lowbrow grassland art; Liao Chiung-chih’s teaching brought it into campuses and national performance venues. This path gave a folk craft, previously undervalued, a position where it could be strictly observed, learned, and discussed, without erasing its folk origins. ⁶⁹

The preservation project’s work was more concrete: the National Traditional Arts Center records that the Classic Repertoire Preservation Project for Liao Chiung-chih was divided into five stages, completing works such as Chen San and Wu Niang, Wang Kui Betrays Guiying, Shanbo and Yingtai, Shixiji, and Wang Baochuan, recording approximately 200 important melodies, and preserving them through audio/video, musical notation, scripts, and guides. ⁴

This method turned "inheritance" from a wish into several checkable items: who teaches, what is taught, which vocal segment, which gesture, through what medium, and whether the next apprentice can restage it. A genre no longer relies solely on one master’s memory, nor does it mean the master’s personal style is erased. On the contrary, by leaving sufficient detail, later generations can understand differences.

In 2014, when the Ministry of Culture introduced the performance of The Civet Cat Replaced the Crown Prince, Liao Chiung-chih served as the storyteller in that performance, organizing the post-war indoor Gezaixi performance memory, and having first-generation transmission apprentices play major roles. She was not merely a senior figure to be commemorated. ⁹

This arrangement was highly symbolic: she moved herself from the sole center on stage to between the stage and the audience. She explained the origin of the story; students were responsible for keeping the characters alive. History was no longer just the teacher’s memory, but a task the next generation could take over. ⁹

Transmission does not automatically succeed. National Foundation for Arts and Culture Development data also recorded difficulties in her early teaching: initially, she wanted to teach students everything she knew at once, resulting in her exhaustion and students’ inability to absorb. After communication, she gradually refined a teaching method for interacting with students. This setback is important because it shows that inheritance is not pouring knowledge into the next person, but redesigning the speed of learning. ²

The most important succession on stage is allowing students to stand in different positions, making their own judgments on the same play, without needing to copy the teacher into another teacher. Liao Chiung-chih’s transmission work is moving from "whether she performs like herself" to "whether students can continue to think."

She Was Always Looking for an Audience

Preserving an opera ultimately returns to the audience. In articles for the National Traditional Arts Center, Liao Chiung-chih repeatedly discussed audience cultivation. She brought demonstration singing into schools and had students form Gezaixi clubs, because preserving performers without viewers leaves the genre without daily life. ⁵

This is the distance between her and the idea that "traditional arts rely only on old fans." She did not require young audiences to understand all musical modes before entering the theater; instead, she linked classic excerpts, children’s Gezaixi, campus clubs, and stage storytelling, leaving an entry point for those encountering Gezaixi for the first time. ²⁹

These entries also changed the class imagination of art. Plays originally performed in grasslands and temple courtyards could enter schools, national theaters, and overseas demonstration venues. It still retained Taiwanese language singing/recitation and folk emotions, but no longer had to accept the verdict of "only vulgar." ⁶⁸

After Boxing the Boxes, the Opera Still Walks

The most memorable objects of Liao Chiung-chih’s later life are less like trophies and more like a stack of scripts students will open, a vocal segment that can be heard repeatedly, and a teaching guide pointing to gestures and steps. She turned what once flowed only in theater tents into material that can be preserved, criticized, and restaged. ²⁴

Classic Gezaixi Repertoire II: Liao Chiung-chih, completed in 2024, includes seven adapted or newly composed works. The production process involved two years of manuscript organization, oral history interviews, and Taiwanese language proofreading. This work did not end Liao Chiung-chih’s creation. Instead, it handed scripts to the next batch of actors, allowing the 2025 Xinchuan Troupe to continue launching new plays. ⁷

Thus, Liao Chiung-chih’s importance lies not only in how many audiences she made cry, nor in how many cultural heritage titles she received. She shows us that for an art to survive, it relies on preserving three things simultaneously, rather than claiming it is forever unchanged: bodily details, textual traces, and space for students to continue rewriting.

She walked from a "bound opera child" to a preserver, still carrying memories of that harsh troupe world. She moved things once understood only between master and apprentice, one by one, to places accessible to all. Gezaixi therefore does not have to stop in Liao Chiung-chih’s voice, yet we can still hear how she taught people to open their mouths.

This ending leaves a question: Does preserving musical notation, scripts, and video equal preserving Gezaixi? Not necessarily. Data allows later generations to rediscover melodies, but cannot replace the breath during rehearsal, the默契 (tacit understanding) between actors and musicians, nor guarantee that someone will buy a ticket and sit down to finish a play. The Ministry of Culture’s introduction therefore discusses both the value of traditional repertoires and the development of new plays. The endpoint of preservation is still the audience. ³⁵

Liao Chiung-chih’s work did not solve all problems for Gezaixi, but provided a feasible answer: first, preserve what the body knows; then, give students the opportunity to perform it wrong, perform it alive, and perform it as their own version. The continuation of a genre relies on allowing today to have a concrete encounter with the past, rather than copying an unchanged past.