The institution had an itinerant identity during its active years. It opened in 2000 as the TTT Puppet Centre, a name that signaled its aspirations without quite capturing its scope. In November 2005 it was renamed the Lin Liu-hsin Puppet Theatre Museum — an acknowledgment of the family lineage and institutional heritage behind the collection. Finally it became the Taiyuan Asian Puppet Theatre Museum, a name that broadened the geographic frame from a single lineage to an entire continent. Each renaming reflected a growing ambition: to be not merely a repository for one tradition but a genuine hub connecting puppet artists and traditions from across Asia. The location in Datong District placed the museum in one of Taipei's oldest and most culturally layered neighborhoods, near Dihua Street and the old Dadaocheng commercial district.

More than 10,000 items. The scope of the collection was the museum's greatest achievement and its most immediate argument for its own existence. Glove puppetry — budaixi in Taiwanese, a tradition central to temple festivals and popular entertainment across Taiwan and Fujian — was well represented, including pieces connected to the Lin Liu-hsin troupe lineage that originally anchored the institution. Shadow puppetry arrived from traditions across Southeast Asia and China, each regional style with its own materials, its own figure designs, its own performance conventions. String puppets — marionettes — came from multiple cultural contexts, from European-influenced forms to the complex marionette traditions of Chinese opera. Water puppets, the Vietnamese art form in which carved wooden figures perform on the surface of a pool, added a form that few institutions outside Vietnam have collected seriously. Together, the collection made a case that puppet theatre is not a minor folk art but a major domain of Asian performance culture.

The museum's stated mission went beyond preservation. It aimed to foster interaction between local Taiwanese puppet troupes and their international counterparts — to make Datong District a place where puppet artists from Japan, Indonesia, Cambodia, India, and Europe might encounter each other's work and traditions. In practice this meant hosting visiting troupes, organizing festivals and exhibitions, and functioning as a research center as well as a display space. The international dimension mattered because puppet theatre traditions in Asia face the same pressures that traditional performing arts face everywhere: smaller audiences, younger generations drawn to other entertainments, the economics of keeping specialized skills alive. The museum positioned itself as a counterweight to those pressures, an institution that took puppet theatre seriously as a living art rather than a nostalgic artifact.

On 1 July 2019, the Taiyuan Asian Puppet Theatre Museum closed. The reasons were not made fully public, but institutions of this kind face chronic funding challenges, and the museum had been operating for nearly two decades — longer than many specialized cultural institutions survive. The Beimen Station on the Taipei Metro, a short walk away, still marks the neighborhood where it stood. The Datong District still contains the North Gate (Beimen), Dihua Street, and the temples and markets that make it one of Taipei's most historically dense areas. The museum's closure leaves a gap that was real: 10,000 items telling the story of Asian puppet theatre, an international exchange program connecting living traditions, and a building near the old city wall that had found a distinctive purpose. The collection was donated to the National Taiwan Museum in 2020, ensuring its long-term preservation — a meaningful outcome for the world of traditional performance arts.