Photo:China News Service

China's intangible cultural heritage such as palm puppets of Jinjiang, East China's Fujian, where thousands are quarantined, is helping in the battle against the novel coronavirus.

The palm puppets in the show in Jinjiang wore masks to popularize epidemic prevention.

The palm puppet show of Jinjiang has a history of thousands of years and was included in the intangible cultural heritage protection list in 2006.

"This is the first time in the history of puppet shows that puppets have worn masks to spread common sense about epidemic prevention," Chen Shizhang, scriptwriter for the show, told the China News Service.

The puppet show tells a series of stories that happened during the epidemic prevention period from the perspective of an ordinary Jinjiang family, persuading people to stay at home and wear masks when going outside.

The puppets' small masks are drawn from a normal mask and are cut down to scale and then worn on the puppet with a rubber band and an iron coil. It is not only delicate in shape, but also will not fall off, China News Service reported.

Chen said that it just took two days to complete the scripts and rehearsal for the new short play, which is "faster than ever before."

"It is easier for the public to accept some epidemic prevention knowledge and measures in the form of popular puppet shows," Chen said. "This short play is popular with a lot of people, which is also our little contribution to epidemic prevention," he added.

A man in Jinjiang concealed his travel history and went out multiple times for banquets with more than 3,000 attendees in late January. He was confirmed as being infected with the novel coronavirus on Sunday, causing seven others to be infected and more than 4,000 quarantined, the Beijing News reported on Wednesday. 

Besides palm puppets, paper cut artists in East China's Zhejiang Province also completed a group of art works about fighting the virus, China News Service reported.

Some of the paper-cut art works show scenes of doctors and nurses working hard to fight the virus and some of them show people in different professions all wearing masks, reflecting the determination and will of people to combat the deadly virus.

Global Times