Depth, nuance, and precision. Yes, one can see these qualities running in artisans making beautiful products from the bamboo stems. At a corner of the Bamboo Art and Museum Centre at Qingshen County in the southwest of China's Sichuan Province, four female crafts workers were busy splitting bamboo stalks and extracting thousands of threads out of them.
Their meticulous labour was not only attention-grabbing but also engaging. Visitors from Nepal in no time joined them in taking layers and creating fibres from the bamboo culm. Smiling and receptive, the craft workers taught them some skills to weave the bamboo pieces into art works.
“Oh! That’s incredible. What a beautiful fish!” exclaimed Nepali visitors when the craft workers presented bamboo-woven fish to them within a minute. And all Nepali delegates kept colourful bamboo fish as the token of love of Qingshen, known as the ‘hometown of bamboo weaving in China.
’ The inspection tour at the centre was a part of the workshop ‘Bamboo Industry and Rural Revitalisation’ organised by the Jinjiang College, Sichuan University, Chengdu, in the third week of this September. Also recognised as the ‘national intangible cultural heritage production protection base’, Qingshen boasts of its more than 5,000-year-long history in bamboo weaving. The traditionally inherited bamboo weaving practice has now been developed into a robust green industry, producing 3,000 products in 25 categories and exporting them to more than 50 .