Hong Kong
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Every 12 months, in the course of summer season, a whole lot of Hong Kong building employees and engineers stroll up some 200 steps to Ching Lin Terrace within the seaside neighborhood of Kennedy Town.
There, in one of many metropolis’s temples, they collect and pay their respects to Lo Pan, a legendary Chinese carpenter from the Zhou dynasty and patron saint of builders and contractors.
Even within the sweltering warmth, employees cram into the tiny temple’s smoke-filled lobby with incense and candlesticks in hand. Bowing a number of occasions, they chant slogans in honor of the development deity’s birthday and pray for a secure 12 months of labor.
“I always tell people that Lo Pan is like our Michelangelo. He is a designer, an architect and an engineer,” stated Lawrence Ng, president of the Hong Kong Construction Sub-Contractors Association, which represents town’s waterproofing, metalwork and scaffolding professionals, amongst others.
“We must pay respects to the workers who came before us, and Lo Pan is our ‘sifu’ (master).”
Worshipping Lo Pan has taken on a specific significance in right now’s precarious economic system, Ng stated.
Since the Covid-19 pandemic, town has seen a decline in giant scale building tasks, leaving many laborers without steady, long-term employment. Among them are town’s “spidermen” — hundreds of building employees educated within the historical technique of bamboo scaffolding.
On a slope behind Lo Pan temple is a towering residential constructing lined in a acquainted sight to those that’ve walked Hong Kong’s streets: bamboo poles organized in a distinct grid-like formation.
The crisscrossed constructions, through which every pole is fixed with nylon ties, are ubiquitous throughout town’s dense, vertical city panorama. These scaffolds are erected on skyscrapers, a whole lot of toes excessive, and encased in material security nets forming colourful cocoons of inexperienced, blue and purple.
Smaller bamboo contraptions usually poke out of home windows, or cowl air con models and balconies.
Bamboo scaffolding isn’t solely used within the building of latest buildings, however the renovation of hundreds of high-rises and historic tenements (“tong lau”) yearly.
Popular in Hong Kong for over a century, the technique’s origins in Chinese building date again to at the very least the Han dynasty, round 2,000 years in the past. The methodology was additionally extensively utilized in mainland China till authorities rules began calling for metal and aluminum scaffolds, in step with worldwide norms, within the Nineteen Nineties.
Bamboo, nonetheless, remained the go-to materials in Hong Kong, and has been used to construct among the metropolis’s tallest skyscrapers, like Norman Foster’s HSBC headquarters and components of the 88-floor International Finance Centre.
Aside from serving to develop Hong Kong’s modern constructions, bamboo has additionally performed an integral function in constructing non permanent Cantonese opera theaters.
These conventional theaters, made completely out of the plant, are constructed on particular events just like the birthdays of native deities or the Hungry Ghost Festival.
Scaffolding has, in flip, develop into a part of town’s visible language. Being light-weight, customizable and comparatively inexpensive, bamboo stands in stark distinction to its mainstream counterpart, steel.
“Steel is relatively stiff and strong, but it’s less flexible than bamboo,” stated Goman Ho, a structural engineer at British engineering agency Arup, who has greater than three many years of expertise overseeing the event of tall buildings within the metropolis, together with the 283-meter (928-foot) tall Cheung Kong Center.
“Bamboo on the other hand, has its own craftsmanship,” he added. “You can build a lot of beautiful scaffolding in ways you’d never think of.”
‘It’s tradition we have to keep’
Whether in conventional or modern building, dealing with the lengthy poles requires particular expertise and instinct, which may take months or years to attain.
“Sometimes people spend one, two, three or even four years learning bamboo scaffolding and may not become masters,” stated Ho Ping-Tak (no relation), Chairman of the Hong Kong and Kowloon Bamboo Scaffolding Workers Union.
“But with metal, the technical requirements are lower. If you have the strength, you can generally meet the requirements in a much shorter time.”
The largest member of the grass household, bamboo is flamable, inclined to deterioration and weaker in rain, elevating authentic questions on its sturdiness, Arup’s Ho stated.
“We need to find ways to overcome it,” he stated of those challenges, suggesting that poles might be coated with epoxy or plastic answer to stop erosion.
“It’s culture we need to maintain,” Ho added.
But conserving the custom alive is difficult. The {industry} includes an getting old workforce –– many, like 78-year-old Leung Siu Wai, among the many dozens of senior bamboo scaffold employees paying respects to Lo Pan, are near retirement. New expertise can be missing, stated Ng.
“It’s hard to get young people to enter,” he added. “Young people in Hong Kong don’t want to do physically demanding work, or work that gives them an identity they feel uncomfortable with.”
Discussions on safeguarding the apply resurfaced earlier this 12 months when the Hong Kong authorities’s Development Bureau announced that fifty% of latest public constructing tasks erected from March onwards would want to make use of steel scaffolding to “better protect workers” and align with modern building requirements in “advanced cities.”
The discover sparked concern amongst some Hong Kong residents, despite the fact that the coverage will solely affect “one or two new building projects” this 12 months, in response to the assertion.
The bureau later confirmed to NCS that just one public challenge can be affected in 2025. Nonetheless, some residents have taken to social media to lament what they believed to be the start of the top of bamboo scaffolding.
“This is your sign to film bamboo scaffolding while you still can,” wrote a Hong Kong videographer in an Instagram post that garnered over 20,000 likes. “Truly one of Hong Kong’s quiet wonders. And soon, it’ll just be part of the past.”
The storied constructing technique has additionally been celebrated on the worldwide stage, introduced as a part of the Hong Kong pavilion at this 12 months’s Venice Biennale –– the world’s largest structure exhibition.
In May, a sprawling bamboo scaffold was constructed within the courtyard of Venice’s Campo della Tana, as a part of a showcase exploring the varied and sometimes juxtaposing elements of public house in Hong Kong, with a give attention to threatened heritage.
Its curators stated their proposal for the pavilion was finalized in January, two months earlier than the federal government introduced its transfer to undertake extra steel scaffolding in building.
“We were a bit shocked, to say the least, because we had planned for this without knowing (the government’s announcement) was coming,” stated Ying Zhou, an architect and one of many curators.
“So immediately, we were like, ‘Oh what does our thing now say?’ It takes on a whole different kind of importance, especially when we bring it to a place like Venice.”
Eleven bamboo “sifus,” or masters, traveled to Venice to construct the construction. Watching them in motion, Zhou’s Italian counterparts have been, she stated, impressed with the best way the fabric was assembled so shortly and exactly –– with out a lot calculation.
“These pre-modern technologies are never recognized in a standardized world, because you have steel, you have concrete, you have numbers that are calculable,” she stated.
“And here we have something that even the Italians are like, ‘Oh, we need your structural engineer to certify (it).’”
Thirty-six-year-old Over Chan, a bamboo scaffold employee who builds constructions for exterior restore work, claims that latest industry-wide discussions about deadly accidents on building websites have prompted extra authorities intervention. (There have been 24 deaths related to bamboo scaffolding from January 2018 to August 2025, in response to Hong Kong’s Labour Department).
“When I was starting out as a worker, we didn’t even have to wear shirts, but now, we’re required to wear our uniform, have good manners, and so on –– this ultimately allows us to rise above the competition.”
“Bamboo is not unsafe,” Ho, the chairman of the employees’ union, stated, emphasizing the significance of employees fastening themselves to the wood constructions.
“It’s fine to use metal scaffolding –– we’re not saying that metal scaffolding is a competing technique, but if (the government) makes an announcement without much explanation…it gives the public the wrong impression that bamboo is unsafe, which has huge implications.”
Hong Kong’s Development Bureau informed NCS that adopting steel scaffolding in building is only one of some ways to enhance website security.
“Provided relevant legislative requirements on bamboo scaffolds and metal scaffolds are fulfilled, both types of scaffolds are safe,” the bureau stated in an electronic mail, including that the federal government has “no intention to phase out the adoption of bamboo scaffolds.”
Many large-scale building tasks in Hong Kong already incorporate a hybrid of bamboo and metal scaffolding, the union chief Ho stated, with steel bars fastened to the bottom supporting wood constructions increased up.
He estimates that, at present, 80% of scaffolds are created using bamboo, whereas 20% use steel or a hybrid of supplies.
Chan, who stays keen and optimistic concerning the commerce, stated he has began taking programs on steel scaffolding to face out within the workforce, regardless of his perception that bamboo isn’t going anyplace.
“Over the past few years, there’s been this feeling in Hong Kong about needing to preserve what’s left of the city’s identity,” he stated.