Theater Plays in Beijing. The love for the theater in Beijing is reaching almost absurd dimensions, and strangely enough in all the plays it is about whether Mr. Alfred will marry Miss Josephine. There is no better proof for the stupidity of the Chinese people caused by opium, because they don't even realise that they see the same play every night and they stand in line in front of different theaters every day, worried that Miss Josephine marries Mr. Oscar without them attending the touching wedding ceremony, plate 27 from Voyage En Chine 1845

Honoré Daumier created "Theater Plays in Beijing" as a lithograph, a medium well-suited to social commentary. Notice the composition: a dense crowd presses against what appears to be a theater entrance, their faces rendered with quick, almost frantic lines. Daumier's use of hatching and cross-hatching creates a sense of depth and claustrophobia, mirroring the supposed obsession of the Beijing populace with theater. The figures are caricatured, their features exaggerated to emphasize what Daumier saw as their monotonous fixation. The print's commentary extends beyond mere observation. It subtly critiques the notion of cultural 'otherness' and exoticism prevalent in 19th-century Europe. Here, the semiotic system is one of repetition and assumed cultural homogeneity. It challenges us to consider how easily perceptions can be distorted through the lens of cultural bias. The very structure of the image, with its crowded, undifferentiated masses, becomes a signifier of this perceived uniformity.