The “King of the Theaters,” glove puppetry master Huang Chun-ching (黃俊卿), 88, died on Monday last week from multiple organ failure.
A memorial is scheduled for 1pm at the Wenshu Temple in Yunlin County’s Douliou City (斗六) today.
Huang, the eldest son of Huang Hai-tai (黃海岱), the founder of the Wuzhou Puppetry Troupe, founded his own troupe in the post-1945 era and was part of the zenith of the trade, evenutally matching his father’s renown and skill.
Photo courtesy of Huang Wen-lang
The popularity of his troupe — which sometimes performed for two or three months straight — earned him the title “King of the Theaters,” as well as multiple National Cultural Heritage Awards.
Huang Chun-ching’s performance career was halted in 1994, after a car accident and a stroke kept him from taking to the stage and led to his children taking over his shows.
Hospitalized in Douliou’s Chengta Hospital three years ago, Huang Chun-ching was later diagnosed with blood cancer. On Monday last week, a secondary infection led to his death.
One of the performer’s sons, Huang Wen-lang (黃文朗), said his grandfather, father, uncle Huang Chun-hsiung (黃俊雄) and himself might have set a record by winning National Cultural Heritage Awards across three generations.
Huang Wen-lang said he was certain that his father’s influence in glove puppetry would generate fame for him in the future.
Despite Huang Chun-ching’s multiple marriages — five marriages and a total of 11 children — the entire family continued to live together until his children started their own families, a feat that was widely commended by other puppeteers.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching