The Palace of Eternal Life
play written by Hong Sheng
The Palace of Eternal Life (traditional Chinese: 長生殿; simplified Chinese: 长生殿; pinyin: Chángshēng diàn; Wade–Giles: Ch'ang-sheng tian), also translated as The Palace of Eternal Youth, is a play written by Hong Sheng (洪昇/洪升) in the Qing dynasty. He absorbed certain material from the long narrative poem The Song of Everlasting Sorrow written by Bai Juyi and the zaju Rain on the Paulownia Tree (梧桐雨) written by Bai Renfu. The Palace of Eternal Life is acclaimed as one of China's "Four Great Classical Dramas", along with The Peony Pavilion, The Peach Blossom Fan and Romance of the Western Chamber. The performance is focused on the everlasting love story of Emperor Xuanzong of Tang and his favorite consort Yang Guifei.
This story has been translated into English and published by the Foreign Languages Press.
Author
Hong Sheng, one of the period's most famous playwrights and poets, was born in 1645 in a shack outside Hangzhou City in the Qing Dynasty. He graduated from the Imperial Academy in 1668 and then returned home the following year. At the age of 18, he began to write Incense Pavilion (沉香庭), which was later renamed and known as Dance Seduction (霓裳舞). Finally, the old drama of Dance Seduction was successfully rewritten as The Palace of Eternal Life after being revised several times when he was 27, which became a masterpiece afterwards and was widely played. In the year of 1704, on his way back from Nanjing to Hangzhou, Hong Sheng accidentally fell into the river when drinking wine on a boat and died by drowning in Wuzhen.
The public source identifies “The Palace of Eternal Life” as play written by Hong Sheng. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Palace, Eternal and Life.
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Attribution, date and provenance are strongest when supported by the original work, a catalogue record and documented transmission. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 18, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q836845. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1645, 1668 and 1704.
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This entry incorporates text from “The Palace of Eternal Life” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.