How did puppetry come about?

China's earliest puppet, in the "Liezi? Tang Qushi", there was a record: when King Mu of the Western Zhou Dynasty, the entertainer Yanshi, brought advocates to meet King Mu, advocates can sing and dance, but the King ordered a dissection to see, it turned out to be a puppet made of wood and leather.

During the Han Dynasty, puppets were also used to make enemy troops retreat. According to the Dongfu Miscellany Records:

Then Han Gaozu was in Pingcheng and was besieged by the Xiongnu king, Boldon, whose main general leading the troops was Boldon's wife, Xiongnu.

After learning that Xiongnu was naturally jealous, the strategist Chen Ping came up with a plan. He created a puppet beauty and manipulated it with a mechanism to make the puppet move on the city wall. When Xiongnu saw this, she feared that after she captured the city, Boldun would take the "beauty" as his concubine and lose her favor, so she retreated and lifted the siege of Pingcheng.

Later, artists used puppets as theater tools to perform, known as "puppets" in ancient times. During the Tang Dynasty, the production of puppets with strings was so exquisite that Emperor Xuanzong of the Tang Dynasty wrote a poem in praise of them: "Carving wood and pulling strings to make an old man, with chicken skin and crane hair the same as the real one."

To the Song Dynasty, the production of puppets and performance skills, have made great progress.

In 1979, Laixi County, Shandong Province, Yuanli Township, Dai Shushi Village excavated a 193-centimeter-high large puppet, limbs by 13 sections of wood strips, the joints can be movable, sitting, standing, kneeling can be.

It's discovery shows that the puppet making at that time has reached the situation that there is no difference with the real person, which also laid a solid material foundation for the budding of puppet theater.