Chinese Opera Festival Opens in Zhouzhuang… 46 Genres to Take the Stage until November

The 2026 Chinese Opera Festival (Kunshan) opened on September 23 in Zhouzhuang. This event will continue until this November and consists of a program combining performances, exhibitions, and cultural experiences.

Co-hosted by the Ministry of Culture and Tourism of China and the Jiangsu Provincial People's Government, this festival includes 46 genres of opera. 57 excerpts and 10 full-length works will be staged, alongside new works and audience-participatory programs. Attempts to re-read traditional opera with a modern sensibility are notable.

At the opening ceremony, commemorative certificates were presented to 16 institutions selected for opera-related media projects across China. Additionally, the China Kunqu Blue Book 2026 and the AI-generated micro-drama Meeting Liang Chenyu—The Origins of Kunqu were also unveiled. The festival is designed to expand the scope of opera by encompassing not just performance schedules, but also inheritance, recording, and digital utilization. However, how the trend of combining traditional arts with modern content will secure sustainability remains a key question for the future.

On the opening day, an immersive opera experience was held at Yongqingyuan in Zhouzhuang Ancient Town, and A Feast of Opera—Masterpieces of Opera Folk Art from the National Art Museum of China Collection opened at the Kunshan Opera Museum. The Watch a Hundred Operas, Travel Jiangsu program, designed to allow travelers to tour Jiangsu Province through the medium of opera, also began. The festival will proceed with five major events—opening and closing ceremonies, representative scenes of classical opera and genre-specific skill performances, preservation and practitioner exchanges for endangered genres, invited works performances, and forums and new work presentations—along with three additional programs.

Since starting in Kunshan in 2018, this festival has been held seven times through 2025. During this time, all 348 opera genres across China have been staged, and puppetry and shadow plays were also introduced. 547 performance groups presented 713 works, and the on-site audience exceeded 214,000 people. Online views have surpassed 355 million.

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