Chinese Shadow Puppetry

The puppets are cut from donkey or ox hide scraped until it is translucent, painted in transparent colours, jointed at neck, shoulders, elbows, waist and knees, then worked from behind a stretched cotton screen on three thin rods. Lit from behind, the colours come through and the figures move with a jerky precision that video never quite reproduces. A troupe is small: one or two puppeteers, a singer taking every part in falsetto and gravel by turns, a fiddle and percussion. Regional schools differ in cutting style and music, with Huaxian in Shaanxi and Tangshan in Hebei among the best known. The tradition was inscribed by UNESCO in 2011.

Highlights

• The hide figures - translucent, painted and jointed, often laid out flat before the show.
• Rod handling - one puppeteer running several characters and a fight at the same time.
• The single voice - one singer covering every role, male and female.
• The backstage view - some theatres let you watch from behind the screen afterwards.

When to go

Short programmes for visitors run daily in Xi'an and Chengdu, usually late afternoon or evening, and last twenty to forty minutes. Village performances in Shaanxi are tied to temple fairs and weddings, are not advertised, and are found by asking locally if at all. Museums often pair a small collection with a show.

Good to know

The visitor version is short and heavily abridged, sometimes down to a single comic scene. The singing is in dialect with no translation and the plots assume you know the legends. Theatres are small, hot and often full of tour groups. Puppets sold at the door are mostly machine-cut plastic-backed copies rather than worked hide.

Nearby

Xi'an's walled centre and the Forest of Stone Steles are close to most performance halls.