This term has a two-fold meaning. First, it refers to any work that offers commentaries on ci poets, poems, schools of ci poetry, the gist of a ci poem and textual criticisms. This type of work is a constituent part of scholarly inquiry into classical Chinese poetry. Criticism on ci poetry, with relatively long lines interspersed with shorter ones, are derived from criticism on the more usual type of classic Chinese poetry with a fixed number of characters to a line. They proliferated in the Northern Song Dynasty and matured in the Southern Song Dynasty. Famed works of ci poetry appreciation include Remarks on Ci Poetry from White Rain Studio by Chen Tingzhuo (1853-1892) and Poetic Remarks in the Human World by Wang Guowei (1877-1927), both from the Qing Dynasty. The latter work, written after Wang Guowei was influenced by Western aesthetic theories, and fusing Chinese and Western aesthetic thoughts together, was a criticism work on Chinese ci poets and ci poems made from a brand-new perspective. Although superficially it imitates the traditional way of offering commentaries on shi poetry and ci poetry, it in fact already attempts to construct a theoretic system. It has remained the most influential work of literary criticism since the late-Qing period. Second, the term cihua also refers to an art of theatrical performance combining narratives and songs popular in the Yuan and Ming dynasties, in which the ci part is the singing of rhymed verse. As in Tales of Prince Qin of the Great Tang Dynasty, the performance intersperses singing with narrative, and verse with prose. It was developed from the performance of story-telling with speech and song of the Song Dynasty. After the mid-Ming Dynasty, such performances started to adopt two new terms: tanci (弹词), or story-telling with the accompaniment of musical instruments such as the Chinese lute, and guci (鼓词), or story-telling aided by a drum and clapper. Still later, these two new terms superseded the old. From the last years of the Ming to the first years of the Qing, this term was sometimes also used to refer to a popular novel with each chapter headed by a couplet giving the gist of its content which was interspersed with beautiful verse, for example Tales of the Golden Lotus.