Li Yuru

For the two centuries before women appeared on Shanghai's stages in the 1870s, female opera roles had been played by men.

Because of the association with prostitution, the work was still stigmatized and female students, despite usually being driven into acting by poverty, had previously needed private tutors.

The school was a more respectable setting but Jiao adopted her mother's assumed name of Li in order to avoid shaming her father.

Along with the other members of the school's fourth class, Li then adopted a stage name incorporating the generation component "jade": Li Yuru.

While there, Li memorized plays and participated in "arduous" physical exercises.

Her training focused on the "verdant-clad", "flowery", and "sword-and-horse" roles but covered a variety of schools.

She studied six days a week and was permitted family visits on Sundays.

Beatings were given for poor behaviour, slow learning, or as part of a collective punishment for a single student's mistake, but teachers were expressly forbidden from striking a student's head.

Li and the actresses of her generation "played an important role in the development of [Peking Opera] as they transformed the dan into a role also played by females".

She credited her later success to her school's eclectic training but Li's first performance was a disaster.

Given a supporting role with four lines six months into her training, she failed to hit the high notes and was noticed and jeered by the audience.

For the next five years, she only received walk-on roles.

She put the experience to good use: "Through playing extras, I learned the plays that had not been taught to our year. I also observed not only my own character type but also other roles. I familiarized myself with the stage and the audience".

She woke at 6 each morning (two hours ahead of the other students) and took extra classes.

The audience had also become familiar with her.

At age 14, she was given the gown and star role of the Princess in a performance whose lead and understudy had both lost their voices.

She later recalled that, when she struck her first pose, before saying a line, "the applause and shouting started. It was so loud that my ears were rin[g]ing. Afterwards, every line I sang or spoke and every eye expression I made would gain a full-house ovation".

At 14, she was a "star student" and began "playing all types of leading roles", all the more so because the principal and registrar hadn't realized she'd learned the part ahead of the school's curriculum.

Over the course of her training, Li studied about 40 hua dan ("flowery role") plays.

Li was descended from Manchu nobility but had changed her name to pass as Han following the 1911 Xinhai Revolution that ultimately overthrew the Manchu Qing dynasty.

Her father died when she was an infant.

When she was five, her mother remarried to a businessman named Jiao Dezhai.

The family was poor.

When she was 9 or 10, they sent her to the National Drama School to learn a trade and receive meals.

Li Shuzhen (25 July 1923 – 11 July 2008), better known by her stage name Li Yuru and also known as Li Xueying, was a Chinese opera singer and actress.

Descended from Manchu nobility, she is remembered as "one of the great Beijing Opera performers" and played an important role in the acceptance of female singers in female roles (dan).

She was born in Beijing on 25 July 1923 to Zheng Yuanlong and Li Yuxiu (1900–1966).

This school had been opened in 1930 as the first coeducational opera school in China and aimed to reform education of Peking opera singers and musicians.

Graduating at age 17 in 1940, she established her own troupe with friends from the school.

She organised a program of 62 new and traditional plays over a successful 48-day run in Shanghai, starring in 28 of them.

Disliking the pressure she came under as an independent young actress, she disbanded the troupe and placed herself under the training and protection of older male actors: Xun Huisheng and Mei Lanfang, two of the "Four Great Dan"; Zhao Tongshan, the greatest "flowery" actor of the time; the "martial clown" Ye Shengzhang; the "educated clown" Ma Fulu; the "painted face" actor Jin Shaoshan; the "martial" actor Li Shaochun; the "Four Great Beards" Ma Lianliang, Tan Fuying, Yang Baosen, and Xi Xiaobo; and the other "old men" Zhou Xinfang and Tang Yunsheng.

She also studied under the female impersonators Yu Lianquan and Cheng Yanqiu.

The broad range of specialists expanded her repertoire greatly.

During this period, Li gave successful performances of The Dragon and the Phoenix, The Courtyard of the Black Dragon, Two Phoenixes Flying Together, and Three Pretty Women.

Her career and finances were largely handled by her mother, who was reckoned one of the "Four Famous Mothers" of the opera.

She had her first daughter Li Li in 1944.

Li's mistreatment at the hands of the Japanese and Nationalists led her to "wholeheartedly" support the people's republic founded by the victorious Communists in 1949.

Her success despite her poverty, lack of family connections, and avoidance of a rich and powerful patron gave her a clean slate and she was relatively young and famous.

Amid the Cultural Revolution, she was imprisoned from 1966 until the early 1970s.

In 1979, she married Cao Yu, one of the most important 20th-century Chinese dramatists, and, following China's opening up under Deng Xiaoping, she ended her life respected as one of the few surviving masters of the dan roles.