Chaozhou iron-rod puppetry
Iron-rod puppetry is worked with three iron rods. The operator sits cross-legged behind the stage, and the puppet is in the window at the front. It came out of shadow play — paper shadow first, puppet after — turning an image into a body along the way.
What it is一、是什么
In May 2006 it entered the first national list of intangible cultural heritage, under the item name ‘puppetry (Chaozhou iron-rod puppetry)’, code Ⅴ-92, category traditional drama, with Chaozhou as the applying region.
Three iron rods do the work: a main rod fixed at the centre of the puppet’s back, and two side rods at the left and right arms. Three or four people sit cross-legged behind the stage, one operator to a puppet. The puppet has wooden feet but no legs, and its walking comes out of how much weight the operator puts into the wrist.
Because the repertoire and the singing both follow Chaozhou opera, locally it is also called ‘miniature Chaozhou opera’.
From shadow to body二、从影到形
It developed out of shadow play. Two accounts of when it came in: one says the late Song, carried by migrants from Minnan in Fujian; the other says the Ming, and that it took its present shape only in the Qing. Both are recorded.
The decisive step came in the Qing. Once glass was common, makers replaced the paper screen with glass and the shadow with a body — straw bound into a torso, paper wrapped into hands, wood whittled into feet, clay modelled into a head — and then dressed it in costume. The shadow became a body, and the thing was called ‘round-body paper shadow’.
Further on, imitating the staging and the performance conventions of Chaozhou opera, the glass went as well; it was renamed ‘sun-window paper shadow’ and worked with iron rods, while keeping the old habit of playing from behind.
Three steps, then: paper screen, glass screen, no screen. The way it was presented changed three times. The way it was worked did not change once.
(A third-party photograph stood here without permission and has been taken down. A replacement waits on the rights holder; no substitute image is being used in the meantime.)
Front of the stage, back of the stage三、台前台后
The stage is a single ‘sun window’: a wooden frame around a square opening, a row of short valance along the top of the frame, a green tassel hanging in the middle. The puppet is inside the window, the operator behind it, and the audience sees only the puppet.
In the past most of these operators farmed as well. They went to the fields in the busy season and put up the stage when there was nothing to do; a company was a few men, and the whole kit went into two carrying baskets. Performances were mostly at village processions, at ancestral hall celebrations and at weddings and funerals — not in theatres, and not on tickets.
(A third-party photograph stood here without permission and has been taken down. A replacement waits on the rights holder; no substitute image is being used in the meantime.)
What is performed四、演什么
Repertoire, singing and accompaniment are all Chaozhou opera’s, playing the excerpted scenes of Li Jing Ji and Su Liu Niang. One man sings several parts, and the voice has to carry the difference between the young lead, the female lead, the painted face and the clown.
It is not a separate theatrical ecology of its own; it is one item in a programme of folk observance. That sets its scale — the company need not be large and the stage need not be high, only wide enough to open on the threshing floor in front of a lineage hall.
(A third-party photograph stood here without permission and has been taken down. A replacement waits on the rights holder; no substitute image is being used in the meantime.)
Who makes them五、谁在做
Chen Peisen, born 1968, from Longxia village in Jinshi town, Chao’an, is the national-level representative inheritor of the item. He went into the trade after junior middle school. He is now head of the Chao’an Jinshi iron-rod puppet art inheritance centre and a member of the International Puppet Union. In 1993 he took his puppets to Germany and Austria for international puppet festivals, and later to Belarus.
He has set up a museum of iron-rod puppets in his own house, borrowing 700,000 yuan to do it, and opens it free — puppets and performance equipment of past decades. The address is No. 1, Tangdongchi Second Lane, Xinxi Road, Longxia village, Jinshi town, Chao’an district.
He runs interest classes with local schools and teaches with his own hands. His own words are blunt: the market for this art is very small, it is performed only during folk observances, and living off performance is very hard.
The difficulties六、难处
The first is that the bookings follow the observances. A few slots a year, busiest in the first lunar month and on the birthdays of the gods, empty the rest of the year — it cannot be a daily living.
The second is that the measure of the three rods cannot be put into words. Weight, angle, borrowed force: it is learned at the stage, watching the master’s hands.
The third is that the puppet’s measurements are not published. How big the head, how long the body, how long each of the three rods — no measured record has been found, so none is given here.
Between one area and another七、区域之间
The known centre is Jinshi town in Chao’an: Chen Peisen himself, the inheritance centre and the museum are all in Jinshi. That is the one foothold that can be checked at present.
Whether Shantou and Jieyang have companies of the same type, no dedicated record was found. Beyond the Chaoshan area the form also circulates in eastern Guangdong, in southern Fujian and in Teochew communities in Southeast Asia; whether the construction is the same has not been compared.
Only the distribution is listed here. No conclusion is drawn.
Related关联
Other performance arts: Chaozhou opera and Chaozhou music (English). The occasion it is performed at: ying lao ye. The full list of listed items: heritage.
Sources来源
Item page for ‘puppetry (Chaozhou iron-rod puppetry)’ and the inheritor page for Chen Peisen at the China intangible cultural heritage website; the inheritor page for Chen Peisen at the Guangdong provincial cultural centre ICH office; Sohu, ‘A Chaozhou puppeteer in Guangdong runs his own museum to pass on the craft, open to visitors free’, 15 November 2021; China Youth Net, ‘How much do you know about Chaozhou’s intangible heritage’; the national ICH list on the Chaozhou municipal government portal.
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Last revised: 5 November 2026