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National Geographic : 1980 Oct
Contents
hang suspended between earth and sky, and in the flat two-dimensional world of grays and blacks the diagonal slash of a raftsman's pole completed a composition from China's ink-painting masters. "Before liberation and the establishment of the People's Republic in 1949," said Mr. Chi, "there were only 17,000 acres of tea stick bamboo in Guangdong; now we farm 42,000 acres of it. Our production is about 40,000 tons a year, six times what it used to be. We export about 5,000 tons. Tonkin, as the trade calls it, goes all over the world, but Europeans are our best customers. They use it in horticulture, as supports for tomatoes, melons, hops, and fruits. Scandinavia im ports it for ski poles and to mark the borders of roads buried under snow. These are the small, finger-thick sizes. Bigger ones make poles for vaulters, and the largest, as much as two inches in diameter, go to makers of fishing rods and furniture." In the 1930s tea stick bamboo was intro duced into the United States and planted in botanical gardens in Georgia, Louisiana, and Puerto Rico, but it never attained the size and quality of the Chinese parents. FAINTLY through the curtain of rain I could see figures of men and women among the glistening bamboos on the slopes, felling the mature culms and throwing them down to the river's edge, where they were bound into bundles and laid in overlapping layers like shingles on a roof, forming immense rafts nearly a hun dred feet long. Rounding a bend, we came upon a mov ing floor of bamboo, hundreds of rafts tied together. Beyond, below the tile roofs of a village, bundles of drying bamboo stood in hourglass columns on the bank. Ashore on a beach we watched workers seated on small stools in six inches of water, scrubbing each culm with a handful of sand. "A culm must be three to five years old before cutting," said Mr. Chi. "Bamboo will sprout and reach its full height in six to eight weeks, and then the culms look beautiful, glossy, green, without a blemish. But new culms are mostly water, and if you cut them, they will shrink and crack as they dry." The man before us circled a culm with a cloth full of sand. Inching the pole from the water, he scrubbed vigorously, turning it as he scoured. The long shaft, blotched and spotted as if from skin disease with black and white patches of fungus and lichen, emerged sage green and shining. "The culms dry in the air and sun for ten days," Mr. Chi continued. "Then we ship them by boat downstream to Nanhai, near Guangzhou, where they are straightened over a fire and cut to length." N CHINA there are some 300 species of bamboo, of 26 genera. Of these, tonkin is the most known and prized overseas, but within China the single most useful bam boo is a large cane called mao chu, hairy bamboo (Phyllostachys pubescens), from the fine hair covering its culm sheaths. Fully two-thirds of the bamboo China produces is mao chu, which is used to make furniture and even as reinforcement rods in heavy construction. At the Technological College of Forest Products in Nanjing (Nanking), I listened to Dr. W. Y. Hsiung, China's leading bamboo authority. "Every day our written language reminds us of the antiquity of China's partnership with bamboo. The radical chu-acharacter indicating sense-depicts two leafed twigs of bamboo." The doctor made rapid brush strokes: ft. "Chu by itself means bamboo, but this radical enters into hundreds of other words and phrases. "Our earliest records, long before the in vention of paper in the second century B.C., were written on slips of green bamboo. It is easy to scratch or incise on bamboo's smooth skin, unique in the plant kingdom. To make a bamboo book, strips were strung together with silk or ox sinew. One such bundle of 312 slips was recently unearthed in a Han Dy nasty [second century B.C.] tomb. "Why is such importance given to bam boo in China? Because of its beauty and its multiple good qualities. We call bamboo the chief member of the trio of 'winter friends,' bamboo, winter plum, and pine. The three occur together throughout Chinese art and literature as symbols of resistance to hard ship. The plum flowers while snow is still on the ground, the pine flourishes in poor soil and clings to precipitous cliffs, and the bam boo remains green throughout the year, NationalGeographic, October 1980 510
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