Basurde Xiao Long

I am talking right now to the girl who gave me this picture for my birthday, and she is explaining me a little bit about it.

We know about Pekin Opera. As Pekin is the capital of China, all the stories performed there are about the king, the queen, wars, etc. But we are living south of the YangTze River, in a area called ¨the hometown of fish and rice¨, because it is very rich -Suzhou, Hangzhou, Shanghai, ...-. So we don´t care about wars, king or queen, but we care about flowers, snow, love, etc. So the opera in this area, is called ¨Suzhou Píng Tan¨. It is usually about love stories. 

As you can see in the video, the performance is done by two girls. In my picture, there is only one, because the artist didn´t have time to do the second. Maybe in the future... :-) She is playing an instrument that I don´t know how it is called, but the name sounds like ¨pipa¨ to me.

They are singing in Suzhou dialect, therefore, it is very hard to understand for somebody who doesn´t speak that dialect. People who speak shanghainese, for instance, could, paying a lot of attention, pick some words, but people from Beijing or Cantón... no clue!