Born at Ilan in 1946, Ch'en Chien-ming has never since left this home of folk art activities apart from going to university and doing military service.

As a child Ch'en Chien-ming would often get caught up in crowds going to see some folk opera performance and then lose his way home. Only three minutes walk away from his house was Triangle Park, where wandering singers and ointment peddlers would congregate to play the crowds and sell their wares. Having immersed himself as a child in folk opera and encountered many fine singers, he found when it came to carrying out field research "I could very quickly catch on to quaint vernacular phrases used by old people and understand what they meant by their descriptions and verbal accounts. Once I compared these with other data I was able to organize everything systematically and start probing even deeper." Ch'en Chien-ming feels that growing up in Ilan itself was a great help in sparking his interest as well as being of direct benefit in his research. From an anthropological point of view he is the perfect choice for the job.

"In anthropology there are often a number of barriers between the researcher and the object of his research; linguistic and intuitive differences often place limits on a researcher's full integration into the society he is studying. If a local can under-take recording and explanatory fieldwork in advance it helps give a better insight into the subject, and the lack of obstacles to communication and understanding makes it easier for him to organize scattered and fragmentary materials and so arrive at more meaningful and detailed results." This is how Wang Sung-shan, currently a research assistant at the National Science Museum, regards Ch'en Chien-ming's role vis-a-vis other workers in the field.

The history of folk drama in Taiwan is a huge project still waiting to be tackled seriously. This is even more so in the case of Taiwanese folk opera, where neither the main traditions nor the minor offshoots have been properly defined and traced in detail.

Examples are mysterious individuals such as "Folk Opera Chu," mentioned in the Ilan County Gazetteer as being a prime mover in originating the Taiwanese folk opera tradition, and another famous player of female roles during the Japanese colonial period who was simply known by the pseudonym "Ilan Smile." Little about these people and their actual connection with folk opera was known, apart from their nicknames.

So for two years Ch'en Chien-ming spent every day filling a couple of large notebooks with closely-written notes as he went from door to door in the Chieh-tou-fen area, where "Folk Opera Chu" was said to have been active, enquiring in villages and at scattered farmhouses until he had tracked down the singer's true identity. Not only did he establish his true name, Ou-yang Chu, but he found his descendants, located his grave, and even tracked down some of his colleagues from back in the old days, thus filling in a blank page in the early history of local folk opera.

In fact, though, folk opera springs from many diverse sources of origin, and Ou-yang Chu is by no means the true originator of the genre. Nevertheless, a knowledge of his activities at that period does help give researchers a better insight into early Taiwanese folk opera.

Even the singer "Ilan Smile," hitherto only listed under that pseudonym in the official gazetteer of Taiwan Province, was eventually identified following Ch'en Chien-ming's tireless investigations.

In addition to tracking down historical data, Ch'en Chien-ming also carries out the laborious and thankless task of preparing editions of folk opera texts. The 21-scene opera "A Young Lady Tosses an Embroidered Ball," published by Ch'en in his collection Drums and Gongs of the Outdoor Stage, is based on a whole host of manuscripts, song texts, tape recordings of performances by old artistes and verbal accounts by old people which he lovingly assembled over the years. This is not a particularly difficult task, but it is time consuming and extremely complex because there were no standard editions of the repertoires performed by folk opera troupes, and a tradition of oral transmission inevitably results in textual discrepancies and variants. The old artistes are usually illiterate and are often on the verge of senility, so they frequently do not understand the words they are singing themselves!

It is largely thanks to Ch'en Chien-ming's timely efforts that we are now able to see performances of old-style Taiwanese folk opera at the Folk Opera Museum in Ilan. Although you can still find snatches of folk opera being sung by old people in parks large and small in Ilan today, the old opera troupes have been disbanded and complete performances are unheard of.

Ch'en Chien-ming often encourages the old people to come together to sing, and occasionally to give a performance in a city or at a big occasion. But the old-timers are hesitant: "Local folk opera is a thing of the past, no one wants to learn it any more and no one comes to watch it. Even when we sing in the park we get less applause than young girl singers, so what is the good?" Actually Ch'en Chien-ming did promise to give everyone the chance to hear genuine original old-style Taiwanese folk opera once again.

In 1982 Ch'en Chien-ming assembled a joint troupe of Taiwanese folk opera singers, based on the old Liang Yueh troupe from Chuangsan but including singers from Chiaohsi and Lotung too, and arranged for them to appear at the Taipei Folk Drama Festival under the sponsorship of its director, Professor Tseng Yung-i. All travelling and accommodation expenses were taken care of by Ch'en Chien-ming himself.

In recent years Ch'en Chien-ming's interests have expanded to cover folk operas performed as part of Taoist ceremonies and the collection of folk opera singing texts. Each month he makes one or two trips to Taipei to browse round the second-hand bookshops in Kuang Hua market, along Kuling Street and near the International Student House. Over time the bookshop proprietors have begun to look out for such texts and keep them by for him, so that by the time he leaves the shop he often only has enough money left for the journey home to Ilan. So far Ch'en Chien-ming has built up a collection of nearly 800 singing texts, including a number of priceless manuscripts dating from the late Ch'ing dynasty and the Japanese colonial period.

A lover of the Ilan area and self-proclaimed "folk art enthusiast," Ch'en Chien-ming is preparing to publish his second work, Seasonal Festivals of Lan-yang, and plans to edit a general catalogue of opera texts of Fukien and Taiwan. This local scholar, whose feet are firmly planted in his native soil, has shed light on many riddles concerning the development of Taiwanese folk opera, has helped to extend its life, and in the process has given himself a well-deserved place in its history.

[Picture Caption]

Standing face to face, an elderly folk opera buff recounts stories of bygone performances to an enthusiastic Ch'en Chien-ming.

(Right) Ch'en Chien-ming is both a devoted listener to folk opera and a good friend to the elderly generation of folk opera artistes.

Standing face to face, an elderly folk opera buff recounts stories of bygone performances to an enthusiastic Ch'en Chien-ming.

（Right） Ch'en Chien-ming is both a devoted listener to folk opera and a good friend to the elderly generation of folk opera artistes.