A friend donated 5,000 yuan to the Artemisia Public Welfare Foundation, and heavily publicized crowdfunding for the Artemisia Theater in his circle of friends. So I was curious to investigate the story of Artemisia Theater and its owner, Wang Xiang - the story of a dentist with six stents in his heart who saved China's theater arts by his own efforts.

Wang Xiang's personal and official releases from the theater, as well as various reports, are full of numbers. Perhaps it's an occupational hazard, but I was moved to calculate the relationship between these numbers and found some interesting facts.

If the 300,000-odd audience figures provided by Wang Xiang himself are true, then according to the minimum ticket price of 70 yuan for the Pengxiao Theater, the cumulative ticket revenue over the past nine years should be 30 x 70 = more than 21 million yuan, averaging more than 2.33 million yuan per year.

According to the official website's average annual audience of 13,500, the cumulative audience should be less than 150,000 people. Wang Xiang is the owner of the Pontoon Theater, and the official figures given can be so much different, it is really puzzling. If the numbers on the official website are true, then the average annual ticket revenue is also 70 x 13,500 = 940,000.

One thing the official website and Wang Xiang agree on, though, is that the average number of shows per year is over 300. I've never been to Pontoon, but I've been to the Gulou West Theater, also a small theater, twice, and both times it was packed. As Beijing's most prestigious small independent theater with many hardcore fans, I believe there is absolutely no reason for the attendance rate to be less than 60%.

The Pontoon Theater has 86 seats (with additional seats up to 100). Based on 300 performances per year, with 60% attendance per show with no extra seats and a minimum ticket price of $70, the average annual ticket revenue is 300 x (86 x 0.6) x 70 = $1.04 million. At 100 seats and 80% attendance, the annual ticket revenue would be $1.68 million.

Whether based on Wang Xiang's own figures, the theater's official figures, or estimates based on publicly available information, the Artemisia Theatre's annual ticket revenue of 1 million is definitely not a problem, with a high probability of 1.5 million or more. Instead of the higher than 500,000 that Wang Xiang often says, the maximum will be higher than 500,000.

Wang Xiang has mentioned many times on different occasions that every year he subsidizes over 700,000 to the Artemisia Theater from the profits of his dental practice. If you extrapolate that to an annual ticket revenue of 300,000-500,000, that means the theater's annual operating costs should be 1.1-1.2 million.

Beijing's Dongcheng District government has been providing 1.5 million (reportedly reduced to 500,000 this year) in subsidies to Artemisia Theater since 2011. Why would Wang Xiang need an annual subsidy of $700,000 for a theater that can sustain itself on government subsidies alone and make a net profit of $1-1.5 million a year?

From the report above, we can see that the operating costs of Artemisia's theater are roughly composed of "rent+wages+office". The production of the work is an investment, and should not be included in the operating costs. The theater's operating costs should be $930,000 for rent + $400,000 for wages + $300,000 for utilities = $1.6 million.