Chinese wayang (more popularly known today as opera) and puppetry were early forms of popular entertainment for the migrant community in Singapore. Many of these immigrants were laborers and coolies who converged on the island from various regions in southeast China. Arriving between the late 19th and early 20th centuries, they brought their respective styles of regional opera and puppetry. While these differed from one another in areas such as dialect and music, they shared similar stage conventions and stories derived from Chinese literary epics and folk mythology such as Romance of the Three Kingdoms, The Water Margin and Journey to the West.
