Author of The Peony Pavilion, "the Shakespeare of the East"
A Ming-dynasty dramatist who lived at nearly the same time as Shakespeare and died the same year (1616), earning the name "the Shakespeare of the East." His Peony Pavilion tells of the maiden Du Liniang, who falls in love through a dream, dies for love, and is reborn for love — "feeling springs from one knows not where, and deepens ever; the living may die of it, the dead may live again." He raised "supreme feeling" to a height that transcends life and death, voicing the deepest and fiercest protest against a rites-bound order that suppressed human nature — the summit of romance in classical Chinese opera.
Du Liniang, roaming a garden, dreams of a scholar; waking, she pines away and dies; three years later the scholar opens her grave and she returns to life, and they are wed. With this near-absurd plot Tang Xianzu declares: true feeling cannot be stopped even by death. Here "feeling" becomes a force against every shackle of rite and law.
Tang Xianzu died the same year (1616) as Shakespeare; "the Shakespeare of the East" is a common later comparison, which this site states as such.
Below are how modern works borrow or reinterpret this name or story — not the original material. The two differ, so keep them apart.