The former site of Bakuryō-za (麥寮座), the first theater in Mailiao, Yunlin, built in the late Japanese colonial era as a venue for traditional opera and drama rather than film. The venue closed around World War 2, and the local theater scene lay dormant for years until Qiaotou Theater opened in 1953. Mailiao’s vibrant performance culture, sustained by home-grown amateur troupes (子弟) and visiting professional companies alike, was the milieu from which the Gongle Society (拱樂社) emerged, the opera troupe founded by Chen Chengsan (陳澄三), whose 1956 production Xue Pinggui and Wang Baochuan (薛平貴與王寶釧) was the first widely successful Taiwanese-language film1.
Footnotes
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This film was long lost but archivists uncovered a Hakka-dubbed copy in 2013. ↩
Note: this location has vanished. Any information presented here is only for reference.
提醒：此地點已消失，本文僅供參考用途。
Map
Recorded On
Links
- Cultural Heritage Map of Old Theaters in Taiwan (臺灣老戲院文史地圖)
Sources
- Li Yuanjie, A Brief History of Movie Theaters in Mailiao, Yunlin County Government, 2018-04, No. 59 (ISBN 978-986-05-5628-5) 李元傑，《麥寮地區戲院小史》，雲林縣政府，2018-04，第59輯
- Qiu Kunliang, Chen Chengsan and Gongyue Club, National Center For Traditional Arts, 2001 邱坤良，《陳澄三與拱樂社：台灣戲劇史的一個硏究個案》，國立傳統藝術中心，2001
Themes
- Japanese Colonial Era Taiwan (台灣日治時代)
- Theaters in Taiwan (台灣老戲院)
Nearby Locations
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Author
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I am a web application developer, photojournalist, urban explorer, and history enthusiast passionate about the open web and documenting my experiences on this planet. This project was founded in the early 2010s and has evolved into a sort of personal Wikipedia of places that interest me (and often the photographs I’ve taken there). I’m originally from Toronto, Canada, but spend most of my time residing in Taiwan.