To the sound of wind and stringed instruments, gongs and drums, when a Budai Opera performance starts the eyes of the audience would follow the puppets, the emperor and ministers, the armor-clad generals, the female characters in long robes, scholars in scholars’ gowns and demons dressed in strange attire, performing delicate and reserved moves of a singing play or earth-moving fighting scenes. The glove puppets move in a lifelike way, accompanied by the clearly different voices of a single narrator and music from the musicians backstage, the stage, the puppets, the narration, the gongs and drums and singing combining all captivating the audience. However, after we leave a performance we very rarely have a chance to appreciate the beauty of the art of Budai opera in detail.

Budai Opera came from the people and has a heavy flavor of the common people. In the heyday of Budai Opera in Taiwan there were over 900 troupes, making it the most important of Taiwan’s puppet operas.Budai is folk, local and of the common people in character and it is a microcosm of life in Taiwan’s old society and a cultural synthesis of local dialect, folk music, carving, painting, embroidery and hand puppet manipulation. To preserve Budai Opera cultural and meaning, the  Li Tien-lu Hand Puppet Historical Museum was established in Sanzhi Township in 1996 by the Li Tien-Lu Hand Puppet Foundation” . It is divided into two main areas “the Budai Opera Cultural Relic Exhibition hall” and “ Master Puppeteer Huang Yique Puppet Hall,” ;the exhibits date from 1850-2000 and include almost 400 puppets and almost 1000 puppet costumes, helmets, instruments, props, scripts, music scores, tape recordings   and other relics that first class in terms of both quantity and quality, completely preserving  the various items related to a Budai Opera performance. Of these items the puppet costumes are colorful and diverse in style and, more than any other thing, make people want to know more about Budai Opera.

Red ministers’ robe

Green armor

When watching Budai Opera the audience is audience is usually captivated by the music, the vivid story and the realism of the puppets and the dramatic plot and fails to notice the detail of the puppet costumes, their symbolism and meaning and the numerous related stories. The costumes often seen in Budai Opera are the ministers’ robe, armor, woman’s palace robe, woman’s robe, trigram robe,monk robe, arrow gown, criminals’ clothes,military uniform, mandarin jacket and magpie robe. On stage, aristocrats mostly wear officials’ robe, armor and robes for women.  To differentiate rank and make the character distinct and give it a unique personality, different colors are used or symbolic patterns, such as flowers, birds, beasts and plants etc.For example, yellow can only be worn by the emperor, while red, green, white, blue and black designate officials of different ranks;certain colors are used by certain characters, for example, Zhao Zilong’s silver armor and white robe, while red faced Lord Guan wears a green robe, colors used to make the image of the characters bolder, as well as differentiate different characters and personalities. As for patterns on costumes, birds are often on the costumes of civilian officials, while military official’s costumes often have beast patterns to emphasize their power and ferocity; the robes worn by the empress, aristocratic ladies and daughters often have colorful and finely embroidered  peony, phoenix and flower patterns .Ordinary people have their own costumes very different to those of the aristocracy, simple and plain from head to foot, while those with flower patterns are the sons of wealthy people,  and scholars also wear their own distinctive scholars’ robe.The robes worn by female characters are long robes with large collars and buttons, girls of humble birth or ordinary female characters only wearing plain robes, while monks wear monk robes like in real life. Also, the costumes of monks, celestials, demons and ghosts often have tai ji or trigram patterns representing knowledge of yin-yang, astronomy and geography,and mathematics,   special patterns used to represent the character and personality of the character. 

The costumes reflect the character of the opera character, and help the audience feel the performance atmosphere, the various symbols and colors serving as a microcosm of the values of the times, the embroidery and dyeing reflecting the development of technology, conveying the feelings and memories of tradition and the distant past. On stage, the continual movement of the character means that the costumes can never be clearly seen and appreciated and, as time passes, these old cultural relics are fading, making preservation and reuse important. The Jang-Jung-Chian-Kuen Glove Puppetry Digital Museum, that has operated for several years with substantial success, was jointly developed by Seden Society Puppet Theater Foundation and National Chiao Tung University Library and provides a channel and platform for getting close to Budai Opera culture through digital archives. Apart from uses pictures film, information search and interactive games to reproduce the beauty of the carving art, literature, palm skill, music and vocal mimicry of Budai Opera  (especially in classical Budai Opera,) it also introduces the history and culture of Budai Opera in depth.

Black trigrams robe

Through new technology and media use, with a click of the mouse on the PC screen we can explore new knowledge to our heart’s content. Taking Budai Opera costumes as an example, we can view the delicate and colorful embroidery of earlier times and an introduction and analysis of the meaning of different colors, lines and patterns and, by enlarging pictures of costumes, we can see the vivid lines produced by embroidery.  Taking the red ministers’ robe in the first picture above as an example, the dragon is standing and facing forward, the features on its head are clear, looking very solid, the dragon’s head is full and wide, and raised in many places; the eyes are 3D and the hair is dense and brushed back, the hair strands are delicate and tidy.

The dragon’s nose is shaped like that of a lion, the mouth is open wide,the head surrounded by cloud and with an “eight treasures water”pattern, commonly called “ ocean wave pattern” decoration, below it;  as well as representing good fortune it also means that the country will last forever. The parts of the costume are proportional, color use is even and the bright red is set off by the green and blue. These details show the imagination related to and respect for the emperor in traditional society. During performances it is hard to see the costume details clearly but if we enlarge on a computer screen and are aided by pictures and text we can acquire an accurate understanding of the historical background and cultural context of the costumes and clearly see the delicateness and richness of the embroidery. All this might have been unreachable in the past but with digital archives we can not only view the costumes online and search we can also make them into wallpaper for our PC and greetings cards or screen protectors, thus taking traditional Budai Opera cultural relics  from the stage to the PC screen, using as PC screen wallpaper to brighten up our day or sharing Budai Opera cultural relics with friends, providing another way to appreciate Budai Opera cultural relics apart from viewing performances and closing the gap between Budai Opera and life today.

Red robe for woman

As traditions fade, Budai Opera has declined in popularity. In contemporary times our lives have become detached from the context of symbols, and our pursuit of fashion with regards to what we wear leaves us wearing factory made and brand name clothes, forgetting the values and beliefs of the past.  Budai Opera costumes are small in size but contain a reservoir of the imagination and world views of our ancestors, through color, lines, patterns and images telling us the stories and memories of the past.

As times have changed, many costumes made today are not as elaborate as in the past; using digital archives, the digital museum and various repositories  are using new media and technology to not only preserve Budai Opera culture that was fading over time, they are also actively developing, aiming to connect archived items and life, allowing us to understand through the Internet how the people of the past used colors and patterns to reflect social order and class and their superb embroidery and dyeing skills and other craftsmanship, and also carry out research and analysis of history and culture, letting us see the world behind the stitches and thread.