![]() ![]() glove puppets, “string puppets”, “powder puppets”, “floating puppets” and “live puppets”. The difficulty of investigating the origin of the Chinese puppet theatre is increased, because in the Chinese language, performances with masks and puppet performances are both referred to by one and the same name Kuei lei hsi, and it is often impossible to determine whether any old document refers to people masks or to puppets.Ī classification of puppet theatres does, however, exist in one of these old books and the author enumerates five fundamental forms: the ‘portable booth”, i.e. Neither of these legends of course reveals the origins of the puppet theatre of China, but their existence is evidence of the fact, that, already in very early times, the puppet theatre was part and parcel of the everyday social life of the people and clearly existed as a popular form of entertainment. The danger seemed to her so great and so real that the terrified wife persuaded her husband to abandon the siege of the town. In such an event she would lose the Khan’s love and goodwill. The Khan’s wife, noticing the dancer’s beauty, and thinking that it was alive, became very perturbed because she thought that, if the town was taken, the Khan would take this beauty as his concubine. Knowing that the wife of the Khan was very temperamental, he commanded that a puppet should be made in the form of a beautiful maiden, and, with the assistance of some contraption or other, he made it dance on the city wall. The town was saved by one of the Emperor’s courtiers. In this legend, we are told how the leader of a nomadic tribe, Khan Modo, laid siege to the city of Pinchen, the residence of the founder of the Han dynasty, Emperor Kao-Tzu. This was recorded in the Tang epoch, by Tuan An-chieh, in his book Notes on Folk Songs. There is another legend of how the first puppet was invented. Sun Kai-ti writes that the custom of not allowing women to witness puppet performances was preserved in feudal China until very recent years. Mu-Wang got over it and allowed Yang Shih to continue performing, but, just to make sure that there would be no further unpleasantness of any kind in the future, he forbade his wives to watch any such performances. Mu-Wang ordered the puppet master to be put to death, but before the executioner could approach Yang Shih, he quickly slashed his puppets with a knife to prove that they were not really alive. The legend tells us that on one occasion the Emperor felt that the puppets were winking irreverently at his wives and courtiers. This work was written by Chen Yuan, who lived in the epoch of the Song Dynasty – eight hundred years ago.īut this period evidently has to be increased almost four times over, because when speaking of the puppet theatre Chen Yuan refers to a popular legend concerning a puppet master named Yang Shih who made the first puppets and performed with them at the court of the Chu emperor, Mu-Wang, who reigned in the tenth century B.C., i.e. In a work entitled The Origins of the Chinese Puppet Theatre, the author –Sun Kai-ti- when speaking of the first historical documents which contain references to the existence of the puppet theatre in China, begins his enumeration of these with The Book of Music. The term “centuries-old” is used for the reason that the tradition is really thousands of years old. ![]() The majority of puppeteers in old China were either not very literate or entirely illiterate people, but popular ingenuity and an unbroken centuries-old tradition evolved a puppet “anatomy” and a technique of construction, which one man alone could never have done no matter how literate or technically skilled he might have been. ![]()
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