The Bamboo Trapeze Builders
Up eighty or so floors on one of Hong Kong’s tallest buildings you can see way beyond the city limits. You can see past neighbouring islands, out across the strait to mainland China. If the air is clear enough (not often), they say you can see ships up to 40 km away.
Disconcertingly, you can often also see a muscular man, one leg hooked around a vertical bamboo pole, dangling in space.
He’s doing his day job. Building a bamboo scaffold. From where I was, I could see him, but luckily for me I was on the ground; my heart was still in my mouth though. Bamboo scaffolding is not for the faint-hearted.
I was in Hong Kong, to visit a bamboo expert; he was billed as a world authority on the difference between mao jue and kao jue bamboo. He explained about the differences between mao jue, used for verticals and diagonals, and kao jue, used for horizontal poles. I nodded and took notes.
His name was Yu Shing So, and he looked like an authority. He wore a tweed jacket and you don’t see many of them as everyday wear in Hong Kong. He also had a PhD in bamboo construction. His tiny office high was up in his company building, with views of rising skyscrapers and samples of bamboo dotted about — to impress scaffolders, presumably.
According to Yu Shing, the best scaffold poles come from halfway up the hill they grow on. “The best bamboo grows mid-way between the river and the hill, mostly from China’s Guangxi province,” he explained. “Hill bamboo is strong, but can be bent and has too many knuckles and knots. On the other hand, riverbank bamboo is long and much straighter — but can be too flexible.” Hmmm, you don’t want a wobbly scaffold 80 stories up, that’s for sure. Now I knew what to look for, I set out to look at some scaffolders in action.
It’s not something you notice to begin with, but once you know it’s there and start looking up as you walk through the smelly, rattling, bustling canyons of Central or Wan Chai, you see scaffolding everywhere. And it’s almost all bamboo.
It hangs out over watch shops, cosmetic counters and everywhere-always food and general tourist rubbish stalls. It wraps new building work, renovations, upgrades, demolitions, neon signs and brand new skyscrapers. It’s all over the place, mostly packaged garishly in green netting. That’s presumably there to catch the odd pole or two that might get dropped by the riggers.
Actually, that’s wrong. They are not riggers, they are taap pang, according to my new friend Yu On who used to work up on buildings, tying poles together, but was now working as a team boss on the ground. He was still plenty wiry and tough though; he gave me a friendly arm wrestle and cracked my knuckles on the table in seconds while simultaneously waving to the stall owner for another cup of milky tea.
He told me that bamboo scaffold building was something of an art. It demands an unusual mix of tradition, a good eye, and skill he said. And friction.
Because the poles, even 200 meters up above the pavements, sometimes clinging on in the face of a 100kph typhoon, are just tied together with plastic string. Even more gob-smacking, without any clips or knots. “The workers use plastic ties,” Yu explained. “They wrap them round a joint six times, really tight. Then they twist the ends of the tie around each other and tuck the twist into the gap between the poles.” And that’s it?
Yes. No mechanical fastenings, no screws or clamps, no spring-loaded tensioners — no sticky tape, even? None of that. It’s all held together by twist and tuck. And a big construction job could use up to 16,000 individual lengths of bamboo, all held together by twist and tuck. Yikes.
I looked up at the hundreds of metres of scaffolding over my head and stepped back warily. Let’s hope those guys don’t get Friday Afternoon Knock-Off Early Syndrome . .
There was a single scaffolder, sorry, a taap pang, up on the top level of the framework sticking up above the green netting over our heads. He’d got his leg wedged into a joint, and was holding on to a vertical with one hand. He reached down with the other hand to grab the end of a bamboo (up to 7m long, they told me) from a stack on the nearest flat. He swung it nonchalantly into place, balancing its weight with the ease of practice, then reached down to his waist-belt and pulled out a length of plastic tie.
Holding the pole in position, he wrapped the tie round and round the joint between two poles, twisted them up then tucked the ends in, just like Yu had said. His pole stopped swaying — and another piece of his gravity-and-death-defying scaffold jigsaw was in place.
Apparently bamboo scaffold isn’t just a quaint tradition in Hong Kong; it has real advantages for the densely packed building environment there. It’s more flexible, safer to work on, more resilient and much simpler to erect and take down in tight corners than metal scaffold. And if a typhoon whips through, it will bend and flex — unlike metal which is more likely to stay stiff until it gives up under the pressure and then suddenly collapses.
The list goes on: it’s cheap — bamboo costs 60% less than metal, it’s biodegradable, and best of all if you want some more you can just grow it. Researchers are looking to wring even more sustainability out of the world’s biggest grass. They are investigating ways to recycle used scaffold poles into paper, textiles, even charcoal for barbecues.
But despite all these advantages, the bamboo scaffold business in Hong Kong is flat. It’s not a poor business; it’s just not expanding. That’s mainly because the number of taap pang is dwindling.
It’s hard, repetitive work, not that well paid and can be dangerous given the potential for accidents. Surprisingly, few taap pang fall or get badly injured, possibly because of the skills that are handed down between generations. But Yu’s sons (he has three) who used to work on the scaffold have all gone into other, easier construction jobs.
“They followed me into taap pang, but eventually they all gave it up,” he says, with a touch of resignation. “To do this job you have to be experienced, have to work all day long in difficult and scary conditions, year round, on a contract basis with no job security.” That’s the way it is.
As we walked out of the construction site, Yu told me the craft has a long and significant history to it. “Parts of the Great Wall of China would have been built with bamboo scaffold like this,” he said proudly, waving at the spindly towers rising above us. So that’s a couple of thousand years worth of history then. And the traditions that went with it still survive.
In the old days, Yu said how the taap pang would hold ceremonial processions and make offerings before they climbed and built. He described how they would hang bamboo loops on their belts and up in the scaffold to keep bad spirits and ghosts at bay. To keep the structure safe.
As we walked through the exit, I noticed a small red tinplate altar on the ground by the gate, with joss sticks and a few bits of fruit sticking out of it. Those traditions, like the bamboo scaffolds, are still hanging on in there.
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