Why this show is different
Most evening performances in China are staged indoors, in a theatre with a proscenium. Impression Liu Sanjie has no building. The stage is 1.654 square kilometres of the Li River, the backdrop is twelve karst peaks standing out of the valley floor, and the ceiling is the sky. It opened on 20 March 2004 at the foot of Shutong Hill outside Yangshuo, and it is generally credited as the first landscape-stage production anywhere - the one that started the entire genre of outdoor site-specific shows in China.
The people who made it are worth knowing about. The directors were Zhang Yimou, Wang Chaoge and Fan Yue; the producer and originator was Mei Shuaiyuan. Sixty-seven artists from China and abroad worked on it, the running order was rewritten nineteen times, it took five years and five months to bring to the stage and cost close to a hundred million yuan.
The afternoon - out to Yangshuo
We collect you in the afternoon and drive out to Yangshuo, which gives you the last of the daylight in the town rather than in a car afterwards. Yangshuo's West Street is fourteenth-century in origin and less than a kilometre long, a paved lane that bends through the middle of the old town, and it is best walked before dinner, while the shops are still open and the crowds are still thin.
Dinner
Dinner in Yangshuo, on the early side, so that the theatre does not have to be rushed.
The performance
The audience sits on a bank built in the shape of terraced fields, 2,200 seats in a 180-degree arc, with 2,000 ordinary places, 180 VIP and 20 presidential. The performance runs about seventy minutes and the cast is around six hundred people, roughly two-thirds of them local fishermen, farmers and villagers rather than professional actors - the show's whole argument is that the people of the river can play themselves. What they perform is the story of Liu Sanjie, the Zhuang singer of the Tang dynasty whose songs made her the region's figure of resistance and romance, staged as a sequence of images: the fisherman's lanterns, the fishing cormorants, the wedding, the moon.
Two practical points. The show is outdoors and runs rain or shine, so bring a layer even in summer, and the setting - water, mist, insects - is part of it. And the seat class genuinely changes the experience: the ordinary seats are fine, but they are at the back of a very wide arc, and on a dark night the difference between the classes is a difference in what you can read on the performers' faces.
Afterwards
Back into Yangshuo, where West Street has by now turned into itself - lit, loud and full - or straight back to your hotel if you would rather. The show has run more than nine thousand performances and has had more than twenty-two million people through it, and in 2024 it was named one of the first 'Guilin Classics'; whatever you make of the spectacle, you are watching a piece of the city's history of the last twenty years.
Meals
Dinner
Accommodation
Evening programme - no hotel night included.
