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HELGA WERLE
The hands are made of wire (Plate VII) which facilitates the fastening of the sticks or arms, but their appearance is ugly.
The sticks have the length of chopsticks. Made of iron, they form a small ring at one end and have a wooden handle on the other, to prevent the sticks from slipping out of the hands. The third stick is thicker and is hooked into a hole at the puppet's back from below. The puppeteers tell that in Ch'aochow some puppets were considered so precious that they were handled with sticks made of pure gold.
Neither the waist nor the stick is movable.
The Historical Background in Ch'aochow
Although well proportioned and even beautiful, this puppet has many technical disadvantages compared to the Cantonese rod-puppet or the Fukienese string or glove-puppet. The reason for this incongruousness can be found in the dominance of Ch'aochow's ancient leather shadow-puppet tradition, which was definitely well established in the Ming dynasty in that area. One can assume that it existed earlier but any proof is lacking so far.
In Ch'aochow these shadow-puppets were cut out of cowhide (which is very rough when compared to the donkey-hide used in North China or Szechuan) which was coloured. They have two-jointed arms and legs and are handled with three sticks attached to the hands and the back of the two-dimensional puppet. The author has seen such Min-nan shadow-puppets in Taiwan, and some old Ch'aochowese confirmed that the Ch'aochow ones had exactly these features. By the end of the last century, supposedly under the strong influence of the extraordinary perfection of the string and glove puppets of Ch'uan-chou, Fukien, a new type of puppet evolved, a hybrid with the beauty of a Ch'uan-chou puppet, but handicapped in movement by the technique of a two-dimensional puppet. The name paper-shadow-theatre chih-ying-hsi was also applied to the new puppet. These two kinds of puppets existed side by side for one generation, and according to witnesses the leather shadow-puppets disappeared in the 1920s.
It is yet possible to receive first-hand accounts of the time when puppets were much used. An educated elderly Ch'aochow gentleman, Mr. Su related that in his childhood, at the beginning of the Republic, there were still 3 different kinds of puppets: shadow, horizontal stick-puppets and a third kind which he describes as...