Water puppetry «Traditional Water Puppet Show» at Nhà hát Rồng Vàng

   Every evening in central Ho Chi Minh City, puppets take to the water: the Golden Dragon theater (Rồng Vàng) stages a 45-minute program of traditional Vietnamese water puppetry, múa rối nước. If you have one free evening in the city and want to see a centuries-old Vietnamese art form, it is an easy one to fit in before dinner.

   The program's name says it plainly: «Traditional Water Puppet Show». Water puppetry was born more than a thousand years ago in the rice-growing culture of the Red River Delta (sông Hồng), and its earliest written record is carved on the Sùng Thiện Diên Linh stele of 1121. The puppets perform on the surface of the water, while the puppeteers spend the whole show in the water themselves, controlling the figures with their hands.

   According to the newspaper Tuổi Trẻ, by 2020 Golden Dragon had been running for more than 20 years and was a long-standing, regular water puppet venue in the city. Before the pandemic it gave at least two shows a day, around 800 a year, and tour buses pulled up outside the Labour Culture Palace every day. The paper also reported that the theater employed more than 20 puppeteers along with musicians playing traditional instruments, and that training a puppeteer is no easy matter: it takes a feel for music, nimble hands, good health and the stamina to work in cold water.

   The show suits first-time visitors to Ho Chi Minh City who have never seen water puppets, as well as families with children: it runs for less than an hour and starts early in the evening, leaving time for dinner and a stroll downtown afterwards.

   The theater is on the grounds of the Labour Culture Palace (Cung Văn hóa Lao động) on Nguyễn Thị Minh Khai street. There is one show a day, at 18:30, and the theater makes a point of asking guests to be on time: latecomers, it warns, cannot be helped.

   Be there by half past six, and forty-five minutes later you will step back out into the evening city having just watched puppets come alive on the water.