Bamboo Culture
With over 1,000 disparate varieties growing in Asia, it?s no surprise that bamboo has been a staple resource and material for Asian cultures. In historical China, Japan, and Korea, bamboo was used for everything from construction to entertainment to food.
Starting with the last first, ancient Asian peoples began cultivating bamboo shoots as a food source since the beginnings of written history. Known as take no ko in Japan and Sun in Chinese, bamboo shoots are still found today in several dishes, notable Japanese style ramen and in Philippine labong. However, bamboo as an edible commodity goes back much further than just these dishes. Bamboo's low calorie to high vitamin content ratio and its hardiness made it an ideal starch for early agricultural communities.
Of course, with the rise of agriculture came the rise of permanent buildings and again, bamboo played a prominent role. Initially, large sections of bamboo trunks provided the central supports for walls and roofs. As newer, sturdier joining techniques made other, more tractable woods an alternative, bamboo found a new life as a scaffolding material allowing buildings to be become taller and more intricately designed. Bamboo is still used as scaffolding at small construction sites around Asian today, when standard scaffolding is not available or is to rigid to be of much use.
Alongside its use as a construction material came bamboo's use in tool making. There is, in a lot of Western movies and stories an image of an rice farmer walking across the fields with a bamboo pole slung over his shoulders, carrying water or rice from one place to another. And while these images might come from Hollywood, the inspiration stems from real tools made and used for centuries. Bamboo tools were not found only in the fields though. Rather, they were found in almost every aspect of daily life - from the kitchen, where bamboo whisks were used to make tea to artisans' homes, where bamboo helped shape clay and dye cloth.
Of particular note is the niche between tool and construction material that bamboo found in the ornamental gardens of many wealthy Chinese and Japanese families. In Japan, bamboo was used to make small fountains called shi shi wo doshi that would make a soft clack as a bamboo joint was filled with water and overturned itself. The noise was considered helpful in keeping wild animals away from peoples' homes. Meanwhile in China, bamboo was often planted directly in gardens as a symbol of strength and morality as well as being used as aqueducts to bring water to the various parts of the garden area.
As with cultures everywhere the rise of agriculture and architecture left people with increasing amounts of free time and here, too, bamboo was put to good use. An especially popular use was that of using one or more lengths of bamboo as a flute. All over Asia, people discovered that by combining different lengths of bamboo, or by drilling holes in a single length, sounds of different pitches could be produced. Even today, traditional instruments like the Japanese shaku-hachi can be found easily in Asian marketplaces.
There are, of course, far more bamboo tools and artifacts created by ancient peoples than we could begin to discuss in a single article. A visit to any anthropological museum detailing the history of any early Asian culture can give the interested reader hundreds more examples. Without bamboo, the history of early Asian cultures would be much different, and, as a result, so would the modern cultures that have taken their places. In other words, bamboo has literally helped shape the world in which we live.