Thang Long Water Puppet Theatre

This guide to Thang Long Water Puppet Theatre in Hanoi traces water puppetry back to flooded rice paddies in the Red River Delta as early as the eleventh century, and to Dao Dang Khiem, who founded four guilds in his village in the seventeenth century, only one of which outlived him. It follows the art into this theatre, opened in 1969, where puppeteers stand waist-deep behind a bamboo screen guiding wooden figures to a live orchestra. Listen for how a centuries-old trick still shapes the show you're about to see.