Ah-Pao

Ah-Pao (Chinese: 蔡阿炮), born Tsai Ming-yi (蔡明毅) in 1961, is a Taiwanese actor, theatre director and stage performer whose working life runs from the experimental theatre of the 1980s to a supporting role in a 2026 boys’ love series. He is also credited as Ming-Yi Cai, Min-I Tsai and Tsai A-pow.

He studied at Taipei Municipal Jianguo High School and took a degree in insurance at Tamkang University, then went into performance rather than into finance. He was a member of 蘭陵劇坊, the Lanling Theatre Workshop, founded in 1980 as Taiwan’s first amateur experimental small-theatre company and the driving force of the island’s little theatre movement. Lanling ceased activity in 1990 and dissolved the following year, but the companies that grew out of it, among them the Ping-Fong Acting Troupe and the Performance Workshop, shaped Taiwanese theatre for the next three decades.

After completing military service he became the head of 華燈劇團, the company that later became the Tainaner Ensemble (台南人劇團), one of Taiwan’s significant theatre organisations, known in recent years for its programmes of reinterpreted Western classics and for its musical work. In that period he wrote and directed 台語相聲─世俗人生, a Taiwanese-language crosstalk piece performed with Hsieh Ya-lin, billed as A-Chiao. The crosstalk work rather than the theatre work brought him into television.

On screen he appeared in The World Between Us (我們與惡的距離, 2019), as the Deputy Minister of Law in Best Interest (最佳利益, 2019), in The Magician on the Skywalk (天橋上的魔術師, 2021), as Aniki in the film Coo-Coo 043 (2022), as Lai Yu-tien in Wave Makers (人選之人 造浪者, 2023), as Chiang Wei-chung in What the Hell Is Love (2023), as Principal Wu in the film The Eye See The Soul (2024), as a chief in Zero Day Attack (零日攻擊, 2025), and in the 2026 film Matsu.

In 2026 he plays the police station chief across the twelve episode main run of Connecting to You (整個世界，只有你連上了我), the GrX Studio boys’ love series directed by Yu Jhi-han, which aired from 14 August to 11 September 2026 and added a special episode on 18 September 2026. By episode count it is the largest television role in his filmography: every previous drama credit runs to four episodes or fewer.