山西古戏台

Shanxi's Old Stages

古戏台的历史是一部中华文化的发展史，人间的悲欢离合，世上的喜怒哀乐，在这里都被演绎得有声有色，有情有味，说到底呀，这古戏台就是老百姓离也离不了、忘也忘不掉的一块精神圣地。

Lying on the eastern side of the Yellow River, to the right of the Taihang Mountains, the ancient Shanxi was a major birthplace of the venerable Chinese civilization and a cornucopia of folk arts. With an abundance of musical and operatic resources, Shanxi enjoyed a wide variety of operatic genres and consequently had a plethora of stages. Since time immemorial, these stages had remained the spiritual home-which was unforgettable and could not be dispensed with-of the ordinary people. Since there appeared operas from antiquity, so these stages are as old as the operas. Shaxi's ancient stages were dotted everywhere, with most of them erecting invariably adjacent to temples. This phenomenon is indeed thought-provoking. Having witnessed vicissitude of the times and withstood hundreds of years of exposure to the elements, these stages stand more or less intact, but they have lost much of their original glory - just like a old man, wirily built but with a weather-beaten face. Looking at them, one seems to be time-capsuled back to those submerged years, the old operatic music resonating vaguely around the stages.