Amid the cacophony of gongs, drums, and cymbals, and the more plaintive notes of strings, a song arose, trilling to a traditional tune of Chaochow, a city in Kwangtung Province on the Chinese mainland.
And with the song's first bars, the blank white screen—the sole illuminated object in the pervading darkness—jumped suddenly with colorful images: astride his horse, Hsuan Tzang, the historically-famed Tang Dynasty abbot who made the long, dangerous journey to India to obtain Buddhist scriptures for China, and his three legendary disciples—the monk Sha Wu Ching, and the humanistic monkey king, Sun Wu Kung, and pig, Chu Pa Chieh. Against mystic backgrounds created by special lights and shapes, the enchanted figures quickly mesmerized the audience. Cast by delicately shaped, beautifully tinted translucent figures, the shadow images were reflections of the artistry of the Tung Hua Parchment-Shadow Players, presenting Pilgrims to the West (a legend surrounding historical event of more than ten centuries ago) in the modern environs of the bustling port city of Kaohsiung
The shadow-puppet show is an age-old folkart of China—and of many other countries, including India, Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia, Egypt, Turkey, France, and Italy. Its origins in China are linked to a touching legend from the Western Han Dynasty, which existed over two thousand years ago:
"Emperor Wu's (157-89 B.C.) favorite concubine, the Lady Li, passed away, and the great monarch missed her so deeply that he fell grievously ill. And there came a Taoist high priest, Li Shao-weng, who proclaimed his ability to invoke the spirit of the Lady. In the night, the priest lit a candle in a tent, and he arranged for the Emperor to rest in another, close-by. In the flickering candlelight, the silhouetted spirit of Lady Li seemed to appear on the door curtain of the empty tent, and the stricken Emperor's lovesickness thereby abated. Thus was initiated the shadow- puppet show," according to Kao Cheng in his 11th Century treatise, The Origins of Various Matters.
By the advent of the Sung Dynasty (960-1279), the shadow-puppet show had come into great fashion. Chang Lei (1054-1114), in his Sequel to the Ming Tao Miscellanies, reported the reactions of a monied shadow-playgoer in the then Sung capital of Pienliang (today's Kaifeng, Honan Province). He found a shadow puppet presentation of The Story of the Three Kingdoms so bewitching that he attended repeated performances. But whenever they came once again to the portrayal of the decapitation of Kuan Yu (?-219), the famous red-faced general of the Three Kingdoms Period (deified by later Chinese generations as the god of war), the rich patron wept unrestrainedly and even pleaded with the puppeteers to stop. We may well imagine the theatrical excellence of such a presentation.
Chou Mi, in his Stories of Itinerant Entertainers, written in the same period, declared that the most renowned and expert shadow puppeteers of that time numbered just twenty-two persons; that is, coincidentally, just two times the number of top puppeteers for the regular puppet theater form —also exceedingly popular before the full impact of Chinese opera, which took mature shape during the Yuan Dynasty (1271-1368). The shadow puppeteers of the time even organized their own professional association—the Leather-Painting Club.
Within the imperial family, shadow puppet plays were also highly popular. Men Yuan-lao, in Records of the Prosperity of the East Capital, reported that during the reign of Emperor Huitsung of the Sung Dynasty (1101-1125), shadow-puppet theaters were set up in royal households "to entertain the children, who might otherwise lose themselves wandering."
Historical records indicate that the shadow puppets not only continued to enjoy great popularity, but reached a golden age in the 17th Century, at the turn from the Ming to the Ching Dynasty. Among the "golden-age" puppet schools considered richest in local color, the most famous are the Luan Chou, Yueh Ting, and Chien Chiao.
The early Luan Chou shadow-puppet show, referred to as hsuan chuan(an oration of scripts), had its origins in the shuo shu ( the traditional story telling) of the Sung Dynasty. Initially, the performances were to the accompaniment only of the "wooden fish," wooden clappers originally used by Buddhist priests to set the rhythm for ritual chanting of the scriptures. But this particular musical ambience lacked color and liveliness and, gradually, flutes and plucked-string instruments were added. Indeed, the music became quite appealing to the ear and, in the mid 18th Century, Luan Chou puppet shows spread across Hopeh Province and into the three northeastern provinces of Manchuria. Popular among Manchu noblemen, the Luan Chou troupes were honorably designated as "Palace Shadows."
The Yueh Ting school of shadow puppetry, a local form that prevailed in Shensi Province, differed in its music. Other aspects are historically obscure.
The Chien Chiao puppet shows were religiously oriented and were especially popular around Tomb-Sweeping Day on April 5, and on the occasions of funerals, shows of respect for the spirit world.
Both the Luan Chou and Yueh Ting shadow puppets were generally made of mulehide; the Chien Chiao shadow puppets were largely of sheepskin.
Generally speaking, the many Chinese shadow-puppet theatrical forms are divided into two major groups, the Tung Cheng (East of the City) and Hsi Cheng (West of the City) groups. The former roughly coincides with the Luan Chou school. The latter, especially prevailing in districts west of Peking, though it has a longer history, is not as visually exquisite since the shadow puppets utilized are mainly of cowhide, which does not permit puppet conformations as delicate as those of sheepskin. Taiwan's shadow puppetry belongs to the latter school.
The origins of Taiwan shadow puppetry trace back to the 17th or early 18th Centuries. When General Koxinga (1624-1662) expelled Dutch occupation forces from Taiwan, growing numbers of settlers crossed the Strait to the island. Among them were shadow puppeteers from Chaochow in Kwangtung Province. And in the interstices of time, their artform took root and gradually developed into an indispensable element of rural life in southern Taiwan.
The early troupes of shadow puppeteers concentrated in the Tainan, Kaohsiung. and Pingtung areas. According to contemporary shadow-puppet master Chang Tien-pao, his grandfather once told him that in the waning years of the Ching Dynasty (1644-1911), there were forty-odd puppet troupes in Kangshan, and thirty-odd in the single village of Hsialiao, both in Kaohsiung County—an astounding popularity.
There are good reasons. This special theater form consists, really, of ancient animated cartoons, replete with bright colors and striking lines. And the motions (sometimes surrealistic) are in the dramatic cartoon style of marionettes, designed to emphasize distinctive differences between good and evil; the good characters, as in most animated cartoons, are favored by handsome countenances, and the evil figures feature villainously ugly appearances quite satisfying humanity's universal psychic wishes.
With its cartoonized action and distinctive facial characterizations, shadow puppetry's distinctive influence was later to be clearly discernible in the Chinese Opera. Indeed, it is quite safe to identify the shadow-puppet show as one of the specific forefathers of Chinese Opera.
A very special attraction or the shadow-puppet show lies in the circumstances of its performance: It must be presented in a dark room or at night, so that the backstage lights (once candles or oil lamps) can effectively cast the delicate shadow images on the screen. The lights came to be fitted with special deflectors to avoid the shadows of the puppeteers and the puppet-manipulation sticks.
A peculiar effect created by the light and its objects, though expressed on a flat screen, is the depth in the shadow images: As a puppet nears the screen, its image appears sharp and, drawn back, turns dim and enlarged. Before the advent of electric lighting, the wavering light of oil lamps must have made the screened figures seem very mysterious.
A poem recorded in the I Chien Chih (Records, edited by Hong Mai, 1123-1202, of the Sung Dynasty) brings out the charm of the shadow-puppet show:
Three measures of raw silk
compose a theater,
in which the
Central fingers flaunt all manner
of jocularities.
Sometimes, by the moonlight,
Before the lit screen, springs
laughter,
from the palm of a hand.
The darkness in the performance locales disturbed the Ching Dynasty authorities. who once prohibited shadow-puppet shows for fear that these circumstances would make possible large conspiratorial gatherings. Today, on a wall of Tainan's Pu Chi Palace, there still hangs a stone tablet inscribed with an 1819 decree prohibiting shadow-puppet performances.
During the Japanese occupation of Taiwan, most shadow-puppet shows were again banned. Only the very limited number of troupes, such as the Tung Hua Parchment-Shadow Players, which were able to adapt Japanese folk stories as scripts, were allowed to perform.
Though banned at least twice in their history, the shadow-puppet shows were like "wild grasses" which "even prairie fires cannot destroy, rising again as the spring winds blow" (from Grass. by the Tang Dynasty poet Po Chu-yi, 772-846). Now, after such great vigor through generation after generation, movies and TV have propelled the artform to a plateau of near-critical obsolescence.
In the Republic of China on Taiwan, currently, only four shadow-puppet troupes survive: Tung Hua and Ho Hsing in Kaohsiung's Tashe Village, and Fu Hsing Ko and Yung Le Hsing in Kaohsiung's Milo Village.
On a crisp tropical-winter's day, special to Kaohsiung, Pilgrims to the West unfolded in a darkened room on the third floor of the home of Chang The-cheng, director and leading puppeteer of the Tung Hua Parchment-Shadow Players.
While reading (and chanting) the lines on behalf of the characters, master-puppeteer Chang, 66, nimbly manipulated the sticks commanding the movements of his "cast"—now, a gesture by the voyaging high priest, Hsuan Tzang; then, a somersault by the monkey king; and suddenly, a fierce fight between the pig and the ox demon.... Truly, the puppeteer was a majestic commander, ordering all actions, uttering all sounds.
Sometimes the action becomes so complicated that two hands are definitely insufficient: Additional characters come on-screen, and an assistant, literally, lends a hand. As the action in this showing reached its climax, the assistant, and even the three musicians sounding the gongs, drums, cymbals (and strings), joined in the shouting.
The play over, puppeteer Chang talked of the history of the Tung Hua troupe. which traces its origins over more than two hundred years. His ancestor, Chang Chuang, brought his puppeteering skills over from Chaochow on the mainland to Tashe, where his descendants, including Teh-cheng's own children, have now lived for six generations.
Chang Teh-cheng shows off his "movie stars"—The puppets appeared in the film "God's Favored Girl."
In the beginning, the family troupe was considered only amateur, but at the hands of the fourth generation—that is, Chang Teh-cheng's father, Chang Chiao, it became professional.
"We performed almost every night in those days," recalled Chang Teh-cheng. "At seven o'clock, responding to our gong and drum advertising, a big crowd would converge before the stage and then, standing there, watch raptly until ten, when the play came to an end. Sometimes, they would stand even longer; after a short rest, we might present another play deep into the night. There used to be a popular saying: 'The ground before the stage belongs to those who are most able to stand.'"
Chang Teh-cheng began learning shadow puppetry at the age of twelve. And in his feelings, the shows remain totally as enchanting, both for their viewers and for the puppeteers. "Our shows are rich in audio-visual effect," offered Chang. "Sometimes we use a small fire to create a raging wilderness blaze on the screen, or set off firecrackers for their special sounds. It is really amusing."
To make his show more attractive, Master Chang introduced major innovations. He doubled the size of the traditionally foot-tall puppets to make them more visible from afar, and changed the leather-puppet heads from full to semi-profile, so that both eyes and more of the face could be shown. Colors were also enriched, the original four colors-bluish green, red, black, and white—being expanded to ten.
With puppet-size enlarged, the screen followed—from four feet to eight feet high. Now, the puppeteers perform on their feet instead of seated, which is physically beneficial to the puppeteers and facilitates the manipulation.
Shadow-puppet shows are also classified into singing, fighting, and semi-singing, semi-fighting categories. The singing shows stress the auditory presentation, and the fighting shows, visual presentation. Tung Hua is famous for its fighting shows, the most popular being Pilgrims to the West, A List of Deities, The Mysterious Legend of Taoist High Priest, Chi Kong, The Western Campaign of General Hsueh Jen-kuei, and The Eastern Campaign of General Hsueh Jen-kuei.
Tung Hua's lively, exciting style, during the period 1951 to 1977, thrilled audiences round-the-island in performances at over two hundred theaters.
In 1952, Tung Hua toured Japan for three months; in 1958, it performed in Manila for a month; in 1972, it toured universities in the United States for two and a half months. In February 1976, the troupe participated in a Hongkong art festival and, in August 1979, in an Asia Pacific international puppet-theater festival in Japan.
During the recent closing ceremonies for the 1985 Taiwan District Games, a Tung Hua shadow-puppet show proved a uniquely popular event: Surely, there is something special in this ancient folkart which other theater forms can never outdate.
Currently, though there are only five or six performance dates now each month, and though they now engage in commerce in groceries and timber as their major income source, Chang Teh-cheng and his three sons, Chien-kuo, Yi-kuo, and Tuan-kuo, still insist on maintaining the troupe, and the family puppeteering skills.
"We would consider it very sinful if the heritage passed down by our ancestors was broken off in our own hands," said second son Chang Yi-kuo.
As he spoke, Chang Teh-cheng's little grandson played skillfully with a puppet at the side of the old master, in the mountain village of Tashe.
The home or Hsu Fu-neng, director of the Fu Hsing Ko Shadow-Puppet Theater, is in the seaside village of Mito.
Hsu had recently presented a performance of Cheng Ho (the famed eunuch explorer of the early Ming Dynasty) Flying Down to the Indian Ocean to Find Wang Ing. He recalled an October night in Taipei's New Park, performing as part of Taipei Arts Festival 1985: Though the rains poured down, they could not extinguish the fervor of a capacity crowd. Under a sea of umbrellas, the urban audience watched, motionless, an orthodox performance of a traditional Chinese shadow-puppet show.
Fu Hsing Ko, the only one of the four ROC shadow-puppet troupes consisting of master and pupils rather than family members, is also the most traditionally conservative of the troupes. Its screen is just four by five feet; its puppets, a foot tall, appear only in profile and only in the four conventional colors (bluish green, red, black, and white). Every detail of the puppets' manipulation is also exquisitely restrained to meet traditional criteria.
The script for a puppet-play— In this case, "The Legend of Tsai Po-chieh and Chao Wu-niang."
Fu Hsing Ko is celebrated for its singing shows. Since these demand memorizing both words and musical scores, a good and practiced singing voice, and the special competence to compellingly present an intrinsically less-exciting visual situation (lower-keyed action scenes), quality singing shows are very rare. According to Hsu, it took him two years and four months just to memorize the first part of the Legend of Tsai Po-chieh (a scholar of the Eastern Han Dynasty) and Chao Wu-niang (his wife); and the whole play (four parts) took him twelve years. No wonder that in modern times, he is having difficulty finding anyone willing to devote the time to learning the play.
Looking back to the days when he was still a new hand in the late Chang Ming-shou's troupe, Hsu ruminated: "It is surely a long, long road for one to become a shadow-puppet master. When I first came to my teacher at the age of eighteen, I was taken on only as an 'apprentice-to-be;' it took me two years just to become a 'formal apprentice.' But only under such a strict training system can real masters be developed."
Chang Ming-shou (who was later to become Hsu's father-in-law) developed a passion for shadow-puppet shows at the age of 20, when he took the famous puppeteer Wu Tien-lai as his mentor. Wu taught him craftsmanship as well as the craft: how to choose the best cowhide, to soak it in limewash and to tan it properly to achieve an extreme thinness, and then to "animate" it by frequent rubbing with his fingers. In such intimate contact daily with the very origins of the shadow puppets, he was often too excited to fall asleep at night, anticipating the time he would manipulate a puppet he had made himself.
The time and effort spent in tanning, shaping, tinting, fixing the sticks, and threading the puppets sharpens their personalities for their creators, who later give them movement and voice.
Hsu Fu-neng shows how to properly manipulate a member of the cast.
Besides shadow puppets, Chang Ming-shou, like other present-day puppet masters on the island, had a second occupation. And he also passed these skills along to his pupils. Therefore, Hsu Fu-neng and his brothers (who were also his classmates) donned white aprons and took up kitchen knifes to help "master cher' Chang Ming-shou cater banquets for such special occasions in the village as weddings and funerals. This extended association intensified the affinity among the teacher and his students.
Chang's troupe also had an apprentice from abroad. In 1979, Anne Riston, a student of Professor Jacques Pimpaneau, a famous Sinologist at the University of Paris, joined the troupe as a student of Hsu Fu-neng. After several months of intensive training and practice, day and night, she returned to France where she is now a professional Chinese shadow-puppeteer.
In October 1980, on the invitation of the Shu Ho Cheng Folk-Culture Foundation, Masters Chang and Hsu lectured and demonstrated their skills in shadow-puppet making and manipulation for forty primary and high school teachers and college students in special sessions at Taipei's Tien Educational Center. Later, Hsu also lectured at Tunghai University.
Chang Ming-shou's death at the end of 1981 was a shocking loss to both Fu Hsing Ko and shadow-puppeteering in general. But the show has gone on. Today, Fu Hsing Ko's "treasure trunks" still provide hundreds of shadow puppets created by puppet masters Hsu, Chang, Wu, and Wu's mentors—a continuous line in the millennial Chinese heritage of shadow puppetry.
Perusing the contents of Fu Hsing Ko's trunks, Hsu explained that the characters of the puppets can be judged quickly by the shape of the eyes—very round for very evil and spindle-shaped for good—and that the costumes are a clue to social status.
Traditional movement details are critical for an artistic evaluation of the puppeteer, he noted. For example, a puppet should bend his knees before sit ting down, and keep his legs nearly vertical when seated. And there are fixed formats for the appearance of various characters—for example, an official must arrange his official cap, his girdle, and his beard, and then recite a four-line poem when he first enters the play.
Like many other masters of the traditional folkarts in modern China, Hsu has forsaken the ancient tradition of secrecy concerning unique professional skills. He is eager to pass along all he knows, in the hope that new generations will forever fan embers of the traditional Chinese shadow-puppet play.