A gong, then cymbals, then a painted face coming through the curtain right on the beat — that's the Anhui troupes arriving in Beijing in 1790, hired for the Qianlong Emperor's eightieth birthday. Booked for an occasion, and then they simply didn't leave. What grew out of those companies over the next sixty-odd years is Peking opera, still working out of Beijing, Tianjin and Shanghai.
The role types are lovely on a printed playbill — sheng, dan, jing, chou — and a bill would set the type name beside the actor, so you knew before the curtain whether you were getting a painted face or a clown. I've a battered handbook of them behind the counter; the diagrams of the face patterns are better than the text.
Listen for the clapper and the drum, Constance — the ban and the danpigu are running the clock, not the singer. The jinghu fiddle sits up over the voice, thin and bright, but it's the percussion telling everybody when to breathe.