A play written by David Henry Hwang in the late 1980s, this play is a very loose re-telling of perhaps one of the most strange (and true) cases of mistaken identity this side of 1900. A French diplomat named Rene Gallimard works in China during the '60s as an advisor to the goings-on of the day where he meets and becomes enamoured with a Beijing Opera diva named Song Liling. The two hit it off, and Gallimard cheats on his wife with Song for the next twenty years, in which his relationship with Song has ups and downs such as the cultural revolution in China, the Vietnam War, an unexpected and faked pregnancy on Song's part and Gallimard falling out of power in China only to regain some of his power as a spy for China, handling very sensitive documents out of France.