On the morning of September 26, 1998, two days before the funeral of the widely beloved puppet master, Lee Tien-lu, the fourth generation of his students presented two consecutive puppet shows in front of the funeral hall. Clangorous gongs and horns announced the beginning of the memorial service.

For Taiwanese people, who view death with sorrow and solemnity, it is rather unconventional to put on a show called "The Pig's Getting Married" at a mourning ceremony. Nevertheless, Lee's students knew too well that their ah-kung (grandpa) had always rejoiced in good company and liveliness. Besides, these teenaged and elementary school youngsters were keen to perform to comfort their deceased master, who had always worried that nobody would pass on the art of glove puppetry in Taiwan.

Although he won the National Heritage Award, the International Communications Service Award, and numerous other honors and prizes, Lee did not sail to such reputation without getting into deep waters. Within his lifetime, the rising and falling fortunes of Taiwan's puppet theater coincided with changing political situations.

Lee (1909-1998) was born when the Japanese ruled Taiwan. The only son of a puppet troupe organizer, he grew up with many puppets as his toys. He intuitively acquired the techniques for manipulating the puppets and he loved to perform before his peers. Although puppetry was built into his genes, his grandfather, Lee Huo, had other plans for his first grandson. Grandpa Lee sent the seven-year-old boy to a private school where he memorized many passages from time-honored Chinese primers, including the Three-Character Classic, the Four Books and collections of Tang dynasty poetry. Lee was meant to become a man of letters, or so it seemed to Grandpa. However, five years of schooling enriched the boy's understanding of traditional drama and poetry. Other than that, Lee often followed his grandfather to see Chinese operas and raconteurs' shows. All those encounters with theater, poetry and art laid the foundations for his future career as a top puppeteer.

When he was ten, Lee started to spend the time after school playing the second performer in his father's troupe. It was a painful experience to learn puppetry from his father. Whenever he made even a minor mistake, his father would hit him hard on the head with a wooden puppet. Consequently, nobody was willing to be his assistant. Lee, the only son, had no choice but to stay by his father's side and endure his harsh teaching style.

As time went by, Lee saw all of the over forty plays in his father's repertoire. He also learned to prepare puppets and set up props. When he was twelve years old, he entered elementary school, but soon found that under the Japanese regime, teachers did not appreciate traditional Chinese theatrical culture. His father was infuriated by the Japanese contempt toward the Taiwanese people. He bid Lee to quit school and later to perform in another troupe which toured the countryside and mountain areas.

During his five years in the mountains, young Lee not only sharpened his puppet manipulation skills, but also expanded his own repertoire from two plays to a dozen. Teenaged and stouthearted, he created dramatic tension in his performances that attracted many fans.

The year he turned eighteen, Lee figured it was time to go back to Taipei and become somebody in the puppet show business. When he arrived in Taipei, though, he discovered that the soft, romantic Southern Chinese musical style was fading while the rhythmic, lively Northern style had come into fashion. Music plays the leading part in Taiwanese puppet shows. Unfortunately, the troupe Lee worked for clung to the Southern style. Not to be outdone by troupes which had adopted the Northern music, Lee and his friends would beat up arrogant "Northerners." He recalled in his memoirs that although he was not an established artist then, he never hesitated when a fight was necessary to give Northerners a lesson. "I liked to bash three kinds of people at that time: pro-Japanese jackals, spies, and [Northern sect] performers from Hsinchuang." He actually had no prejudice against the Northern musical style. It was just that he couldn't bear it when Northerners looked down upon Southerners.

Lee acted as first performer in a troupe called Pleasure Garden, and he eventually married into the troupe leader's family. However, the honeymoon was not as sweet as he had imagined. He and his wife both had had the same kind of childhood. They both lost their mothers when they were little. Raised by their grandfathers, each was headstrong and intractable. Therefore, when neither of them would compromise, the passion usually shared by newlyweds was frozen. From then on, Lee concentrated on his show business and prepared to organize his own troupe.

In 1931, the same year his first son was born, Lee named his own puppet troupe I Wan Jan, or "vivid mimicry." To compete with the sixty other troupes in Taipei, Lee didn't miss any chance to show off his artistic talent. Once his father's teacher, the famous mainland puppet master Chen Po, was invited to give a show in Taiwan, but no one dared to play his assistant, the second performer. Lee was the only one who would agree. That night, his father saw the whole show through and silently listened to his teacher's praise of his son. Although Lee was not sure whether or not his father would be happy for him that night, the sensational news about Lee's pairing with Chen Po spread quickly and drew more opportunities for Lee to perform.

What really crowned him as the prodigy of Taipei's puppet theater was a three-way contest in 1935. At a Taiwanese festival of the dead [at that time in Taiwan, puppet shows were usually performed at religious festivals or funerals], three rich landowners in west Taipei competed to invite the most prestigious puppet troupe to perform for the glory of their ancestors. The heavyweight troupes Wan Juo Chen and Hsiao Hsi Yuan were both in. How could Lee's I Wan Jan let such a golden opportunity slip away? So, he recommended his own troupe to the third gentleman, even though it meant they had to compete with two theatrical colossi at the same place and time. At first, the landowner hesitated because he thought I Wan Jan was not famous enough, but when no other troupe was willing to take the job, he finally granted Lee the chance. Excited and determined to win or at least to tie, Lee went to a friend and borrowed a stage set whose scenery could be changed during the show, a novelty at that time. Even though he didn't choose a popular action show, the audiences from the other puppet shows flocked to his stage to ooh and aah at his special effects. Awarded a gold medal by the landowners, Lee's troupe attracted large audiences for the next two years.

With the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War in 1937, the good days of the puppet theater were over. Indigenous puppet shows were banned, and artists were only allowed to present Japanese plays. Lee decided to stop performing and he went into business instead. During the war, he opened a tea house and he sold oysters, but each time the business went down the drain. Finally, he got a job as manager of a traditional Taiwanese opera troupe, where he made a good living.

When the Pacific War broke out in 1941, Japan established the Imperial Subjects Service Society to strengthen the wartime social structure and to promote Japanization of the Taiwanese people. Since all theatrical groups had to join the society and perform for their imperial rulers, Lee resumed doing puppet shows. He was eloquent enough to convince the Japanese officer concerned that to attract more viewers to the political propaganda, they had to perform a few Taiwanese puppet shows after the "imperial show."

With the end of World War II, all forms of indigenous Taiwanese art started to thrive again. Lee led his I Wan Jan troupe from one religious celebration to another. Gradually, puppet shows were transformed from programs at religious festivals to a kind of commercial entertainment performed in theaters. Lee introduced elements of Peking opera, such as opera music and narration, into the theater. He also adapted a large number of historical and traditional folk stories for his shows, importing new sound, lighting and staging techniques. Sometimes he even designed the stage himself. Given a fashionable new look, puppet theater enjoyed popularity and prosperity until the Chinese Nationalist government, or Kuomintang, moved to Taiwan in 1949.

Ironically, the Nationalist administration also dictated that puppetry should serve politics by presenting anticommunist and anti-Soviet shows before every performance. Lee worked for the Kuomintang for a while. His I Wan Jan troupe won the annual Taiwan Drama Contest more than twenty times, and students came from as far as Europe to learn his techniques. In 1967, six years after Taiwan's first TV station was launched, Lee's puppet shows went on the air, but the program only lasted for one year because his troupe had too many technical problems coordinating with the broadcasting crew. The end of his TV show seemed to be an omen of the fall of traditional puppetry, although he didn't deem the emergence of TV as the only reason. "There were three major reasons that accounted for the decline of puppetry: the generation gap, the government's prejudice against local religious activities [as being wastefully expensive], and the lack of apprentices," observed the great puppeteer.

He closed I Wan Jan in 1978. However, while the spotlight was no longer focused on Lee in his home country, his art was reproduced and recreated by his foreign students all over the world. In that same year, his French students organized a glove puppet troupe in France and named it Little Wan Jan. Among the many Wan Jan troupes, Little Wan Jan might be the most successful. The three French artists not only make Caucasian-looking puppets, but also write their own scripts, such as Odyssey, in puppet show format. Lee himself gained from his contacts with foreign students as well. He admitted that he had been inspired by the distinguished French mime Marcel Marceau when he produced his first wordless puppet show in 1983.

The octogenarian puppet master spent his final years teaching, visiting his overseas students, and acting in a dozen movies. In many film directors' eyes, Lee Tien-lu's outgoing spirit and historic figure made him the best choice for a grandfather or great-grandfather character. Wu Nian-chen, screenwriter of the award-winning movie City of Sadness, remembered that when they were shooting that epic film, "Grandpa" Lee just sat there on the set talking and the rest of them were spellbound. "It was like my own dead grandfather coming alive again," said Wu. "He's really everybody's grandpa."

The master has passed away, yet his merry old soul still seems to stay with us. His daughter said that the tape recorder she used to play Buddhist sutras in her father's mourning hall would stop for no reason unless she replaced the sutras with Lee's favorite Peking operas.

Concerned about the future of traditional puppetry, Lee set up a puppet museum and a puppetry foundation before he died. His sons and students still teach school clubs and interested individuals everything about the ancient art. Whether or not the art will continue to be passed on, Lee Tien-lu's achievements and contributions will be remembered forever.