Li Deli’s Journey to The West 西去李德立

Performance 40 min 2025

Le Deli’s Journey to the West is a speculative monologue-performance that reimagines the life and afterlife of Edward Selby Little, an English missionary in China known also as Li Deli. After his death, Little, instead of entering Christian paradise, enters Chinese Buddhism’s underground world.

The play explores Little’s controversial creation of Kuling, a Western summer resort on Mount Lu in China. As Little defends his actions in front of King Yanwang in four scenes, the performance explores cultural misunderstanding, colonial mindsets, and the violence of language. With minimal staging requirements and echoes of T.S. Eliot and Joseph Conrad, this meditation on cross-cultural encounters challenges audiences to consider how histories are written and how landscape is shaped by the agency of imagination.