Taiwan's god of the theater, Marshal Tiandu, celebrates his birthday in early August, and this year Huang Hai-tai chose the same date to celebrate his 103rd birthday with his family. Surrounded by nearly 150 family members, Huang couldn't have been happier.

According to grandson Vincent Huang, president of Pili International Multimedia, "Grandfather didn't want to trouble anybody. Had all his students and their students been invited, we would have needed 200 tables to seat everybody."

When asked the secret to a long life, Huang Hai-tai laughs and says, "Just keep breathing."

Huang, who has always been healthy, had a mild stroke this past spring that has left him slightly incapacitated. According to his daughter-in-law Tu Yi-ching, who takes care of him now, "The stroke weakened his right hand. But all he can think about is one more performance he's supposed to give for the Cultural Affairs Bureau." That thought has made the 103-year-old Huang a model patient at the clinic where he is undergoing physical therapy. The moment he opens his eyes in the morning, he begins pestering his family to take him in for his physical therapy session. Once he arrives, he often teases a smile out of the nurses by raising his cane in greeting.

The glove conquers all

Huang Hai-tai was born in 1901 during the Japanese Occupation in what is today Yunlin County. But the tale of the four generations of Huang-family puppeteers actually begins with Huang Hai-tai's father, Huang Ma. At the time Huang Hai-tai was born, his father was just starting out as a glove puppeteer.

In those days, glove puppetry performances were still very primitive. A troupe consisted of five or six people carrying two baskets of props to wherever anyone wanted a show. Huang chuckles as he calls up a memory nearly 100 years old: "They used to perform with oil lamps. After each show, their faces would be black from the smoke."

Having a father who was a performer, Huang and his younger brother Cheng-sheng not only learned how to work the puppets, but were also, when Huang was 11, quietly sent to a school that taught them to read Chinese, something not generally done under Japanese rule. Over the course of three years, Huang studied the Book of Poetry, the Spring and Autumn Annals, the Book of History and the Four Books from cover to cover, and developed an especial fondness for the episodic chivalric novels that would be central to his later work. Huang became familiar with everything from the story of Pangu's separation of the earth and sky, to the tales of famous men and women, and each dynasty's customs and legends. As a youngster, Huang could not only rattle off the names and nicknames of the 108 heroes of The Water Margin, but also recite poetry from memory.

For more than 200 years, glove puppet plays followed pioneers into and around Taiwan. Today, traditional puppet plays are hard to find. Most temples just offer simple presentations of plays about the immortals and of thanksgiving accompanied by taped music that few people come to see. But some puppet companies, such as the Hsiao Hsiyuan Troupe, which still uses beiguan tunes, and the Yiwanjan Troupe, which uses waijiang melodies, still put on exquisite traditional shows. In contrast, Huang Hai-tai's Wuchou school of puppetry, which dominates southern Taiwan, has changed with the times, developing the spectacular golden-light style of puppetry and pioneering puppet plays for television.

According to Kang Bu-chhiong, a scholar who has spent half his life studying glove puppetry, "Narrative is handled in pure Chinese; classical Chinese is used to give a sense of elegance and refinement; and colloquial language is used to make cruder fun. Those who learned puppetry from the Huangs had not only to be able to use lines of poetry, couplets and riddles in performances, but also to be able to write them. It's one of the things for which the Wuchou school is known."

By the age of 18, Huang could hold up his end unassisted and began touring with his father's Chingchunyuan troupe on a regular basis. Huang recalls, "I performed every day from the moment I opened my eyes. I was usually half asleep by the time I came home again. By the time I got cleaned up, had something to eat and took care of this and that, the sun was coming up again. I was up again and on my way to another show before I'd even had a chance to get the bed warm." Not a big man, Huang began practicing crane-style kungfu to make himself more fit and increase his lung capacity. Up until he had his stroke, he was still practicing for 30 minutes every day.

Sewing, archery, calligraphy

Once Huang began performing, he traveled all over Taiwan with his father's troupe. In those days, most glove puppet plays were accompanied by traditional beiguan music. The plays themselves tended to be traditional and somewhat staid historical fare with themes that revolved around patriotism and filial piety. But both Huang and his younger brother were well versed in the martial arts and literature. They drew on this background to create chivalric tales of good versus evil. Their exciting action sequences and martial arts moves created an immediate stir among audiences in central and southern Taiwan, and were the origin of the chivalric glove-puppet play.

"When puppets punch, they must do so with strength; when they shoot an arrow, it has to fly far; they should even sew and do calligraphy. Male and female characters must be distinguished from one another. Males move roughly, while females move with grace. The roles have to be clear." Huang picks up a puppet and enthusiastically demonstrates.

By the age of 24, Huang had already made a name for himself, and fellow puppeteers were beginning to imitate his techniques. But Huang felt that if he were going to take his art to the next level, he needed a deeper understanding of beiguan music. He began studying beiguan in his hometown of Hsilou, learning not only to be a toushougu, or lead drummer, but also to sing the multiple roles, voicing the melancholy of the xiaodan (young woman), the educated refinement of the xiaosheng (young scholar), the aged rasp of the laosheng (old man) and the humorous tones of the xiaochou (clown). Huang's versatile voice not only clearly distinguished the five basic roles-sheng, dan, jing (painted face), mou (older man) and chou-from one another, but also gave audiences a sense of the characters' personalities, ages, moods and circumstances.

According to Kang Bu-chhiong, "The Wuchou school's puppeteers have always had particularly good voices and been good speakers. That's why they're considered the best choice to emcee dinner banquets during election campaigns in central and southern Taiwan."

Huang says with some pride that when he had an assistant working the puppets, the assistant had only to hear a character's turns of phrase to know which was speaking and what actions the puppet should take.

Wuchou's oyster

Huang married at the age of 26, and his eldest son, Huang Chun-ching, was born the next year. One year after that, Huang Hai-tai's father died and he became the leader of his father's troupe. He changed the troupe's name to Wuchou Garden (under Japanese rule, Taiwan's administrative regions consisted of three ting and five zhou or chou) and invited beiguan teacher Wang Man-yuan to be the ensemble's toushouchui, or lead suona player. With such strong performers both backstage and onstage, the world was Wuchou Garden's oyster.

During the later years of Japanese rule, the government tightly regulated traditional theater. Huang's Wuchou Garden was one of only seven puppetry troupes that was allowed to continue performing, but even so its programs were limited to state-approved "model plays." These state-approved plays revolved around Japanese bushido themes that didn't much interest Taiwanese audiences. To hold onto his audience, Huang would switch into traditional puppet plays once the police left. When people heard Chinese music playing, they would immediately perk up, knowing that something good was on the way. But performing Chinese plays could have consequences-Huang once had his license revoked, and had to sell blackmarket pork for a time to get by.

On another occasion, an enemy of Huang's brother Cheng-sheng turned up at a performance and began provoking the brothers from in front of the stage. In the chaos that ensued, Cheng-sheng's enemy was beaten to death, and both Huang and Cheng-sheng ended up spending more than nine months in jail. But even here, Huang kept busy. He wrote ten episodes of a new series-Loyalty, Bravery, Filial Piety, Justice-based on the Qing dynasty novel Ye Sou Pu Yan. In doing so, Huang created Shih Yen-wen, the most famous hero in all of puppet theater, and Liu San, a much-beloved comic character. While most people think of Huang Chun-hsiung as the creator of Shih Yen-wen, Huang Hai-tai was Shih's true father.

Taiwan's largest school

Following the end of Japanese rule, there was an unprecedented surge of interest in traditional theater. Wuchou Garden's name was already well known, and there was tremendous demand for their shows. They performed an average of two shows per day during this period, and on one occasion actually put on five in one day. At this time, Huang also began taking more apprentices, and his two eldest sons, Huang Chun-ching and Huang Chun-hsiung, joined the troupe.

Later, Chun-ching and Chun-hsiung went on to establish Wuchou 2 and Wuchou 3. Likewise, the more than 20 students who had been formally apprenticed to Huang also began establishing their own Wuchou Garden troupes. Many of these apprentices went on to great success. Cheng Yi-hsiung, who established the Hsinkangpao Wuchou Garden troupe, dominated radio in central and southern Taiwan; Sun Cheng-ming, a student of one of Huang's students, became well known for his speaking skills as a raconteur and emcee; and Liao Wan-shui's Hsinshen Wuchou Garden troupe, which he ran with his son and daughter, was renowned in the Yunlin-Chiayi area. If one includes the "third generation" of Huang's students, as well as those followers of his style who were not formally apprenticed to Huang and the students of these latter, there are at least 200 Wuchou-school puppetry troupes in Taiwan.

How did Wuchou Garden become Taiwan's largest school of puppetry? Kang Bu-chhiong says it resulted from Huang's generosity.

When the leaders of most traditional theater troupes take apprentices, they keep some tricks to themselves out of fear that they will one day be competing with their students. Some even penalize apprentices who want to strike out on their own, bringing an end to friendly relations between master and student. In contrast, Huang was always happy to see his apprentices establish their own troupes, and maintained good relationships with them. The result has been that Wuchou Garden is the largest school of glove puppetry in Taiwan, and Huang is the preeminent glove-puppetry teacher of his time.

Keeping it fresh

In addition to not keeping secrets from his students, Huang set no limits on how his students expressed themselves in their art-they could follow tradition or innovate as they pleased. Huang's only stipulation was that they do it well. Chiang Wu-chang says, "Huang placed no limits on his apprentices' development and did not insist that they adhere to any particular form."

In the 1950s, Huang Chun-ching and Huang Chun-hsiung gradually took over the family business. Chun-ching in particular proved a font of new ideas. He enlarged the puppets, put more modern faces on them and dressed them in brighter costumes. He used dry ice and flash powder to create a variety of stage effects. He also made changes to the music, importing a sound system and making bold use of local pop stars and Western music to accompany his plays. His golden-light theater came to dominate puppetry and he himself rose to the top of his generation of puppeteers.

In 1970, Chun-ching brought Shih Yen-wen to TV in a hugely popular show that ran for 583 episodes. By the time the program entered its second year, students were cutting classes and worker efficiency was suffering as everyone tried to keep up with the latest developments on the show. Shih Yen-wen became a folk hero to the generations born in the 1950s and 1960s, and was so popular that in 1974 he was taken off the air because he was "interfering with the normal work schedules of agriculture and industry." This "knight in shining armor" was sorely missed when his show was canceled.

Pili takes the stage

Huang's grandsons Chris and Vincent continued the family habit of innovating. They took scriptwriting to a new level, creating a new generation of characters with more depth and more complex personalities-characters that were both loyal and evil. They also took the idea of setting up shots from filmmaking, creating the tightly knit chivalric plays that characterize the Pili style of televised glove puppetry. In doing so, they drew a new generation of fans to glove puppetry. They also introduced characters, such as Su Huan-chen, Yeh Hsiao-chai, Fei-chang Nu and Hai Shang-chun, who became hot topics of debate at colleges and on the Internet. Politicians have even been known to dress up as these characters during election campaigns.

In 1999, the brothers spent NT$300 million to film a glove-puppet movie, The Legend of the Sacred Stone, which has generated a lot of interest on the international film festival circuit. While traditional glove puppetry is on the decline, the brothers have achieved even greater success with their Pili productions than did their father's generation. According to Chiang Wu-chang, "The Huang family's glove puppetry is the only traditional puppetry that has been able to ride the currents of contemporary fashion to create a popular, mainstream entertainment."

Last year, Chris and Vincent Huang's Pili puppetry made a dignified appearance at the National Theater, where their performance demonstrated that they had outstanding puppetry skills in addition to their facility with technology. It was also something that, as Vincent Huang put it, "we as grandchildren wanted to give him [Huang Hai-tai]." Vincent says that his grandfather had always dreamed of performing at the National Theater. When Chris and Vincent did, Huang Hai-tai made the trip to Taipei from his home in Huwei for the show. The next day, Huang wanted to return to Taipei to see it again. "Grandfather was really happy to see us perform there."

This year, Chris and Vincent gave their grandfather another gift-a series of ten programs on his life entitled Skills for a Century-The Memory of Huang Hai-tai, which were screened at the National Center of Traditional Arts in Ilan during its "Summer of Puppetry" event.

Huang, who himself contributed decades to puppetry, is happy to see his grandchildren innovating because "innovation" is precisely the "tradition" he always tried to pass on. "Traditions can't be abandoned, but audiences follow what is contemporary." Huang believes that the stories related in traditional glove puppetry have great meaning, and that the use of modern technology helps draw audiences into the shows. He says, "We're living in the nuclear age; you have to use technology." Even at 103 years old, Huang's thinking is still cutting edge.

Ten fingers telling stories

Looking to the future, Huang Hai-tai believes that "two parts traditional, eight parts modern" would be the ideal mix. Grandsons Vincent and Chris take the same view. In recent years Vincent, known for his facility with Taiwanese, has been inviting master musicians to accompany his performances. He also plans to collate and learn the beiguan tunes and lyrics his grandfather knows so well. "These classics have to be preserved." Vincent remarks that it is many years since anyone understood these "antiques." If he could get a large Chinese orchestra to play them to accompany one of his Pili shows, it would be both authentic and innovative.

Vincent says, "Before I perform, I always find a place without any people to run through the previous episode in my head and get myself in the right frame of mind. I also swim and play sports most days to increase my lung capacity and keep my voice in tip-top shape. I picked this up from Grandpa, too."

A couplet Huang wrote describing glove puppetry runs: "One voice exhaling joy, anger, sorrow, delight / Ten fingers wriggling out the shapes of events past and present." From square tents to TV and the big screen, from a human voice depicting the sounds of a tempest to today's laser-lighting effects, glove puppetry has come a long way. Huang and his heirs have not only written a page in the history of their art, but have themselves become immortal "heroes of the age."

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The 103-year-old Huang Hai-tai has devoted his entire life to glove puppetry and has been called a living piece of glove puppet history. (photo by Jimmy Lin)

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In the 1990s, Taiwan's glove puppetry artists formed the Wangyeh Society as a forum for contact and exchanges amongst themselves. The photo captures master glove puppeteers and national treasures Li Tien-lu (far right) and Huang Hai-tai together at a 1997 society meeting.

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Nearly everyone in this 1969 group picture of a local theatrical association headed up a major troupe of performing artists. They include: Huang Hai-tai's renowned student, Cheng Yi-hsiung (front row, far right); Huang's eldest son, Huang Chun-ching (front row, second from right); Huang Hai-tai (front row, third from right); Huang's second son, Huang Chun-hsiung (front row, fifth from right); Chen Teng-san, the director of Mailiau's Kung-le Taiwanese Opera Troupe (front row, far left); Luo Mu-sheng, another well known director of a Taiwanese opera troupe (front row, third from left); Liau Ying-pi, leader of Hsilou's Chinhsingko Glove Puppetry Troupe (middle row, third from right); Chen Ming-chi, director of the Ming Hwa Yuan Taiwanese Opera Company (middle row, seventh from right); and Huang Chiu-teng, leader of the Yuchuanko Glove Puppetry Troupe famous in southern Taiwan (middle row, third from left).

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In 1970, Huang Chun-hsiang brought glove puppetry to television, putting the reach of this medium to very effective use.

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Fans of Shih Yen-wen should also remember the characters of (from left) Tiensheng Sanjen, Old Monk and Mai Chang Sheng from the "Three Defenders of the World" stories.

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The cool look of the Pili glove puppetry of Huang Hai-tai's grandchildren has won innumerable fans.(photo by Jimmy Lin)

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In 1991, the 91-year-old Huang Hai-tai proved he still had his chops when he put on a show to commemorate the opening of a temple to the Earth God in Erlun in Yunlin County.

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Huang Hai-tai's eldest son, Huang Chun-ching, dominated glove puppetry in Taiwan up to the 80s.

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Huang Hai-tai's second son, Huang Chun-hsiung, and Shih Yen-wen opened up the golden age of glove puppetry on television and provided a generation of Taiwanese children with happy memories.

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At a time when traditional arts are in decline, the Pili and Tienyu glove puppetry of Huang Hai-tai's grandsons Chris Huang, Vincent Huang and Huang Wen-yao are attracting a new generation of young fans to puppetry. (courtesy of Pili International Multimedia)

Huang Hai-tai's eldest son, Huang Chun-ching, dominated glove puppetry in Taiwan up to the 80s.

In 1991, the 91-year-old Huang Hai-tai proved he still had his chops when he put on a show to commemorate the opening of a temple to the Earth God in Erlun in Yunlin County.

Huang Hai-tai's second son, Huang Chun-hsiung, and Shih Yen-wen opened up the golden age of glove puppetry on television and provided a generation of Taiwanese children with happy memories.

In 1970, Huang Chun-hsiang brought glove puppetry to television, putting the reach of this medium to very effective use.

Fans of Shih Yen-wen should also remember the characters of (from left) Tiensheng Sanjen, Old Monk and Mai Chang Sheng from the "Three Defenders of the World" stories.

At a time when traditional arts are in decline, the Pili and Tienyu glove puppetry of Huang Hai-tai's grandsons Chris Huang, Vincent Huang and Huang Wen-yao are attracting a new generation of young fans to puppetry.

Nearly everyone in this 1969 group picture of a local theatrical association headed up a major troupe of performing artists. They include: Huang Hai-tai's renowned student, Cheng Yi-hsiung (front row, far right); Huang's eldest son, Huang Chun-ching (front row, second from right); Huang Hai-tai (front row, third from right); Huang's second son, Huang Chun-hsiung (front row, fifth from right); Chen Teng-san, the director of Mailiau's Kung-le Taiwanese Opera Troupe (front row, far left); Luo Mu-sheng, another well known director of a Taiwanese opera troupe (front row, third from left); Liau Ying-pi, leader of Hsilou's Chinhsingko Glove Puppetry Troupe (middle row, third from right); Chen Ming-chi, director of the Ming Hwa Yuan Taiwanese Opera Company (middle row, seventh from right); and Huang Chiu-teng, leader of the Yuchuanko Glove Puppetry Troupe famous in southern Taiwan (middle row, third from left).

In the 1990s, Taiwan's glove puppetry artists formed the Wangyeh Society as a forum for contact and exchanges amongst themselves. The photo captures master glove puppeteers and national treasures Li Tien-lu (far right) and Huang Hai-tai together at a 1997 society meeting.