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NOTES AND QUERIES
find that for a joke, which he would be unable to explain to his friends, she had painted a crab in indelible ink around his mouth. The prince got away with it the first time by telling his friends that he had painted it himself for amateur theatricals. However, when next she painted one on his forehead, he was at a loss as to how to explain it away and never again demanded the company of the businessman's wife.
Having examined Chief Marshal T'ien in some detail, let us move on to a Swatow articulated figure with which it is closely connected. At the back of a bamboo temporary stage of a travelling Ch'aochow opera company in Singapore there was a small shrine (Plate 23) on one of the crates used for transporting the actor's robes. This shrine contained Marshal Tien seated well back, under a plaque bearing the title Han Lin Yuan (✯✯E) (The Han Lin Academy*). Before it, between a doll's size wicker chair and a bamboo pot of incense sticks, was a seated articulated puppet (Plate 24) dressed in a short-sleeved jacket and knee-length trousers. He was known as Chi Hsiang Ko (**) (Lucky Brother) and, as one of the actors explained, he is a three-year-old child, another form of Marshal T'ien, who when seen outside the bounds of the theatre is an extremely potent fertility deity and who, when on a permanent altar in a temple, is also prayed to for luck. This articulated image of a child deity can be seen in several temples, (one especially attractive one—rather surprisingly nude—being in a cave temple near Tanjong Rambutan in Perak), all worshipped by the childless of the Ch'aochow communities for sons and daughters. One temple keeper, possibly with tongue in cheek, said that Chi Hsiang is the brother of Kuan Yin, who in one of her forms is the 'Giver of Sons'***.
The Three Jesters
In his articles on three prominent puppets Schipper explains that the 'Jesters' who stand out amongst the total of 72 puppet heads and 36 bodies of the Fukienese puppet theatres, are the three gods of marionettes. He continued that puppet plays are connected
* The Chinese nation's highest academic institution during Imperial times.
SK. M. Schipper: 'The Divine Jester', Academica Sinica 21:1961, pp. 81-94.