Compared to other kinds of Chinese Opera, Peking Opera doesn't have a long History:

In addition to Peking Opera, China boasts several regional kinds of opera. These include Sichuan Opera (川剧), Shanghai Opera (沪剧), and Hebei Opera (河北梆子). These types of opera may not be as well-known as Beijing Opera, but they have a much longer history. All of them started many centuries ago.

By contrast, Peking Opera emerged relatively late in Chinese history. Indeed, it dates only to the mid-18th Century, which is fairly recent for a country with a 5,000 year history. It began when the Qing Dynasty (清朝) Emperor Qian Long (乾隆), whose picture is at the top of this post, observed four large Anhui Province (安徽) Opera troupes (班) perform during one of his inspection tours of Southern China. He invited these troupes up to Beijing to set up shop and the rest, as they, is history!

The Chinese characters used in this post, along with their Romanized spelling (Pinyin) and tones are listed below. A number 1 indicates that the character has a flat tone, a number 2, a rising tone, a number 3, a falling rising tone, a number 4, a falling tone, and a number 5, a neutral tone.

川剧 (chuan1ju4). 川 is an abbreviated form of 四川 (si4chuan1) Province, which literally means “four (四) waters (川), while “居” on its own means “theatrical play”.
沪剧 (hu4ju4). “沪” is an older name for Shanghai (上海; shang4hai3). The city's modern name means “up (上) from the sea (海)”.
河北梆子 (he2bei3bang1zi3). “河北” is the name of Hebei Province and it means “north of the river,”namely the Yellow River (黄河; huang2 [Yellow] he2 [River]).
清朝 (qing1chao2). “清” is the name of the dynasty, which means “pure”, while “朝” is the Chinese word for “dynasty”.
班 (ban1).