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# THE CRAFT OF THE BAMBOO SCAFFOLDER
DAN WATERS
Admired by Taoists for its resilient beauty, tenacity and flexibility, bamboo symbolises endurance and the lifestyle of an upright, virtuous gentleman. It has rings marking, as it were, important events in a person's life. It is fast-growing and has great powers of survival. Not long after the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, on 6 August 1945, bamboo on the devastated site was said to have sprouted new shoots.
Bamboo also, with classical, delicate leaves like painting on porcelain, bends but seldom breaks. The tender sprouts are a popular vegetable. With its unbounded usefulness it is employed to make waterpipes, poles for hanging out washing, mats, incense sticks, wide-brimmed hats to offer protection from the sun, shields used by riot police, chopsticks, pillows, divination blocks for temples, carved ornaments and countless other types of utensils. The elderly will have slept in bamboo cradles as children. Their coffins will be conveyed at their funerals by bearers using bamboo carrying poles.
James Stewart Lockhart, a senior Hong Kong civil servant who played a major part in the taking over of the New Territories by Britain from China at the end of the last century, described bamboo in a large, undated notebook, as follows:2
To start with, the bamboo has seven virtues of its very own: it is clean and unspotted in itself; a sheaf covers the stem as it pierces the dark earth, so the bamboo has protection from the world; being hollow it is symbolical...of a pure heart; it is strong and unyielding; the stem being divided into segments is orderly; the stalk is pure green without blemish; and is lastly eternal and enduring.
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Although the Victorian naturalist, Alfred Russel Wallace,3 described bamboo as one of nature's most valuable gifts, the main purpose of this paper is to look at bamboo as a material for scaffolding, together with the methods of training and the role of the bamboo scaffolder.
A legendary sage named Yau Chao Shi is said to have lived 5,000