Along a stone path in a misty mountain village, musicians in red blow horns and beat drums, leading a procession of banners and a canopied shrine as villagers watch from the steps of their houses.
The two oldest kinds of Chinese drama outside xiqu: masked ritual drama grown from exorcism rites (Nuo, Dixi, Mulian plays), and puppet theatre in which performers work marionettes, rod and glove puppets or shadow figures. Both are still staged at festivals, temple fairs and rites.
1300 BCE · OriginShang oracle-bone inscriptions already record Nuo rites to drive out pestilence, the earliest written evidence of masked exorcism.178 · EvolutionYing Shao's Fengsu tong of the Eastern Han already uses the word kuilei for puppets, and puppet shows appeared at late-Han banquets.1120 · EvolutionIn Northern Song Bianjing the playhouses staged the Mulian Rescues His Mother play from Qixi to the Ghost Festival, and puppet and shadow plays were regular fare in the wazi.1381 · ImpactAfter the Ming campaign of 1381, garrison settlers in Anshun turned their military Nuo into Dixi, the ground opera still performed today.
Nuo originally meant driving out pestilence. In the Shang and Zhou, at the end of the year or at the turn of the seasons, the fangxiangshi put on a mask with four golden eyes and led a band through palaces and streets to chase away plague spirits. The mask made the wearer, for a while, into another being, and that is where acting begins. Over time stories and characters were added to the exorcist procession, and the rite became something people watched as a play.
Puppet theatre took another path. The performer does not go on stage but acts through a stand-in of wood or leather. Tomb figurines and ritual substitutes gave the puppet a ceremonial meaning at first; by the end of the Han, puppets performed at banquets. In the wazi entertainment quarters of Song cities there were specialist performers of string puppets, rod puppets, water puppets, firework puppets and shadow plays, and puppetry became an everyday city pastime.
The two kinds share some traits. Performance and belief go together: a show often opens by inviting the gods and closes by sending them off. The plays draw on historical romances and religious stories. The stage is flexible: a patch of ground, a temple platform or a lit screen is enough. Mulian plays run for days around the Ghost Festival, Dixi is staged at New Year and in the seventh month, and Quanzhou marionettes still take part in weddings and funerals.
Today Guichi Nuo theatre, Nanfeng Nuo dance, Anshun Dixi, Quanzhou marionettes, Zhangzhou glove puppets and many regional shadow plays are on the national intangible heritage list, and Chinese shadow puppetry was inscribed on the UNESCO Representative List in 2011.
Ritual and puppet theatre is the old branch of Chinese drama that stands outside xiqu. It has two parts. One grew out of exorcism rites: performers in masks play gods and demons, as in Nuo, Dixi and Mulian plays. In the other, performers out of sight work marionettes, rod or glove puppets, or shadow figures to tell stories. Both are bound to festivals, temple fairs and votive offerings, and both are often counted among the sources of Chinese drama. Spoken drama (huaju) is not part of this type.
The line starts with the Nuo rites in Shang oracle-bone inscriptions. The Rites of Zhou describes the fangxiangshi "clad in bearskin, with four golden eyes, black jacket and red skirt, holding a dagger-axe and raising a shield," leading a hundred men to expel pestilence at set times; Nuo had become a state rite. The Analects notes that when the villagers performed Nuo, Confucius stood in court dress on the eastern steps, so Nuo was also a village custom. In the Han, Zhang Heng's Rhapsody on the Eastern Capital describes the year-end Great Nuo with the fangxiang, shamans, dwarfs and giants side by side, already with an element of show and jest.
Written records of puppetry begin in the Eastern Han. Ying Shao's Fengsu tong uses the word kuilei, and the later Tongdian says puppets were "first used at festive gatherings at the end of the Han." In the Tang, Duan Anjie's Yuefu zalu describes the palace exorcism with four fangxiang in caps and masks, and records a legend about the origin of puppets. Meng Yuanlao's Dreams of Splendor of the Eastern Capital, a memoir of Northern Song Bianjing, says the playhouses staged Mulian Rescues His Mother every day from Qixi to the Ghost Festival, one of the earliest clearly recorded play performances in Chinese theatre history. The Southern Song Ducheng jisheng (1235) lists string, rod, water and live-actor puppets, and notes that shadow figures were first cut from paper and later from coloured leather.
From the Song onward, masked performers began enacting stories within Nuo rites, and Nuo theatre took shape. In the mid-Ming, Zheng Zhizhen compiled a Mulian play that became the base text for regional Mulian theatre. After the Ming campaign of 1381, soldiers and their families garrisoned around Anshun brought military Nuo to central Guizhou, where it grew into Dixi, staged as "god-leaping" plays on Three Kingdoms and Sui-Tang themes. In the Qing, Fujian marionettes and glove puppets and the shadow plays of Shaanxi and Hebei formed their own schools.
In modern times Nuo and Mulian theatre declined for a period and have been surveyed and protected since the 1980s. Puppet and shadow theatre moved into troupes and schools and onto international stages. From Shang exorcism to today's temple fairs and theatres, the type has kept its two ways of acting: through a mask and through a stand-in.
Nuo Procession
The masked, banner-bearing procession at center is the clearest main scene of the Nuo ritual and drama.
Masked Ritual Leaders
The red-and-green masked figures at the front are the ritual leaders of exorcistic performance.
Villagers Watching
The villagers gathered at the lower-left street show the shift from ritual for spirits to performance for people.
Mountain Route
The river valley at right extends the sense of regional route and procession path for the Nuo rite.
A village Nuo procession: masked performers in fearsome visages lead the way with ritual implements while villagers follow with banners and drums, enacting the ancient rite of driving out pestilence. A millenia-spanning masked ritual preserving the shamanic roots of performing arts.
Ritual and puppet theatre is like the two sides of one door. On one side is the mask: put it on, and you become a god or a demon in front of the audience. On the other side are the puppet and the shadow figure: the performer steps back and hands the role to a stand-in. Both answer the same question: how can the person before you become someone else?
Later opera developed make-up, painted faces and set movements, but the painted face still carries traces of the Nuo mask, and the stand-in lives on in puppet theatre.
Every first lunar month, a mountain village performed Nuo. Masked figures came out of the ancestral hall and went from house to house driving out sickness, and the children hid behind the doors.
A child asked his grandfather, "Is that a ghost?"
"It isn't a ghost. It's the man from next door. With the mask on he is a god, chasing illness and misfortune out of the village for all of us."
That night a white cloth was hung at the village gate with an oil lamp behind it. When the lamp was lit, a general on horseback and a talking monkey appeared on the cloth. The child asked, "Is that the man from next door too?"
The grandfather laughed. "This time he doesn't show his face. He sits behind the cloth with a few bamboo rods and lets the little leather figures act for him."
The child thought about it. "In the day he turns into a god. At night he hides and lets the little people talk."
"Yes. One way, you put on a mask and become someone else. The other, you hide behind a screen and let someone else stand in for you. Both are very old ways in the theatre."
Nuo and puppet theatre are two old kinds of Chinese drama. Shang oracle inscriptions already record the exorcistic Nuo rite, the Eastern Han already had wooden puppets, and puppet and shadow plays were often staged in the entertainment quarters of Northern Song Bianjing. Nuo grew out of exorcism rites, and the mask turns the performer into a god; in puppet theatre, wooden and leather figures go on stage in place of people. Both are still performed at village festivals and temple fairs, where rite and entertainment still sit side by side. (This is an illustrative story, not a historical account.)
String MarionettesPuppet plays in which performers work wooden figures on ten to more than thirty strings
Shadow Puppet TheatrePlays acted by carved leather or paper figures, their shadows cast on a lit screen
Mulian PlaysRitual drama of Mulian rescuing his mother, staged over several days at the Ghost Festival and jiao rites
Rod Puppet TheatrePuppet plays worked on rods from below the screen, including iron-rod and firework puppets
Dixi Ground OperaMasked martial plays of the Tunpu villages of Anshun, sung by farmers with the mask worn on the brow
Nuo Ritual DramaMasked plays staged by nuo priests inside rites of thanksgiving and vow-fulfilment
Glove Puppet Theatre (Budaixi)Hand-worn cloth puppets, the 'theatre in the palm', strongest in southern Fujian and Taiwan