Overview II

Yangzhou is the birth place of Chinese puppetry. It is recorded by Wei Xuan in Tang Dynasty that Du You, a senior government official of the Tang dynasty, once told his subordinates during his stay in Yangzhou that upon retirement, he would love to dress simply and watch the puppet show in the bazaar, a dream he eventually realized. Reprimanded by the government for such inappropriate behavior, he confessed that it was his secret wish to thus tarnish his own reputation so as to stay out of politics forever. This shows that puppetry was deemed at the time a folk art beneath the intellectuals. This story was later adapted for a play called Real Puppet during the Ming dynasty.

Puppetry in Yangzhou reached the peak of its popularity during the Qing dynasty, as evidenced by frequent performances and the greater variety including hand puppet, marionette, rod puppet and water puppet. Li Dou, a writer in Qing dynasty recorded in his essays about Yangzhou that water puppet shows with early characteristics of rod puppet, together with hand puppet shows, were frequently presented. Zheng Banqiao, a famous poet in Qing Dynasty who lived in Yangzhou, vividly described puppetry in his Ode to Puppets, which translates roughly as follows: funny to think that puppets, made of wood without any thoughts or feelings, can play the roles of scholars and dazzle the audience. However, we must not take the puppets seriously as they can only move through manipulation by people.  

During the reign of Emperor Qianlong, opera troupes of Huizhou assembled in Yangzhou prior to departure for Beijing. The popularity of the highly original Hui opera, predecessor to Peking opera, having won the admiration of both the super-rich and the common in Yangzhou, was spreading fast. In contrast, the ancient puppetry was on the decline and forced to move to towns and villages around Yangzhou. Since then, puppetry has been popularized in cities such as Xinghua, Taizhou, Taixing, Jingjiang and Rugao. In regions criss-crossed with rivers, where boat was the chief mode of transportation, troupes of marionette, due to the small size of the puppet and stage, lived on the boat. In regions with larger pieces of open land, rod puppet, due to the larger size of the puppet and stage, was more popular. As a result, a natural divide was drawn: marionette was mostly performed in Xinghua region while practitioners of rod puppet were gathered in Taixing and Taixian.