The Tang and Song Genre Show. The quyi (genre show) is a folk-art performance including elements such as ballad singing, storytelling, comic dialogues, and clapper talks. The genre show originated during the Tang dynasty (618-907) when Buddhists discovered that they were more successful with the masses when they sang Buddhist texts, using music to attract audiences. This earliest form of genre show is called zhuanbian, which means "singing Buddhist texts"; bian refers to the murals in Buddhist temples, and bianwen (Buddhist scripts) initially referred to the all-genre shows from Dunhuang literature in Gansu Province. A thorough study of Dunhuang literature, however, revealed that another form of folk drama, the shuohua (storytelling show), existed during the Tang era and was already quite advanced. It differed from the early zhuanbian mostly in having secular rather than religious content. In the early zhuanbian the...