Taiwanese Glove Puppetry (Budaixi)

Glove puppetry originated in the palm-puppet tradition of Zhangzhou and Quanzhou in Minnan and came to Taiwan with early settlers, forming northern and southern schools whose hand-worked puppets were voiced and accompanied by nanguan and beiguan music. After the war Taiwan developed a distinctive "golden-light puppetry" marked by large puppets, dazzling lit combat and theatrical narration; Huang Jun-xiong's 1970s television puppetry "The Great Confucian Knight of Yunzhou" once captivated the whole island, making the art central to Taiwanese popular culture. It has been registered by the Bureau of Cultural Heritage as an "important traditional performing art."

In traditional glove puppetry a single lead master works the puppets while supplying all the voices across the full range of role-types, backed by an offstage ensemble of gongs, drums and strings; the golden-light and television forms add large puppets, special effects, combat and dubbing, and have grown into long-running commercial series such as Pili puppetry, beloved by younger generations.

Glove puppetry is the most creative and commercially vital traditional performing art in Taiwan, fusing the heritage of Minnan settlers with modern screen aesthetics, and holds outstanding value for the study of Taiwanese popular culture, dialect art and cross-media theatre.