Puppetry is a stage art. Vietnamese puppetry comprises 2 kinds: Puppet & Water puppet.

Vietnamese water puppetry is an age-old typical and traditional art, closely bound to rural culture and agricultural civilisation of rice planting of Vietnamese peasants. Choosing village festival as cultural atmosphere, pond as a stage, puppets as characters, the puppeteers manipulate puppets for their performance.

Water puppetry shows lively activities in both space & time of festivals such as worshipping, palanquin-proceeding, swinging, buffalo-fighting, wrestling, fairy-dancing,...or of daily life as transplanting, ploughing, bufallo-tending, duck-tending, paddy-husking, rice-pounding, fishing,...

In natural 4-season cycle (Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter) of agricultural production, once at leisure when Vietnamese farmers did invent wooden-puppets of sophisticated carvings & colourful paint and floating them on the pond for entertainment.

Water puppet stage is a village pond (including water communual house serving to hide puppeteers' know-how and the surface of water in front of it as the stage of performance). Spectators stand, sit at the water's edge except water communual house (due to secret principles on puppetry of folk puppet guilds). The puppeteers have to stand waist-deep in the water to manipulate the puppets. The water must be muddy to hide puppeteer' strings, sticks, rods,....

In the past, water puppetry was the spirit of Vietnamese agricultural culture, popular in every corner of the countryside with locally traditional performance style. Nowadays, Vietnamese water puppetry which has still remained & developed in many localities is fond of by audience at home and abroad thanks to puppeteers' skillful hands that manipulate puppets up & down as if dancing on the magic water stage as fanciful, glisten fairy world created by the reflection & flexibility of the water.

Department General of Posts & Telecommunications (DGPT) issues the stampset "Vietnamese Water Puppet" with 6 values showing a Vietnamese typical and traditional art - through colourful & lively puppets on the water stage, activities in both festivals & daily life of Vietnamese people seem to reappear before the audience.