Ming playwright whose 牡丹亭, the story of a girl who dies of longing and comes back to life for love, is the best-known play of 昆曲 opera. He died the same year as Shakespeare.
Tang Xianzu's masterpiece, The Peony Pavilion, is still performed today.
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His four plays are known together as 临川四梦, 'the Four Dreams of Linchuan', after his hometown. Two of them, 《南柯记》 and 《邯郸记》, retell the Tang tales behind the idioms 南柯一梦 and 黄粱一梦, a life of glory that turns out to be a dream.
