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Updated Monday, July 27, 2009 9:17 am TWN, By Richard Saunders, Special to The China Post

The museum collection includes a bewildering selection of puppets, costumes, musical instruments, and even changeable heads. (By Richard Saunders, Special to The China Post)

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A culture trip to Sanjhih

The museum is named after one of Taiwan's greatest traditional puppet masters (best-known in the West as the subject of Hou Hsiao-Hsien's 1993 film, The Puppetmaster which won the jury prize at Cannes Film Festival that year), and (like the better-known Lin Liu-Hsin Puppet Theatre Museum in Taipei's Dadaocheng area) is an important repository of traditional Taiwanese hand puppets. Most notable of all about the museum is Li's great love for his craft, which shines out of the many photos of the master (who passed away in 1998), and from the huge and lovingly tended personal collection he left behind.

Housed in a two-story residence, it's clear the museum is a family-run venture, but entering the front door, the owners' love of their craft and flair for displaying the old artifacts is immediately apparent. Inside the front room on the first floor stands a fine puppet theater, all carved wood and shiny gold paint and rich red cloth.

Visitors can try their hand at playing the various drums that traditionally accompany a puppet show, and can even stage their own show at a second puppet theater out in the back, while for under a hundred NT dollars, kids can be kept occupied painting and clothing their own puppet in the DIY section nearby.

Go upstairs and the first, arresting sight that greets the eye is a striking, if rather ghostly 3D hologram of the great man's smiling face, hanging on the wall. Beyond are case upon case of puppets, puppet heads, musical instruments, clothes and various articles of the puppet master's craft.

Best of all, though, come on a Saturday and, with a little luck there'll be a live puppet show in the grand puppet theater, in a large hall hidden behind the main museum rooms. It's not a big museum but this lovely place is probably Sanjhih's most fascinating attraction, and certainly worth an hour of anyone's time, en route to the beach.

HOW TO GET THERE:

From the center of Sanjhih, take local route 18 towards Hengshan (橫山). In about five hundred meters, the road begins to climb a hillside, zigzagging round two sharp bends. About a hundred meters after the second bend, look carefully on the left side of the road for a large black poster board advertising the museum and turn left into the road next to it, through a private residential development. The museum is on the right in about fifty meters.

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