Answered by Mr.MANNY from China | Jul. 24, 2010 21:35
There will be another thesis to tell the costumes of Beijing Opera. Here is some basic facts that may help you to get an general idea. There are 'big costume case', 'second costume case' and the 'third costume case'. I literally translated the names. The big case includes major over coats, gowns, robes, official clothes, etc. The second case refers to the clothes of martial actors. The third case contains underwear, boots, etc. Of course there are cases to contain accesaries and scenes and props like flags, helmats, weapens, make-up cases etc. This is a whole set of Opera costumes. The styles of the costumes comes from the clothes from Tang Dynasty to Qing Dynasty, mostly Ming Dynasty. There are only dozens of costume styles, but have to descrip hundreds of stories and thousands of figural images. So, there is no different in dynasties. That is to say, peopler forcus on the story and the performance, will not mind which dynasty the costume belongs to. There are usually fixed rules in Beijing Opera that different costume can show exact what the people are.