The Stage Where Sun Yat-sen Spoke

The guild hall was built by people who were not from Tianjin and did not pretend otherwise. It was begun on the fourteenth day of the first lunar month of 1907, in the thirty-third year of Guangxu, with money raised by the customs commissioner Tang Shaoyi and his fellow Guangdong merchants, who bought the site of the former salt transport commissioner's office south of the drum tower. The finished building joins Lingnan architecture with the northern courtyard style, which is what happens when southern merchants build in a northern city: the plan answers the climate, the decoration answers the patrons. More than three hundred shop rooms and dwellings were built around the hall, so the guild was a quarter as well as a building.

The theatre is the main building, and its dimensions are worth holding in mind. The stage is ten metres deep and eleven metres wide, and above it a domed caisson is built of densely packed rotating dougong, all joined with fine timber members, a construction that does structural and acoustic work at the same time by spreading the load and shaping the sound. This is a stage built for a large audience in an enclosed courtyard, and it is the reason the building later became a theatre museum rather than a merchants' office. What survives of a guild hall is usually its account books; what survives here is the room where the guild entertained.

The stage was used for more than opera. On 24 August 1912 the northern branch of the Tongmenghui invited Sun Yat-sen and Huang Xing to speak from it, and in 1919 Deng Yingchao led the Awakening Society in a fund-raising performance there. After 1937, under Japanese occupation, the hall served as a police training school. It is now the Tianjin Drama Museum and holds more than four thousand theatre-related relics, among them the paintings and stage costumes of Mei Lanfang, Shang Xiaoyun and Ma Lianliang. A room built for merchants' banquets thus carries the record of a republic's founding, a students' fundraiser, an occupier's school and an opera collection, in that order.