Wang Shifu (1260-1336) was born in Dexin and Dadu (now Beijing), and his ancestral home is Dingxing (now Dingxing County), Baoding City, Hebei Province. A famous zaju writer in Yuan Dynasty, he wrote the zaju The West Chamber.
Wang Shifu is as famous as Guan Hanqing, Bai Pu and Ma Zhiyuan. His works fully inherited the exquisite language art of Tang poetry and Song poetry, absorbed the lively oral language of the people in the Yuan Dynasty, created a brilliant vocabulary of Yuan opera, and became an outstanding representative of the "literary school" in the history of China opera.
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The Romance of the West Chamber originated from the legendary novel Yingying Biography written by Yuan Zhen in Tang Dynasty, but it was adapted from Dong Jieyuan's Romance of the West Chamber in Jin Dynasty. It is almost the same as Dong Xixiang in plot, but it has been further processed, developed and perfected in all aspects, which makes the drama conflict more intense and the characters more vivid, especially in psychological description, which is meticulous, accurate and fascinating.
The phonology of the Central Plains once took Wen Qu in the West Chamber 1 version as an example of "freeze frame".