History[edit]

Historically tanci was a popular art form with women in the lower Yangtze River Valley, specifically the Jiangnan region.^[2][3] It originated as a popular literary genre in the Ming dynasty. In the mid-to-late Qing dynasty it became popular with educated women who wrote and performed the music and who were the genre's audience and reader base.


Women's tanci often are about their philosophy of literary creation, the sentiments of the author, and descriptions of seasons.^[2] Lingzhen Wang, author of Personal Matters: Women's Autobiographical Practice in Twentieth-century China, wrote that "some scholars have even suggested that Chinese women consciously seized upon tanci to express their gendered experiences and to create a female literary tradition different from the male-dominated genres of novels and stories."^[4]


During the Qing dynasty it was not only used for entertainment but also for political and social propaganda. The Gengzi Guobian Tanci, a tanci by Li Baojia (Li Boyuan) written about the Boxer Rebellion, is an example of a political tanci.^[4]