Of course, it is only the most superb actors who appear alone in front of the audience in such small plays. The reputation of such actors is immense. Wherever they appear, they are received with the greatest honor. Wealthy businessmen or officials frequently invite them with their troupe to perform in their houses. And yet probably no European artist would want to trade places with them. So great is the ambition and passion of Chinese actors that the acknowledged masters among them live in continual fear of the attacks that jealous rivals plan against them. It’s impossible to tempt an actor or an actress to ingest the smallest morsel outside of their apartment. They are convinced that the slightest inattentiveness could turn them into the victim of a poisoning. The tea they drink during the performance is purchased secretly and in a different store every time. The water it is boiled with is brought in their own teakettle from home, and only one of their entourage is allowed to make it. The great stars would never think of performing if their own bandmaster was not conducting, because they are afraid of the malice of their rivals, who could set traps for them during the performance by faulty conducting or misleading movements. The audience pays hellishly close attention, and dishes out scorn and mockery at the smallest gaffe. And they are not above throwing teacups at the artists if they are not satisfied with their achievements.
Now, the fire that I want to tell you about on this occasion was the biggest theater fire of all time. It happened in Canton on May 25, 1845. The theater was built, as was common, of bamboo posts interwoven with mats. It had been built for the special celebratory performance in honor of the war god Guan Yu. The performance was supposed to last two days. The theater stood in the middle of a great square among hundreds of similar but much smaller stalls. It held 3,000 people. On the afternoon of the second day, when everything was overcrowded, the stage was supposed to represent a temple of the war god. But because, as I have already explained, there are no sets in China, this was only identifiable because of a sacrificial fire that flickered in the middle of the stage. Then an actor left one of the two doors in the background open as he exited, and a strong gust of wind swept inside the theater, causing a pair of mats lying near the fire on stage to ignite. In the blink of an eye, the whole stage was in flames, and a few minutes later the fire had engulfed the entire structure. Now, the terrible thing was that in the whole theater there was only one single exit. Whoever just happened to be near it could save themselves; whoever sat closer to the front was lost. Hardly had a few hundred people reached the open air when the door began to burn. In vain they tried to douse it with hoses and water buckets. After a quarter of an hour had passed, it was impossible to get near the center of the fire because of the heat, and thus more than 2,000 people perished.
The European who hears about such things naturally thinks with pride and satisfaction about his own great stone theaters, which are under the strict supervision of the building control departments, in which there are firemen present at every performance, and where everything is done for the safety of the spectators. If there was ever a disaster at some point, it would hardly take the same terrible form, even if only because our theaters hold far fewer spectators. But that’s just it: in China all big events, whether work or celebrations, are tailored for enormous masses of people. And the feeling of being one of the masses is much stronger in the Chinese than it can ever be in the European people. Hence the humility, unimaginable to us, that is the main virtue of the Chinese and in no way implies low self-esteem; rather it is simply the constant awareness of the enormous size of the mass of people they belong to. This humility has a strong foundation in the rules for living and educational books of their great wise men Confucius and Lao Tzu, where it is cloaked in very particular codes of conduct that everyone can learn and understand. And at the same time, these great teachers of the Chinese, by instructing their fellow citizens in this humility, have taught them to act in such a way that they make the life of the great mass they belong to easier; they have instilled in them enormous respect for the state and especially for civil servants, whom we must not imagine to be like European civil servants. The exams that the Chinese civil servants take require not only specialized knowledge, such as our exams require, but also close familiarity with the whole corpus of poetry and literature, and especially the wise men’s instructions I spoke about. One might go so far as to say that it is these convictions of the Chinese that make their theaters so shabby and such fire hazards. At least that is what a Chinese man with whom I once discussed these matters told me:
“In China we are convinced that the most long-lasting and impressive house in every city must be the government building. After that come the temples. But places of amusement should not draw attention to themselves, because then one would think that in such a city order and work are only a minor matter.” And now, as you know, in many cities in China they really are a minor matter. But we must hope that the theater of blood, in the face of which they have retreated, will soon come to an end.3
“Theaterbrand von Kanton,” GS, 7.1, 226–31. Translated by Lisa Harries Schumann.
Broadcast on Radio Berlin, November 5, 1931, and on Southwest German Radio, Frankfurt, on February 3, 1932. Benjamin inscribed on the typescript: “Berlin and Frankfurt.” The Frankfurt broadcast was announced in the Südwestdeutsche Rundfunk-Zeitung for February 3, 1932, as the second of two broadcasts on the Youth Hour, which was scheduled to air from 3:15–4:00 pm.
1 In 1931, the Yangtze River valley flooded in a catastrophe that killed millions and that has been called the worst natural disaster of the twentieth century.
2 See “Der Traum” [The Dream], in Chinesische Schattenspiele, compiled and trans. Wilhelm Grube and Emil Krebs, ed. Berthold Laufer (Leipzig: O. Harrassowitz, 1915), in Abhandlungen der Königlich Bayerische Akademie der Wissenschaften, Philosophische-Philologische und Historische Klass, vol. 28 (Munich, 1917), 440.