Pu Opera, a traditional Chinese opera that is loosing an already shrinking audience, has now begun its second life.

A huge 20-volume Pu Opera Anthology, based on a set of hand written scripts, has recently been compiled and published by several elderly experts after six years of hard work. It contains 197 plays or episodes in 7.5 million Chinese characters.

Pu Opera has been popular in southern Shanxi for centuries. Over 500 plays do not have texts because these plays have been passed down through a process of oral transmission.

In the 1950s, a group of experts, organized by the South Shanxi Pu Opera Theater went to the countryside to collect Pu opera texts. These texts were then hand written but were never printed.

After five decades of neglect, most of the texts are covered with dust and many are damaged. To save these rare copies, the Sanjin Culture Research Society in Shanxi entrusted several experts to collate them into an anthology.

During the compiling, the experts interviewed a number of elderly actors, corrected scribal errors in the texts and added new contents to the original scripts.

Pu opera aficionados are overjoyed at the publication of the Anthology, saying the merits of the experts can never be overestimated.