The fall of the Ming was not only a national crisis; it also seemed to contemporaries to mark the dissolution of the Chinese world. The Chinese always experienced complex feelings of being able neither to accept nor reject the Qing, and these contradictory impulses produced the painful and tragic consciousness that was expressed in early Qing drama. This paper takes memory and narrative as points of convergence to explore how these writers employed drama as an intimate vehicle for retaining public and private memories, expressing their lament for the late Ming and their sentiments about dynastic changeover. To explicate the interaction of "memory," "historical writing" and "self-narration," it focuses on the plays by Li Yu (1591?-1671?), Wang Fuzhi (1619-1692), Wu Weiye (1609-1671), Ding Yaokang (1599-1669) and Kong Shangren (1648-1718). The issues addressed are: How Li Yu and Wang Fuzhi communicated their national consciousness and mourning for the Ming in drama; how, if writing is a way of "self-forgetting" or "self-extension," the "twice-serving official" Wu Weiye dramatized his "self-justification" through the processes of "remembering," "forgetting" and "memory rebuilding"; how Ding Yaokang shifted from his lament for the Ming to loyalty to the Qing through the conflict of "double-consciousness" in private and public arenas; and how Kong Shangren reconstructed his life experiences by "memorial narrative" with a triple structure-from the past to the present, from the present to the past, and the eternal present-to demonstrate the formation of cultural and collective memories of the times.