Ice Queens, Rice Queens, and Intercultural Investments in Zhang Yimou’s Turandot Sean Metzger Stage director Zhang Yimou’s production of Turandot in the Forbidden City in Bei- jing was a spectacle of excess. Sean Metzger analyzes the staging of this theatrical event and the investments that fueled its production. Sean Metzger is a Ph.D. candidate in theatre at the University of California, Davis, and adjunct faculty at three universities in Los Angeles. He has published several arti- cles and reviews on the intersections of gender, sexuality, and Asian and Asian Amer- ican representation in theatre and film. He is currently completing his dissertation. A bloodthirsty princess, an exiled prince, and a love-struck slave—these are the melodramatic figures of Puccini’s opera Turandot, recently arrived in their imagined home, Beijing’s Forbidden City, in a production staged by Zhang Yimou. In this essay I offer some specu- lations about what is at stake in staging a fanciful homecoming for Princess Turandot. In particular, I am interested in how this piece of musical theatre used an intercultural aesthetic that hinged not only on orientalist visions of race and national culture but also on certain fan- tastic formations of excessive sexuality. 1 In pursuit of this goal, I first provide a brief background of the opera before engaging in a detailed analysis of Zhang Yimou’s production. For brevity’s sake I focus pri- marily on the first act, using the version that was filmed for interna- tional distribution as the souvenir DVD. 2 After exploring the invest- ments that drove Zhang’s artistic endeavor, I theorize the multiple levels of the opera’s reception. Asian Theatre Journal, vol. 20, no. 2 (Fall 2003). © 2003 by University of Hawai‘i Press. All rights reserved. debut panel papers 4_Debut (209-236) 6/3/03 7:11 AM Page 209