Taiwanese puppet theater
The Taiwanese puppet theater is traditionally a puppet show performed with hand puppets on its own puppet stage. Its roots are in marionette and hand puppet theater in southern China . Traditionally, the puppet show is performed by traveling puppet theater groups, for example at temple festivals. However, there are also modern forms of puppet theater, such as the at times very successful puppet theater series by the television station Pili International . Taiwanese puppet theater is now considered by many residents of Taiwan to be a very important element of their own tradition.
In 1993, the Taiwanese director portrayed Hou Hsiao-Hsien 's famous Taiwanese puppet master Lee Tianlu († 1998) in the film The Master of puppetry ( The Puppetmaster; Hsimeng jensheng ). In Sanchih , near Taipei, there is a small museum for the puppet theater company Lee Tianlu.
history
The hand puppet theater emerged from the Chinese puppet theater during the Ming Dynasty (1368–1644). Since the reign of Emperor Jiaqing (1796-1820), the hand puppet theater was very popular in the southern Chinese province of Fuzhou and spread from there to the island of Taiwan . In Taiwan, too, numerous puppet theater troupes came into being, which soon performed throughout the country. During the Japanese occupation (1895-1945) the performances were temporarily banned or replaced by propaganda pieces in Japanese as part of the policy of Japanization.