8-Day Peking Opera & Kunqu Workshop Tour

Afternoon — Arrival in Beijing
Welcome to Beijing, the capital of China! To make your arrival as smooth as possible, your private guide greets you in the arrivals hall and escorts you to your hotel by private vehicle. Your guide also handles your luggage and assists with the hotel check-in process.

Evening — At Your Leisure
Lunch or dinner will be arranged according to the voucher provided for you; otherwise, you can find some local restaurants nearby or dine at the hotel. The rest of the day is yours to rest and recover from your journey.

Morning — the four types and the painted face
Jingju, usually translated as Peking opera, arrived in Beijing in 1790 when four troupes from Anhui were brought south-to-north for an imperial birthday and simply stayed; it was added to UNESCO's intangible heritage list in 2010. Everything in it is codified. There are four role types - sheng, the male roles; dan, the female roles; jing, the painted faces; and chou, the clowns - and within each type the costume, gait, gesture and singing style are fixed by tradition rather than chosen by the performer. The morning session begins with the faces. The colour is the character: red for loyalty, black for blunt honesty, white for cunning, gold and silver for gods and demons, and the patterns around the eyes tell you what the man does for a living.

Late morning — water sleeves and the walk
The practical work is physical. The shuixiu - the long white silk extensions of the sleeve - are used to express what the face is not allowed to show: grief, refusal, hesitation, flight. You learn the basic throws, the wrist snap that sends the silk out and the pull that brings it back, and then the entrance walk of a dan role, which is done on the ball of the foot with the body level and the eyes fixed forward. Participants are uniformly bad at this, which is the point; the correction the teacher gives is the same one the professionals get.

Lunch
A restaurant near the studio, with northern dishes and a clear soup - light food, because the afternoon has singing in it.

Afternoon — an excerpt, sung
Singing in jingju is not melodic in the Western sense: the two main tune families, xipi and erhuang, are frameworks with fixed cadences and enormous room for individual phrasing. Working in small groups by role type, the class learns one short excerpt - usually a few lines of recitative and one aria - with the teacher correcting pitch, the placement of the voice and, above all, the pronunciation of the syllables. Nobody is expected to sing well. Everyone is expected to sing, and to understand by doing it why a jingju aria moves the way it does.

Evening — a performance on a small stage
In the evening you attend a performance arranged through a local opera organisation, with the venue confirmed before departure. Smaller stages are better than the big tourist shows for a first encounter: you can see the footwork, hear an unmiked voice, and watch the percussion section - drum, clappers and gongs - hold the whole thing together. Your guide explains the plot before curtain up so that the conventions do not have to be decoded in real time.

Meals
Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner

Accommodation
In Beijing.

Morning — Temple of Heaven
Begin your day at the Temple of Heaven, an esteemed complex of religious structures where emperors once prayed for good harvests, epitomizing the connection between Earth and Heaven. Built in the Ming Dynasty and now a UNESCO World Heritage Site, it is also a beloved public park where you can watch local residents practicing their distinctive morning exercises.

Lunch — A Well-Known Local Eatery
For lunch, enjoy a meal at a well-known local eatery featuring authentic regional cuisine. Your guide assists you in selecting dishes that suit your taste.

Afternoon — Tian'anmen Square & the Forbidden City
Stroll through Tian'anmen Square, one of the world's largest public squares, then delve into the enigmatic Forbidden City, the world's largest imperial palace. Home to 24 emperors of the Ming and Qing dynasties, it contains hundreds of halls and courtyards; venturing off the main axis uncovers fascinating tales of notable figures often overlooked by conventional tours.

Evening — At Your Leisure
The evening is yours to enjoy at your leisure in Beijing.

Morning — the 798 Art District
Dashanzi was built in the 1950s as a factory complex for electronics, with East German architects and the sawtooth roofs and north-facing windows that studios need. The plants closed, the artists moved in, and it is now the largest concentration of galleries in the city, alongside design studios, bookshops and the surviving industrial structures themselves. The point of the visit is not shopping but range: what Chinese contemporary art is being made, what it costs, and how much of it is aimed at the domestic market rather than at foreign buyers.

Afternoon — a Cooking Class and Chinese-Style Shopping
The afternoon is practical. In a teaching kitchen you work through three or four dishes chosen from the regions the group has travelled through - dumplings folded by hand, a cold dish, a wok dish and a soup - and then eat what you have made. The class finishes with a shopping stop where the ingredients and the equipment are bought, usually at a market rather than a supermarket, which is also where the group sees how the same dish is sold ready-made. Any speciality shop the group wants can be substituted, including the silk and pearl markets.

Meals
Breakfast and lunch included.

Morning — the Summer Palace
The Summer Palace was the Qing court's garden retreat, built around Kunming Lake and the Longevity Hill. The walk goes along the Long Corridor, whose beams carry painted scenes from history and opera and which is a useful bridge between the two halves of the programme, and on to the Marble Boat and the lake itself. It is a large site, and about two and a half hours is the realistic allowance before the transfer to the station.

Afternoon — High-Speed Rail to Suzhou
After an early lunch, transfer to Beijing South Railway Station and board the high-speed train to Suzhou. The direct service runs roughly five hours; the line passes through Tianjin, Jinan and Nanjing, and there is a trolley service and a dining car on board. Seats are reserved and luggage is carried on with you. Some itineraries change at Shanghai Hongqiao instead, which takes about the same total time and is useful if the group wants to break the journey.

Evening — Arrival in Suzhou
Arrive at Suzhou North Railway Station and transfer to your hotel. Suzhou's old city is built on canals, the hotel will be inside or within a short walk of it, and the evening is free: Shantang Street and the Pingjiang Road lanes are both a short drive away and are open late.

Meals
Breakfast and lunch included; dinner on your own.

Morning — the oldest living opera form
Kunqu began in the Kunshan area in the fourteenth century, was reformed in the sixteenth by the musician Wei Liangfu into a style with a strict, extremely slow and highly ornamented vocal line, and became the dominant theatre music of the late Ming and early Qing. Tang Xianzu wrote The Peony Pavilion in 1598 for it. It was the first Chinese art form proclaimed by UNESCO as a masterpiece of intangible heritage, in 2001, at a point when only a handful of professional troupes remained. The morning session covers what makes it different from the jingju of the north: the dizi flute leads the ensemble, the singing is a single line drawn out over many syllables, and the movement is built from codified gestures rather than from naturalistic acting.

Late morning — hands, eyes and the fan
The practical work is unhurried and precise. Participants learn the female role's basic hand positions, the turn of the wrist that carries the fan, and the way a walk is measured in a garden-scale stage rather than a theatre. Then they attempt one sung phrase with the teacher, which is where the difficulty becomes obvious: kunqu singing requires breath control across a phrase that a Western singer would break into four, and the ornamentation has to be produced without any pressure in the throat. Nobody masters it in a morning. Everybody understands by lunch why the form nearly died.

Lunch
Noodles in the old city, then a short walk along Pingjiang Road, which runs beside a canal with the stage-walls of former residences on one side and a stone bridge every hundred metres.

Afternoon — costume, make-up and an excerpt
The afternoon is spent preparing one excerpt. Participants see the make-up process - the base, the eye shape, the binding of the hair - and the costume, and then work through the entrance and the first sung passage with the teacher marking the stage positions on the floor. Rehearsal is done against a recorded dizi and percussion track, and the teacher explains what each instrument is telling the performer: when to step, when to hold, when the phrase ends.

Evening — a garden performance
In the evening the group attends a performance arranged through a local opera organisation and staged in a restored garden pavilion rather than a theatre, with the venue confirmed before departure. This is how kunqu is best seen: twenty or thirty people, one singer, a flute, a clapper, lanterns, water on three sides, and no amplification. Guests who wish to take part in a short staged passage are welcome to; the rest watch, which is the historically correct role of the audience in the first place.

Meals
Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner

Accommodation
In Suzhou.

Morning — Humble Administrator's Garden
Suzhou's largest and most celebrated classical garden, a UNESCO World Heritage Site built in the Ming dynasty. Its pavilions, lotus ponds, and zigzag bridges embody scholarly landscape design, including the “borrowed scenery” technique that frames distant pagodas. The Hall of Distant Fragrance is a central highlight.

Afternoon — Suzhou Museum & Pingjiang Road
The Suzhou Museum, designed by architect I. M. Pei, pairs a minimalist water-themed structure with ancient Chinese art and artifacts. Then stroll Pingjiang Road, a 1,200-year-old canal-side lane of whitewashed houses, silk shops, and teahouses, where you can sip Biluochun tea and try squirrel-shaped mandarin fish.

Evening — Flexible Evening
The evening is yours to enjoy at your leisure in Suzhou.

Morning — Free in Suzhou
The last morning is unscheduled. Suzhou's gardens open early and are quietest then, and the lanes along the Pingjiang Road canal are at their best before the shops fill; your guide can arrange a taxi or hold the luggage at the hotel for a late departure.

Late Morning — Departure
Suzhou has no international airport of its own, so departure is through Shanghai. Transfer to Suzhou North Railway Station for the high-speed service to Shanghai Hongqiao, about thirty minutes, and onward to Hongqiao or Pudong International Airport for the flight home; or, where the group is continuing by rail, to the Beijing, Hangzhou or Nanjing services. Your guide assists with luggage and check-in as far as the station or the airport.

Meals
Breakfast included.