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Bamboo

Bamboo plays an important part in people's lives in SW China and Yunnan is no exception. In fact, because of its great topographic variations, Yunnan provides habitats for an incredibly diverse range of bamboo varieties. The plant grows everywhere, from the steamy tropical rainforests of Xishuangbanna to over 3000m altitude on the Cang Shan mountains above Dali. Bamboo is a member of the true grass family Poaceae, and is famous for its extremely fast growth rate - up to 1.2 metres per day! In fact, the higher it grows, the faster it rockets skyward! This means it can outgrow, and successfully compete with, just about every other tree in the forest. It also flowers infrequently (sometimes every several decades) and abundantly, a reproductive mechanism called predator satiation which supposedly means that enough of its fruit/seeds will avoid consumption by birds and animals and survive to germination.

Bamboo has an almost infinite number of uses, from ancient writing medium (bamboo slips) to hand-made paper to the casing for state-of-the-art eco-friendly laptop computers; from food to construction material; from medicine (bamboo juice can treat coughs) to implement of torture. This latter example makes use of bamboo's fast growing properties - imagine tying an enemy down over a newly sprouted bamboo shoot and waiting to see what happens! In Chinese culture, bamboo is known as one of the Four Noble Ones, mei lan zhu ju - plum blossom, orchid, bamboo, and chrysanthemum - which represent the four seasons. In Simao bamboo tubes are employed as a packaging for some teas, and the bamboo shoot husks are used to wrap pressed cakes of Pu'er tea.

               
This towering bamboo forest (left) started off not-so-long-ago as a few bamboo shoots, sprouting through the forest floor (centre) in June or July. The smaller varieties of bamboo shoot (right) are used in cooking.

Bamboo, and bamboo shoots are used in cooking, especially by the minority nationality peoples (Dai and Hani) of southern Yunnan. Delicately flavoured strips of bamboo shoot are usually pickled or used in dishes such as kao sunzi (grilled bamboo) or suansun zhuyu (sour bamboo fish soup). Another less appetizing dish is made from fried bamboo grubs, the larvae of an insect which lays its eggs in the hollow bamboo trunks. The most famous use of bamboo is in the Dai nationality street food zhutong fan, slightly sweet sticky rice steamed and barbequed in a thin bamboo tube. See the Yunnan Eighteen Oddities page for more details.

       
Zhutong fan for sale on the streets of Simao. The fragrant rice is held within the thin inner membrane of the bamboo, giving the rice a delicious bamboo flavour.

Bamboo grubs for sale in a Simao market.

       
Bamboo is also used in many cooking utensils, including mortars for crushing spices or other ingredients. We use this big mortar (left) for making papaya salads. It was made personally for Lesley on one of her countryside school visits. Many shops in Simao sell chong mixian (pounded rice noodles), prepared in these enormous bamboo tube mortars (right).

Bamboo is a very useful construction material - it's light, flexible, segmented, strong, hollow, it floats, is easily worked, and grows in profusion out in the forest. Apparently bamboo has a higher tensile strength than steel! It's politically correct too - the ultimate renewable wood source! Harvesting bamboo is easy - just pack your machete and head off into the jungle. Then stride back home and get sawing, splitting, weaving and chopping ... and hey, presto - you've got a bamboo raft fit to escape from any desert island!

       
Harvesting bamboo for construction purposes at a village near Simao.
With experience it's possible to detect the faint colour changes or bends which can indicate the presence of bamboo grubs.

A rattan basket weaver at work in Zhentai, Zhenyuan County, surrounded by his raw materials.

       
Making chopsticks by hand. Smoking a bamboo tube water pipe, another of the Yunnan Eighteen Oddities.

       
Rattan (woven bamboo) products are cheap and readily available in Yunnan. Here are a couple of scenes from Dali's weekly market.

The hollow stems of the bamboo make an ideal home for a number of insects, but also one of the world's smallest mammals. The Bamboo Bat is the size of a bumblebee - whole families of 20+ bats can roost inside one segment of bamboo stem. Below are some of the many more miscellaneous (human) uses for bamboo...

           
Scaffolding in Simao (left) and a cormorant fisherman's boat/raft (right) on the banks of the Li River, Guilin.

       
Tobacco tower ladder, Da Lu Shan (left); Rattan chicken basket, Simao (centre); Bamboo baby-carrier, Simao (right).

   
Floating bamboo-pole bridge near Gu Cheng, Zhenyuan County (left); Birdcage and clothes-peg hanger, Simao (right).

       
Another bamboo-pole bridge, Man Xie Ba, near Simao (left); ornamental bamboo in a Simao park (right).

Finally, bamboo is of course panda food! But you have to be wary when your sole food source has a nasty habit of flowering, then completely dying out, every few decades! It's a hard life, being a panda (unless you're safely ensconced in an enclosure at the Chengdu Panda Breeding Centre).