A plastic art peculiar to the Chinese stage, the facial make-ups are various designs of lines and colorful patches painted on the faces of certain operatic characters. They follow traditionally fixed patterns for specific types to highlights the dispositions and quality in the personages so that the audience may immediately know whether they ate heroes or villains, whether they are kind or treacherous and wicked. The following describes briefly the major categories of facial make-ups:
The red face shows bravery, uprightness and loyalty. A typical red face is Guan Yu, general of the period of the Three Kingdoms, famed for his faithfulness to his Emperor, Liu Bei.
The relish purple face likewise shows a just and noble characters, for instance, Lian Bo in the well-known play Jiang Xiang He, The General Reconciled with the Chief Minister General Lian was proud and impetuous and quarreled with the chief minister to whom he was ultimately reconciled.
The black face indicated either a rough and bold character or an impartial and selfless personality. Typical of former are General Zhang Fei (of the Romance of the Three Kingdoms) and Li Kui (of Water Margin), and the latter is Bao Gong (alias Bao Zheng), the semi-legendary fearless and impartial judge of the Song Dynasty.
A green face depicts surly stubbornness, impetuosity and a total lack of self-restraint.
Commonly seen on the stage is the white face for the powerful villain. It highlights all that is bad in human nature: cunning, craftiness and treachery. Typical characters are Cao Cao, powerful and cruel prime minister in the time of the Three Kingdoms, and Qin Hui, treacherous Song Dynasty prime minister who put national hero Yue Fei to death.
All the above facial make-ups belong to a category of characters collectively called jing—all males with pronounced personal traits.
For the clowns of the traditional drama, there is s special make-up called Xiaohualian (the perry painted face), i.e., a small patch of chalk on and around the nose to show a mean and secretive character, such as Jiang Gan of the Three Kingdoms who fawned upon Cao Cao. It is also occasionally painted on a young page or an ordinary workingman, often to enhance his wit, hour or jesting ad to enliven up the performance,
Another type of players, called acrobatic clowns (wuchou), are also touched up with a tiny patch of white on the tip of the nose to show and astute mind and a keen and quick wit. Several of the stage heroes from the novel Water Margin are made up in this way.
The facial make-ups date a long time back to the Song and Yuan dynasties at least. Simple patterns of painted faces are found in tomb murals of that age. During the Ming Dynasty, improvements were made in the skills of drawing and in preparing the paints, leading to the whole set of colorful facial patterns that we see in today's Peking Opera.
