page_title: Chen Shimei
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Chen Shimei / History
caption_attribution_description: English: A depiction from a famous Bao Zheng case: Chen Shimei listening to his abandoned wife Lady Qin playing the pipa.
context_page_description: Chen Shimei is a Chinese opera character and a byword in China for a heartless and unfaithful man.
context_section_description: “Illustrated Edition of Bao Zheng’s Trials of A Hundred Legal Cases” (增像包龙图判百家公案), “Bao Zheng’s Cases” (包公案) in short, published in 1595 had already had the story of Chen Shimei whose children’s names were as the same as they are in the traditional opera.
  The character was based on the historical court records of the Qing dynasty government official Chen Shumei (陈熟美), whose wife was Qin Xinlian (秦馨蓮). Like Bao Zheng, Chen was an upright official who eventually became an enemy of other corrupted officials. These officials created two fictitious husband-and-wife characters based on the couple by changing the middle Chinese characters of their real names and brought Bao Zheng of the Song dynasty era into their fictitious story to slander and smear Chen Shumei and his wife Qin Xinlian.
caption: An illustration from a 1594 copy of the novel Legal Cases of A Hundred Families Judged by Dragon-Design Bao (包龍圖判百家公案) depicting Chen Shimei in a banquet listening to his abandoned wife Lady Qin disguised as a pipa player.
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