Chengdu wins praise for puppetry and shadow play

The secretary-general of UNIMA (Union Internationale de la Marionnette - International Puppet Organization) says he made the right decision in 2008 to choose China to host the 21st World Puppetry Festival.

"I voted for Chengdu, hoping the world could know more about China's puppetry and shadow play arts," Jacques Trudeau says, after the eight-day festival ended in Sichuan province on June 3.

Chengdu, capital of Sichuan, and Yekaterinburg, Russia, competed to be the host city. The 80-year-old festival took place just once in Asia at the end of the 1980s.

Amazed by the Chengdu Shadow Play Museum of China, he speaks highly of China's efforts to conserve and develop the puppetry and shadow play arts and heritage.

The museum, which was opened in 2006, has a collection of about 200,000 show puppets from Sichuan, Yunnan and Shaanxi provinces as well as more than 1,000 scripts of shadow play dramas. It is the world's largest museum of its kind in terms of quantity, sources and variety of collections.