During the Yuan Dynasty, literati held a low social status and faced difficult lives; to make a living, they withdrew from the court, turned to the folk, and wrote plays, leading to the rise of Yuan drama. During this period, a large number of outstanding playwrights emerged, the most famous of whom are known as the "Four Great Masters." These four masters are Guan Hanqing, Ma Zhiyuan, Zheng Guangzu, and Bai Pu. Among them, Guan Hanqing achieved the highest accomplishments, ranking first among the Four Great Masters, with achievements that left the others far behind.
Guan Hanqing was jokingly called the "leader of zaju" by his contemporary Jia Zhongming due to his outstanding achievements in zaju drama. Guan Hanqing wrote tirelessly throughout his life, creating a total of sixty-seven zaju plays. However, regrettably, most of these excellent works have been lost over time, with only eighteen surviving to this day. Among them, The Injustice to Dou E, Rescuing a Prostitute, The Riverside Pavilion, The Moon Prayer Pavilion, and The Single Sword Meeting represent the highest artistic level of Guan Hanqing's work. The Injustice to Dou E, in particular, became a timeless masterpiece of Yuan Dynasty zaju, known to all, from women to children, and passed down through the ages.
The full title of the play "The Injustice to Dou E" is "The Injustice to Dou E That Moves Heaven and Earth," and it is one of the ten great tragedies of ancient China. The renowned late Qing Dynasty scholar Wang Guowei once said, "Guan Hanqing's 'The Injustice to Dou E' and Ji Junxiang's 'The Orphan of Zhao' can be listed among the world's tragedies without any shame." From this, we can see the important position that "The Injustice to Dou E" holds in the history of Chinese and even world literature.
When Guan Hanqing wrote The Injustice to Dou E, he based it on the "Filial Woman of the East Sea" from Biographies of Exemplary Women by the Western Han Confucian scholar Liu Xiang. Guan Hanqing set this story against the backdrop of the corrupt and dark Yuan Dynasty, making the filial woman Dou E a victim of her era, representing all the kind-hearted, suffering, yet defiant great women at the bottom of Yuan society who refused to submit to fate.
The story of The Injustice to Dou E (Dou E Yuan) goes like this: the impoverished scholar Dou Tianzhang, in need of travel funds for the imperial examination, sold his young daughter Dou E to the Cai family as a child bride. After Dou E married, her husband soon died of illness, leaving her to depend on her mother-in-law. The lecherous and ill-behaved Zhang Lü'er and his father, coveting Dou E's beauty and her status as a young widow, made improper advances. When Dou E resolutely refused, Zhang Lü'er threatened to poison her mother-in-law. But before he could act, his own father accidentally ingested the poison and died on the spot. Foiled and enraged, Zhang Lü'er falsely accused Dou E of murdering his father. Dou E was arrested, tortured in court, and forced to confess, resulting in a death sentence. At the execution ground, she swore to heaven that if she were truly wronged, her blood would splash onto a white silk cloth, snow would fall in June, and a drought would plague the land for three years. After her death, these three events indeed came to pass. Later, Dou E's father succeeded in the imperial examinations and avenged his daughter's injustice.
Guan Hanqing's works often feature female protagonists, most of whom come from lowly backgrounds and are ruthlessly exploited and toyed with by the ruling class. However, unlike the vast majority of women of their time, they do not passively accept their fate; instead, they choose to rise up and resist, persisting to the very end, even at the cost of their lives. Dou E is a prime example of such a character. In the history of Chinese literary development, these brave and resilient female figures created by Guan Hanqing have had a profound and lasting influence on later generations.