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Transforming Ghosts into Mud and Sand: Religion and the Shadow
Theatre of Hunan
Fan Pen Chen

Communities in southern China have been known since antiquity to have been intensely
involved in shamanistic activities and the worshipping of ghosts and spirits. Through a fortuitous
chance, I had the opportunity during the summer of 2008 to observe a shadow show in southern
Hunan that ended with ritual banishment of evil spirits. Since the role played by religion in the
Chinese shadow theatre had been largely neglected prior to the publication of my book, Chinese
Shadow Theatre: History, Popular Religion and Women Warriors, the rituals performed prior to
and after the shadow plays in this instance much more pronounced and elaborate than anything
I had observed before were of immense interest to me. This tradition of Shadows also turned
out to have been a rare form known as Paper Shadows.
The study of shadow theatres was not in the original agenda of my 2008 research trip. Ye
Mingsheng, a senior researcher at the Research Institute of Art of Fujian Province (Fujiansheng
yishu yanjiuyuan), Bradford Clark, professor at Bowling Green State University, Huang
Jianxing, a graduate student, and myself were conducting a survey of puppetry in southern
China. Ye had arranged for a rod puppet performance of Tale of Fragrant Mountain
(xiangshanzhuan) on the life of the goddess Guanyin in Huaihua, western Hunan for us. But
while in Changsha, we were informed that foreigners needed to obtain special permission to
enter into this militarily sensitive region. The Cultural Bureau contacted by Ye did not want to
take responsibility, so they deferred the case to the Security Bureau, which in turn inquired of the
local Military Personnel, which felt the need to refer the request to the higher military

establishment in Guangdong. By then it was decided that Ye and his graduate student would go
without Clark and myself, and videotape for us the one day event. We would meet with Ye two
days later at Shaoyang in southern Hunan to observe a one-man glove puppet show there.
Rather than waiting at Changsha before reconnecting with Ye and Huang, Clark and I
decided to visit the famous Mount Heng in southeastern Hunan en route to Shaoyang. The day
we arrived at Nanyue, the main entrance to the mountain, we walked across the town until a side
street led us to a vista of beautiful vegetable gardens and woods reminiscent of the village this
touristy town once was. An elderly lady with a basket of home-grown squash chatted with me
and invited us to visit her house down the lane. We sat on little stools in the open front courtyard
of her house. Neighbors and other members of the household trickled in and joined us.
The elderly lady was the mother of the household. By early evening, her husband came
home from working in the fields. The son also returned riding on a scooter. He and his wife
maintained a store next to a temple in town. They usually sleep above the store. Their two
children, a boy in grade school and a three-year old girl, live with the grandparents. The girl was
obviously the jewel of the household (Fig 1). The family had to pay a fine in order to have this
second child. We asked about shadow theatre, which was popular in this region. The son called
his cousin using his cell phone and located a troupe in a village three kilometers away. We
considered hiring a car to visit the troupe. But it was getting dark and cars would not be able to
travel on the paths between the paddy fields leading to the village in any case.
The grandfather suggested that we have the troupe perform at his house. A few phone
calls later, all was arranged for the evening. Grandmother cooked dinner for us we had
delicious homegrown vegetables, egg and tomatoes soup, and rice. The son then took me back to

my lodging on his scooter to pick up my video camera. By the time the troupe arrived, neighbors
began to trickle in. The grandfather served tea to the visitors and was a visibly proud host. He
said that more neighbors would have come if they could have gotten the word out sooner.
The troupe of a master puppeteer and two musicians arrived on two scooters after dark.
The master puppeteer carried the trunk of puppets and musical instruments at the back of his
scooter. One of the musicians drove the other scooter, with the other musician and some other
equipment at the back. The musician riding on the back held onto the driver with his left hand
and carried a bundle of bamboo poles with his right hand over his shoulder. When they noticed
foreigner Clark, they decided to jack up the price. The son of the family approached me and
said that since the troupe had to supply candles, firecrackers, mock money etc. for the rituals,
could we give them 560 yuan ($80) instead of the 500 yuan previously agreed upon? The family
had been so helpful that we decided to give him 600 yuan for him to use as he saw fit.
In less than half of an hour, the stage was set up in the sparsely furnished living room,
using furniture and doors of the household. Two square dining tables with two unhinged wooden
doors placed on them served as the base for the stage. Bamboo poles (Fig 2) ingeniously tied
together formed the frame for the stage (Fig 3). The screen in front consisted of a thin white
cloth with red borders. Red cloth draped over the sides and back of the frame completed the
stage (Fig 4). Inside the stage, the main puppeteer, facing the back of the screen, hung the bodies
of the shadow figures to be used for the performance on the bamboo frames to his left and right.
Extra puppet heads and furniture were stored in trays before him (Fig 5), while headgear and
weapons were kept in pockets on the sides. Two tiered wooden stands not found in other shadow
theatre traditions were also placed behind the screen. They helped to secure the central rods in
place when the shadow figures were not being manipulated (Fig 6). The musicians sat behind the

puppeteer and set up their instruments. One musician was in charge of the percussion
instruments: a drum, a large gong, a small gong, a large cymbal, a small cymbal, a clapper and a
stick called rod (bangzi). The other musician played a two-stringed violin (erhu). Unlike the
majority of other shadow traditions, the musicians sometimes chimed in when the puppeteer he
sang, creating a chorus (Fig 7).
As the cymbals announced the inception of the show, grandfather stuck two candles in
the ground to one side of the front courtyard (Fig 8). There he lit the candles, offered incense,
burned tissue-like yellow paper that represented money for the spirit world and set of a string of
fire crackers as offerings and announcement to the ancestors and other gods and spirits in the
area. The main puppeteer completed this opening ritual through an invitational prayer before the
performance. I requested a play that featured at least one woman warrior; the master puppeteer
who was also the director of the troupe, got to select a local favorite as the second play for the
evening.
Unlike the performances in most other rural areas, the main plays proceeded without the
opening playlets, in which puppets representing deities would enter the stage to bring blessings
to the sponsors and audience. The troupe performed two plays that lasted for about two hours:
Xue Dingshan Fights at the Cold River Pass (Xue Dingshan zhan Hanjiangguan) and Han
Xiangzi Teases His Wife (Han Xiangzi xiqi), both being stand-alone excerpts of serial plays.
The former was an episode from the fictional tales on a general, Xue Dingshan and an even more
powerful woman warrior, Fan Lihua, popularized through the military romance, Three Tales of
the Tang (shuoTang shanzhuan by Rulian Jushi, 18th century). The latter was one of many
popular stories on Han Xiangzi, one of the famous Eight Immortals. Both tales were situated
during the Tang dynasty (618-907).

This shadow theatre tradition is transmitted through memory. Traditions that do not use
playscripts tend to result in performing less sophisticated versions of the stories that deviate
considerably from the published versions of the novels or plays on the theme. In this case, Xue
Dingshans encounter with Fan Lihua (Fig 9) was so grossly simplified that the complexity of
the relationship between the two was totally neglected, and a comedy was created out of one
originally filled with tensions. While in the renowned novel, Three Tales of the Tang, the foreign
or barbarian princess, Fan Lihua, becomes so enamored by the Chinese warrior, Xue
Dingshan, that she disobeys her father and eventually commits both patricide and fratricide; in
this shadow play, Fan Lihua proposes to Xue who is initially reluctant to accept her offer but
then agrees to ask his father for permission. The two warriors are subsequently married with the
blessings of both fathers (Fig 10). Hence, in the shadow play the marriage of Xue and Fan
enables two enemy forces to join as one.
However, the resemblance between this play and the novel stops short of Fan Lihuas
forwardness and Xue Dingshans initial reluctance. In the military romance, Xue Dingshan is so
obsessed by an inferiority complex vis--vis the militarily superior Fan Lihua that he renounces
her repeatedly and is finally forced into marrying her by his father who realizes the need for her
prowess to help the Chinese state against the barbarians. Even after their marriage, Xue
continues to repudiate her. It is not until she feigns death that he finally breaks down and shows
love for her. Hence, while the novel represents a Chinese male fantasy in which a foreign
princess renounces her own family to assist the Chinese state for the love a Chinese warrior, this
shadow play celebrates the happy union of two enemy military forces through the marriage of
two young warriors. The fact that Fan Lihua was supposed to have been a barbarian princess
was all but totally ignored. Here she is just a beautiful woman warrior who proposes to a

handsome male warrior who is initially reluctant to marry her but eventually receives permission
from his father after he is apprehended by her father. The simplicity of this version of the tale
could be attributed to its transmission through memory rather than playscripts.
Han Xiangzi Teases His Wife illustrates how Han, who has already attained
immortality, returns home to lead his wife to the path of the transcendence. This he accomplishes
by transforming himself into a playboy who tries to seduce his own wife. She holds steadfast
against his advances and finally earns herself the right to attain the Dao. To the audience,
however, her rejection of his advances is of no surprise. An ugly, lewd clown (Fig 11) rather than
a dashing playboy, his characterization provides laughter for the spectators rather than
admiration for the chastity of his wife. This may have been one of the most popular plays in the
region precisely because it affords many opportunities for enacting salacious humor. It is also a
popular theme in the local Flower Drum Opera (huaguxi). I suspect, however, that the version
videotaped by us was considerably toned down as is the usual case whenever women, children
and outsiders join the audience of such plays.
Although I was able to decipher the outline of the plays, I was not able to understand
their dialogues and lyrics. In preparing for this report, I asked my gardening neighbor, Li
Kunyang, whose hometown is a mere thirty kilometers north of Nanyue to help me transcribe the
plays. He was curious and delighted. Intimately tied to religious beliefs and practices, shadow
plays were banned when he grew up in the 1960s and 1970s. I transferred the video onto a DVD
and played it for him. He listened quietly for five minutes and then laughed and pronounced that
he could not understand a word of it. In fact, I understood more because of my familiarity with
the genre and the Fan Lihua story. Li Kunyang subsequently enlisted the assistance of Li Yun
who lived within a hundred kilometers south of Moung Heng, on the same side of the mountain

as Nanyue. Li Yun arrived fully confident of his familiarity with the dialect of the region. When
the videotape was shown, however, he moved closer and closer to the television and eventually
conceded that although the accent was very familiar, the only words he could make out were
Fan Lihua which I clued him on at the outset. The music was also very familiar. It was the
same as that used in the Flower Drum Opera mentioned earlier. The apologies were profuse but I
laughed and told them that I would include this in my report to demonstrate the tremendous
disparity of Chinese dialects in remote regions.
After the conclusion of the plays, the master puppeteer stood behind the screen and
performed an extended (about eight minutes) ritual that sent away any evil influences and ghosts
that might have resided in the house. Judging from the characters on the talismanic block he
pounded, he might have transformed the ghosts into mud and sand. This shamanic ritual included
the burning of incense and mock money, chanting without music, the use of talismanic hand
gestures, and the banging of a two-hundred year old wooden block called an Order-Dispatching
Ruler (lingchi). Four characters are carved into each side of this rectangular block. They are:
As Soon as the Golden Whip Strikes (jinbian yixia); The Ghosts Transform into Mud and
Sand (guihua nisha; Fig 12); The Five Thunder Order Dispatcher (wulei haoling); and a side
with talismanic character-like created symbols. Once the ghosts and spirits were exorcized and
the house cleansed, the master puppeteer blessed it by tossing a mixture of tea and rice into the
audience several times as he continued to chant. The grandfather, as master of the household,
once again lit candles, burned mock money and set off firecrackers in the front courtyard, which
ended the rituals.
We photographed some of the shadow figures and interviewed the performers after the
show. Most of the puppets had one rod at the back of its neck on a swinging hook. Simpler in

construction and for manipulation than the puppets of the other Chinese shadow theatre
traditions, characters wearing robes with long sleeves only had a rod attached to one hand, the
other arm had neither hand nor rod. However, characters not wearing robes, such as warriors and
soldiers, did have two hands, each with its own rod. The figures were fairly large (about 27
inches tall). Some of the protagonists were made out of painted celluloid, but the majority of the
figures were carved out of thick paper and made colorful by filling the cutout patterns in the
bodies with colored plastic paper (Fig 13). The necks of the paper puppets were reinforced by
strips of hide (Fig 14). Initially, the existence of an old puppet of a tiger that looked like it was
made out of leather (Fig 15) led me to conclude that traditionally the form used hide but that
contemporary artists used paper instead. A visit to the Shadow Theatre Museum in Chengdu this
summer (2009), however, confirmed the existence of the tradition of Paper Shadows in Hunan.
The main difference between the bodies of the old paper puppets collected by the museum and
those we saw last year was the use of plastic colored paper as fillings in the bodies of the new
paper puppets, rather than painting the opaque paper itself (Fig 16). Also, while the heads of the
museum puppets were made of minimally colored ink painted parchment (Fig 17), the
contemporary ones were made of brightly painted celluloid. Hence, the colorfully painted
celluloid, and paper bodies with transparent colored plastic paper fillings are new inventions that
have made this traditional form brighter and more colorful. A comparison between the clothing
made out of paper (Fig 9) versus those of celluloid (Fig 10) shows the contemporary artists
conscious choice of using the dark outlines of paper to create the effect of armor when the
warriors first meet in battle. These southern Hunan puppets also differ from the figures of most
of the other Chinese shadow traditions in that the faces tend to be painted rather than carved and
seen head on rather than in profile.

When asked about the obviously exorcist ritual, the priest-puppeteer was reluctant to
discuss what might be construed as superstition. He simply said that the blocks were to ensure
safety and peace (bao pingan). The particular ruler used here belonged to the master of his
fathers master and was more than two hundred years old. The master puppeteer, Wang Donglin
(Fig 6), was born in 1945. He began learning the art form when he was thirteen and had studied
from his father, Wang Shousheng (b.1913) and three other masters, Zhou Fangxian, Yuan
Yeqing and Wu Zhixiong. The percussionist was Wang Yueqiu (b.1942; Fig 7) and the erhu
violinist was Wang Xinmin (b.1940). They have worked together for several decades, probably
beginning sometime after the end of the Cultural Revolution in 1976.
Wang Donglin claimed his had been the most popular troupe in the region, performing
more than 250 shows each year. Occasions for their services included the celebration of
birthdays, building of houses, passing of college entrance examinations, fulfillment of vows, and
purification of homes. Vow fulfillment, the sponsoring of a show promised to a deity for the
granting of a favor requested of the deity, and exorcism of ghosts and evil influences from homes
were the most common occasions for the sponsoring of shadow plays. Grandfather was
obviously happier with the cleansing aspect of the performance than the entertainment aspect of
the show.
Aside from celebrating the birthdays of mortals, shadow theatre also celebrated those of
the deities that were even more important. The most significant were the three dates referred to
by the locals as the birthdays of Guanyin (Avalokitesvara; also known as the Goddess of
Mercy; Fig 18): the dates of her birth (the nineteenth day of the second month according to the
lunar calendar), of her taking the tonsure (the nineteenth day of the six month), and of her
deification (the nineteenth day of the ninth month). The first date was so important that its

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celebration would typically last from the first day of the second month to the thirtieth day of that
month when four to five troupes might perform simultaneously as many as five shows a day each
at the main local Guanyin temple. The master puppeteer also noted that this particular theatrical
form was even more popular before 1990. Despite general decline, it remained popular during
Guanyins birthdays.
This was the first time I watched a shadow performance by a mere three-member troupe. Indeed,
its simplicity and emphasis on religious functions may be reflections of its antiquity and as a
very traditional form. I was very excited to have finally been able to observe a shadow show
performed primarily to entertain ancestors and accompanied by the exorcism of evil influences at
its end. In no other shadow theatre tradition have I ever seen the master puppeteer taking over so
unambiguously the functions of a shamanic priest. While its disappearance during the Cultural
Revolution could be traced to the suppression of traditional culture and superstitions, one
might attribute its present decline to the attrition of traditional religious beliefs among the
younger population who grew up without the religious ambiance. Given the nature of the
function of this shadow theatre tradition, it may disappear when the local religious belief system
no longer exists.

Fan Pen Chen teaches at SUNY-Albany