Hua Meixia

01 · Lineage & Regional School

She studied under Cai Yanqiu, performing and manipulating the dan (female) roles of the puppet stage. Within the regional tradition and school record of Puppetry in Yangzhou, Jiangsu: Yangzhou rod puppetry centres on Yangzhou city, Jiangsu, and is popular through central Jiangsu and the Lixiahe area; because Yangzhou was a canal stronghold in the Qing where troupes gathered, its rod puppets toured the wharves of the Jiangnan region, and it later took the Yangzhou Puppet Research Institute (Jiangsu Provincial Puppet Troupe) as its professional performing and transmission body. Yangzhou is one of the birthplaces of Chinese puppetry; Yangzhou puppetry was famous in the Song, performed everywhere from village threshing grounds and temple roadsides to palace inner quarters.

02 · Mastery & Signature Works

Female, Han ethnicity, born in December 1947, a native of Taixing County, Jiangsu Province. She is a National First-Class Performer. She later received careful guidance in stage performance from Ma Hongjun, a celebrated veteran master of puppet manipulation, and others. With solid basic skills, she inherited the vigorous, powerful manipulation style of earlier artists and, according to the needs of each role, created puppet movements of spear-play, sword-dance, orchid-finger palm-turn and handkerchief-twirling together with more than twenty water-sleeve movements that are light, floating, soft and beautiful, enriching and developing the traditional techniques of puppet performance. Her stage characters are vividly lifelike, gentle in civil roles and fierce in martial ones, and she has gradually formed a manipulation style in which strength and suppleness complement each other and every detail is finely conveyed. Her “puppet training exercises” and “water-sleeve movement combinations” provide relatively standard teaching material for puppet manipulation. She has performed and taught in Japan, Australia and Pakistan. Within the documented technical tradition of Puppetry in Yangzhou, Jiangsu: After entering the Qing, Yangzhou puppetry successively absorbed the strengths of such operatic genres as Kun, Hui and Jing opera, and through the reform and creation of several generations of artists finally formed the distinctive style of rod-puppet manipulation and performance. Rod-puppet performance requires the actor to master the three basic skills of the “lifting skill” for holding up the puppet, the “rod skill” for manipulating it and the “step skill” expressing a character's gait, to grasp the four essentials of “steady, straight, upright and level”, and to act with practised ease. Yangzhou rod puppets are finely carved and painted, their performance vivid and expressive, much welcomed by audiences. Their traditional repertory is mostly transplanted from Kun, Hui and Jing opera, while modern newly written plays seek new things in both subject and form, the musical arrangement being decided according to play and performance form. Representative repertoire, works and technical entries recorded for the project include: "The Seventh-Rank Sesame Official (Grand Puppet Modelling)": One of the grand-puppet modelling designs undertaken in 1988. "The Four Great Beauties (Grand Puppet Modelling)": One of the grand-puppet modelling designs undertaken in 1988, alike in form and spirit and surpassing real persons. "The Puppet Training Routine and Water-Sleeve Movement Suite": Devised by an inheritor, comprising “puppet spear-play, sword-dance, orchid-finger palm-turn and handkerchief-twirl” and more than twenty light, floating, soft and beautiful water-sleeve movements, giving puppet manipulation teaching a relatively standard textbook.

03 · Transmission & Safeguarding Status

National representative bearer of Puppetry (Rod Puppetry), a third-batch national intangible cultural heritage project.

04 · Associated Heritage Item Dossier

05 · Fellow National Bearers Lineage

National representative bearers recorded under the same item code, ordered from the first to the sixth batch. Batch order is not a teacher–student relationship.

06 · Archival Sources & Bibliography

1. Hua Meixia · National Representative Bearer Archive