Glove Puppet Theatre (Budaixi)

Introduction

Hand-worn cloth puppets, the 'theatre in the palm', strongest in southern Fujian and Taiwan

Glove puppet theatre, also called the theatre in the palm, uses puppets with carved wooden heads on cloth-bag bodies; the puppeteer slips a hand inside the body, and one performer can work two figures at once. Southern Fujian is its heartland: the southern school of Quanzhou and Jinjiang sings in Quanzhou tunes, the northern school of Zhangzhou in northern tunes, while the glove puppets of Shaoyang in Hunan and the one-man shows of Cangnan in Zhejiang are carried by a single performer on a shoulder pole, who plays a whole play with hands, feet and voice (IV-92). Quanzhou legend credits a scholar named Liang Binglin of the Jiajing reign of the Ming with inventing it; the earliest reliable record is Li Dou's Yangzhou Huafang Lu of the late Qianlong reign, describing the shoulder-pole show in which one man 'works three-inch puppets with his five fingers' and supplies all the voices and gongs himself. Glove puppetry also travelled to Taiwan with migrants from southern Fujian, where television glove puppet serials became a craze from 1970.

Timeline

1. 1550EvolutionTradition holds that in the Jiajing reign of the Ming a failed Quanzhou candidate, Liang Binglin, prayed for a dream at Nine Carp Lake in Xianyou and was told his success would lie 'in the palm', whereupon he created glove puppetry and became known as the 'top scholar of theatre'; the story is told in the Taiwan provincial gazetteer and in folk tradition but cannot be confirmed from records.
2. 1795OriginLi Dou's Yangzhou Huafang Lu, first printed in 1795, the 60th year of Qianlong, describes the shoulder-pole show: 'a booth of cloth propped on a single pole, three-inch puppets worked with the five fingers, gongs and drums loud, the sung and spoken parts all done with a reed in the throat, all by one man', an early reliable record of one-man glove puppetry.
3. 1970EvolutionIn March 1970 The Confucian Knight of Yunzhou, a television glove puppet serial by Huang Chun-hsiung, son of the Wuzhouyuan master Huang Hai-tai, began on Taiwan Television; its hero Shi Yanwen became a household name before the show was pulled that November, and televised glove puppetry, later including the Pili series, grew from it.
4. 2006ImpactIn July 1951 the glove puppetry of southern Fujian was formally named palm puppet theatre; in 2006 the glove puppets of Jinjiang, Zhangzhou and Shaoyang entered the first national ICH list (IV-92), the one-man show of Cangnan followed as an extension in 2008, and in 2012 the strategy for training coming generations of Fujian puppetry practitioners was selected for UNESCO's Register of Good Safeguarding Practices.

Heritage Listings

1. 2006National List of Intangible Cultural Heritage1st batch · IV-92 Puppet theatre [no. 236: Jinjiang glove puppetry · Zhangzhou glove puppetry · Shaoyang glove puppetry · Jinjiang and Zhangzhou · Fujian · Shaoyang county · Hunan]
2. 2008National ICH extension itemIV-92 Puppet theatre: one-man glove puppetry · Cangnan · Zhejiang
3. 2012UNESCO Register of Good Safeguarding PracticesStrategy for training coming generations of Fujian puppetry practitioners · mainly string and hand puppetry