Displaying gravity-defying skills as they construct web-like support structures made of bamboo around the towers of Hong Kong – no it’s not something from a comic book, but the local ‘spiders’ doing their scaffolding day jobs.
At 250m above ground in Hong Kong, you’re so high you can see beyond the city limits. You can see past the neighbouring islands and across to mainland China. But even at that height, if you glance sideways you might see a young man with one leg hooked around a swaying bamboo pole, doing his job. He’s building a bamboo scaffold with his bare hands
Still swaying, he reaches down to grip the end of a long bamboo pole, passed up by another scaffolder. He swings it elegantly and accurately into place, balancing its weight against gravity. He sets it at 45 degrees to the upright and, without stopping, reaches down to his waist-belt and pulls out a 2m length of thin plastic banding. With the pole held fast in position against his upright, he spins the banding round and round the two bamboo lengths, tying them tightly together. His pole stops swaying – and another piece in the bamboo scaffold jigsaw is safely in place. He edges a metre sideways to the next tie point, concentrating hard. He is Yu On, a taap pang (Cantonese for bamboo scaffolder).
“Every scaffold we build is different,” says On, a muscular, crew-cut veteran of the taap pang who weave together one of Hong Kong’s most recognisable features. “It has to fit the site we’re working on.”
Tied not Died
On, who has been in the trade for decades, now works as a team manager looking after gangs of scaffolders who work on a contract basis. He doesn’t get up into the elegant, delicate bamboo structures as much as he used to, but he hasn’t forgotten how it’s done.
“The important thing is being able to build straight and strong even with curved poles – and do it fast,” he says. And build they do. Bamboo scaffolding isn’t just used for small jobs. It’s used for massive projects like the multi-million-dollar Chatham Gate development in Kowloon. That’s a two-year job. Elsewhere it hangs over the tiniest of back streets, clinging to walls and buildings, cantilevering out of windows and stairways, giving access to an army of workers reconditioning, upgrading and demolishing existing buildings.
According to Dr Francis So, the only man in Hong Kong with a doctorate in scaffolding technology, using the right bamboo is an art as well as a skill. “The best bamboo grows halfway between the river and the hill,” he explains. “Hill bamboo is stiff, but can have kinks in it and too many knuckles or knots. Riverbank bamboo is long and much straighter – but can be too flexible.” Of the thousands of species of bamboo that grow in the wild, only two are used, and mostly grown in China’s Guangxi province.
Read the full story in January's issue of the Red Bulletin.
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