Chinese puppet show in town!

Walking on the street of Taiping the other day, I came across a little newly constructed stage. There was some kind of celebration in a temple and the stage has been erected for a puppet show! China is said to have a flourishing history of puppetry for 2000 years, originally in pi-ying xi, the theatre of the lantern shadows, or, as it is more commonly known today, Chinese shadow theatre. In Taiwan, there is this budaixi or glove puppetry, a type of local opera using cloth puppets that originated during the 17th century in in Quanzhou or Zhangzhou, in China's Fujian province. I suppose the puppet show here in Taiping is of this type. The art however is dying in Malaysia. There is just a small audience, people waiting to kill the time, I suppose and of course me, who was more curious than anything else.

A Chinese temple in Taiping...