Yunlin Glove Puppetry

Budaixi is performed with puppets worn on the hand, carved wooden heads on cloth bodies, worked from below inside a small ornate stage that was once carried on a shoulder pole. It arrived from Fujian and became a Taiwanese form of its own, played at temple festivals to an audience of villagers and, in principle, to the gods. Yunlin is where the great puppetry families worked, and Huwei is where the museum is, housed in a Japanese-era official residence with carved heads, stages and costumes on display. The tradition split in the twentieth century: one branch kept the temple stage, while another moved to television and film with larger puppets, smoke, amplified music and long serialised plots.

What you actually see

• The carved heads - individual character heads, each with a fixed face and role.
• The portable stage - the ornate carved frame the puppeteer works behind.
• The museum in Huwei - a Japanese-era residence holding puppets and stage sets.
• Temple forecourt shows - performances staged for festivals, often to few people.

When to go

The museum keeps regular hours through the year and takes about an hour. Live traditional performances are tied to temple festival dates and are not scheduled for visitors, so seeing one is partly luck; asking at any large temple in the county about upcoming god birthdays is the practical approach. Weekday visits to the museum are quiet.

Honest expectations

Almost everything is in Chinese, the plots come from folklore and serial fiction that will mean nothing without background, and the amplified music at a live show is very loud. Temple performances are sometimes played to an empty forecourt because the audience is the deity, which visitors find deflating. Huwei is a small town with little else to fill a day.

Nearby

Xiluo's old street and its long steel bridge are half an hour north.