The play Sakuntala (Chinese name Finding Sakuntala Again by the Keepsake) by Kalidasa, the famous Indian dramatist, begins with the encounter between the King Dushyanta and the miraculously beautiful Sakuntala when Dushyanta is hunting in the woods. They fall in love at the first sight and get married. Then the King leaves her with his ring and soon returns to the capital. She waits for a long time but the king doesn't come back. Sakuntala decides to find her lover, expecting him to keep his parting promise. But a curse intervenes and makes the King forget her, until he sees the ring again. On the way to the King's capital Sakuntala loses the ring and the King denounces her. Eventually the ring is retrieved and when the king sees it, he recalls his memory about Sakuntala. The story about Sakuntala and the King Dushyanta was first described in the epic Mahabharata.

Recompose into the drama brimming with poetic sentiment from an ancient story, Sakuntala shows great originality of the dramatist. Sakuntala in the drama is of Indian classical beauty, vivid image and integral personality. The drama highly praises true love as well as the honesty, goodness and the determination to pursue beautiful life of people in lower classes, while criticizes the soul of the monarch indirectly. With poetic sentiment, fascinating plot, unique personalities of characters, exquisite description of the inner world, elegant landscape depiction, and vivid, simple language, the drama unifies content and form perfectly.

Sakuntala was popular in ancient India with various versions. In the Middle Ages, it was translated into different Indian dialects. Kalidasa was still famous all over the world in modern times for his Sakuntala. William Jones, a British scholar of Sanskrit who was the first to translate Sakuntala into English in 1789, regarded Kalidasa as Indian Shakespeare. Later Sankuntala was translated into other European languages and well received in European literatus, especially in Germany.

Since the 1920s, several Chinese versions of Sakuntala appeared, which were all based on English version or French version. It was not until 1956 that the Chinese version (by Ji Xianlin) directly translated from Sanskrit was published. The drama Sakuntala was presented on the stage in China twice since the 1950s.