Bamboo Is Innocent

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1:28Julie is a China correspondent for the Dutch newspaper De Volkskrant. I'd seen the images on the news the evening before. Seven huge residential towers in the Tai Po neighborhood of Hong Kong, completely engulfed in flames. By the time I landed, 20 hours had passed. I figured the fire would be out and I'd be documenting the wreckage, talking to survivors. But that's not what she found. When I got there, the buildings, all part of this complex called Wang Fuk Court, were still burning. Not smoldering, but burning. Seven towers, 32 stories each, and still on fire. Still billowing smoke. There's, I guess there's one or two towers that are completely blackened, and then there's a few that are just filled with smoke.

2:18It's kind of insane. And every so often, And you'd hear it before you saw it. These explosions or banging sounds coming from somewhere deep inside the towers. I was talking about it with my friend Jones. She was helping me translate from Cantonese that day. They suspect that it is a bathroom or kitchen. Maybe. Or maybe guests. And then the friend is quite serious. Getting serious right now. Julie was standing in a park just across the way from the burning complex. and all around her were people from the neighborhood. There was this 73-year-old guy called Ma Ming, a local, who'd been at the park when the fire broke out the day before.

3:01He'd seen it start. He told me the flames just raced up those 32 floors. And within 20 minutes, the firefighters had completely lost control.

3:15And I asked him, because this was already the narrative that was forming in the news, I'd read it on my phone on the way to the airport that morning. I asked him, was it the bamboo? The eight towers at Taipo had been undergoing renovation, and all seven that were on fire were wrapped from top to bottom in bamboo scaffolding. In the immediate wake of the inferno, bamboo was the most obvious culprit. Breaking news from Hong Kong, where a massive fire has engulfed a housing complex. Bamboo scaffolding fixed on the outside of the towers is fueling the blaze. The fire spread quickly due to bamboo scaffolding and highly flammable.

3:56The housing complex was covered in scaffolding made from bamboo, which appears to have helped the fire spread. Combustible scaffolding should be prohibited. I mean, we shouldn't use bamboo. This is an unnecessary risk for a catastrophic fire. But Ma was adamant in his answer. He said, no, it wasn't because of the bamboo that the fire spread so quickly.

4:26He insisted it was because of the plastic netting that had been draped around the bamboo. That's what caught.

4:39For someone who isn't from Hong Kong, our discussion at that moment might have appeared strange, Maybe even insensitive. The buildings were still burning behind us. Nearly 300 people were still unaccounted for. And here we were distinguishing between construction materials. Only that distinction, bamboo versus netting, would turn out to matter enormously. Because bamboo scaffolding is a tradition that has long helped set this city apart from the Chinese mainland. But now the fire at Wong Fook Court might just spell the end of bamboo scaffolding in Hong Kong. If you've ever seen any images of Hong Kong, you've seen its bamboo.

5:19It's just as iconic as Hong Kong's ferries, dim sum restaurants, skyscrapers, and neon signs. The omnipresent use of bamboo scaffolding for construction or renovation jobs. In Hong Kong, entire skyscrapers are often fully encased in bamboo scaffolding. On any given day, countless stalks of bamboo cover dozens of glass office buildings from top to bottom. enveloping the city's skyline like a veil. It's really hard to overstate how much bamboo is part of Hong Kong's image and identity. In tourist shops, I even found these little plastic miniatures of Hong Kong buildings, and they all included bamboo scaffolding.

6:01And for those who haven't had the chance to go to Hong Kong, there's always this vital action scene in Rush Hour 2 with Jackie Chan and Chris Tucker.

6:14The scene hinges on a stunt in which Chan and Tucker maneuver across the bamboo scaffolding on the side of a building. And they end up hanging from this one really tall piece of bamboo, which just bends and bends and bends. Don't worry. Chinese bamboo is very strong. Ah! You shoot me! I'm sure! Until finally, it breaks. Ah! Ah! Because, you know, it's a comedy. You won't see anywhere near this much bamboo in the rest of China. Today, on China's mainland, including where I live in Beijing, scaffolding is made out of metal, not bamboo. Other places in China might have their own vernacular building styles, but only in Hong Kong is the site of construction and maintenance itself part of the vernacular identity.

7:05Perhaps no city on Earth more proudly displays its own upkeep. Therefore, I say the bamboo scaffold is just like grow together with Hong Kong. This is Lo, an engineer with over 30 years of experience in Hong Kong's construction industry. He asked me not to use his full name. And Lo thinks the tradition of bamboo scaffolding hasn't survived here simply by accident. Hong Kong, he says, was by necessity built with bamboo. Hong Kong is a place where we don't have much flat land. It's quite a lot of mountain hills, and you can see Hong Kong Island. Most of the ground is sloping. With a premium on usable land, Hong Kong is extraordinarily dense.

7:51Its streets are narrow, its alleys narrower. Construction and repair work in these spaces is notoriously tricky, requiring constant adaptation. Therefore, we try to use some... What can I describe? Some very flexible and easy-to-mobilize solution for the problem. This is all the benefit of bamboo scaffold. Bamboo is far lighter than steel. It's even lighter than wood. It's actually a grass, so it can be easily carried and assembled by hand. And there's no standard size. You can quickly cut it down to suit whatever space it needs to fit. The result is that this ancient construction material is still useful, maybe even perfect, for modern, crowded Hong Kong.

8:39There's a line from a bamboo scaffolding master that sums it up perfectly. Wherever a person fits, a bamboo scaffold fits. And for something as straight as bamboo, you'd be surprised how many shapes can be made out of it. Walk around Hong Kong and you'll see lopsided bamboo pyramids surrounding movie marquees and long bamboo tendrils snaking around windows. And then there's this. Bamboo scaffolding doesn't need to be anchored to the ground or descend from the roof of a structure with a crane. Instead, the 65th floor of an office building is often the starting place for a typical bamboo platform.

9:16Most of the time, it just shoots straight out of the window with nothing but air underneath it. From there, two scaffolders working alone can quickly build the bamboo out in any shape and direction that's required for the job, all without ever for a second touching the ground or blocking traffic. Heavy metal scaffolding, by contrast, usually needs to be built from the ground up. It comes in fixed tube lengths and requires clamps, platforms, and standardized components. On a flat surface in an open space, it's fast and it's cheap. But in a narrow alley, on a curved facade, on the side of a 64-story tower on a Hong Kong hillside, steel becomes slow and expensive.

9:58And bamboo scaffolding isn't just practical for patching up a building or making repairs. It's often the way skyscrapers are constructed in Hong Kong. Hong Kong is famous for its daring and surreal architecture. And Lo believes that's because bamboo has made it easier for construction firms here to pursue ambitious designs more often. He says bamboo scaffolding is so easy to manipulate that it can be molded alongside any shape an architect requires. Just like a tailor, because every time the angle of the scaffold perfectly matches the building shape. And if no choice, we have to use metal scaffold, then maybe we need to use one or two months or more time for preparations.

10:43because everything is healthy by three or four times or more. Bamboo scaffolders usually require far less prep. Instead, most of the time, they just show up, eyeball the situation, and get to work. Hey, good morning. Good morning. Almost in place. On a recent hot, humid day in Hong Kong, I watched one such scene play out from a tiny alley in the Prince Edward neighborhood, next to two dim sum restaurants. the jade and the pearl. The alley couldn't have been more than three meters wide, flanked on both sides by tall residential buildings. Two bamboo scaffolders, Timmy So and his father, Sochi Fai, were gathering materials from their truck.

11:26Timmy briefed me on the job. So that one will be the building we're working at, the orange-colored one. But we can walk around to see all the pipes, where they are. And we're working at the 14th floor. The assignment that day was to build a bamboo balcony that could reach an air conditioning unit on the side of one of the buildings. This is probably the single most common job scaffolders are asked to do here. Modern Hong Kong is nothing without its air conditioning. But Hong Kong's AC units are not the dinky one-off window units that you see in a lot of American apartments. They're usually located away from windows in hard-to-reach places, crammed alongside a complicated maze of pipes and fixtures for plumbing, electricity, internet, everything.

12:12And this building was no different. But Timmy assured me they'd make quick work of it. You already came here before, or is that what's happening now? No, it's happening now. This is the first time I've been here. All their equipment seemed custom-made for Hong Kong. They had this tiny cart designed to slot exactly inside a standard Hong Kong elevator, with just enough space on the side for two scaffolders. And on top of it, all their gear, alongside bundles of bamboo. Ooh, it fits perfectly. Yes, everything is designed by itself, so it fits most of the environment in Hong Kong. You just asked someone to make it precisely according to your own dimensions.

12:56Actually, my father made it by himself, so it's all unique design. The elevator only went to the 13th floor. They carried their supplies to the next floor themselves. No problem. They picked up the bamboo poles and walked up the stairs as if they weighed nothing. Which, compared to steel, they basically do. In which surely counts as one of the great disappointments of my life, safety regulations prohibited me from going out onto the scaffolding with them. So I went back down to gawk at them from the alley. We stayed in touch by walkie-talkie. Let me see if I can... Oh, maybe you need... Oh, yeah, there you are.

13:36I watched as Timmy, strapped into a harness, stepped out of a tiny window into the air and balanced himself on a small length of pipe, about 45 meters above me. He drilled some metal brackets into the wall, and then his father started handing him bamboo poles through the window, one by one. He laid them across the brackets, tied them up, and built a little platform for himself to stand on. The poles were light enough that he could just grab and hold them with one hand. Not exactly something you could do with steel.

14:21So that's how we communicate, and we never drop anything. Within a few minutes, Timmy was already well on his way to making what some in the industry call a birdcage, a sort of safe enclosure for a repairman to work in. Later, Timmy would tell me this was a tougher job than he thought, lots of unexpected angles and distances. But from where I was standing, you wouldn't know it. His father just kept handing him the bamboo poles at a steady rate. there's number six, and his father's already extending the seventh one while he's lashing the six into place. Probably takes no longer than ten seconds to connect them.

15:04There's some passers-by who are wondering what we're so fascinated by. As I watched Timmy and his father build out the birdcage, the alley continued to go about its business. Some cleaners came and went, An employee from one of the dim sum restaurants took out some trash. Another was moving around styrofoam boxes. And maybe that was the best part. The way the bamboo let everyone else's lives just go on. Steel scaffolding for this job would have likely had to start from the ground floor, blocking half of this narrow alley. But this scaffold never got anywhere near the ground. It stayed well out of the way of the hustle and bustle below.

15:4490 minutes later, the cage was finished. Just another piece of bamboo scaffolding floating above one of the city's busiest neighborhoods. Scenes like this are so commonplace that residents barely notice. But look up from nearly any street corner, and more likely than not, you can see bamboo scaffolders making the nearly impossible look easy. It's why bamboo still accounts for roughly 80 % of all scaffolding in Hong Kong. But just because bamboo is easy to work with doesn't mean it's easy to learn. That's bamboo's one honest disadvantage compared to metal. A bamboo master requires years of apprenticeship.

16:23The craft has been passed down father to son, job by job. I think the easiest way to explain is like a teacher. But in old days, when they learn from teacher, they live together. They even help to cook. They help to wash. So everything. Timmy told me he's a third-generation scaffolder. His family's company builds bamboo scaffolding all around town. He's also the assistant head of a builder's association. He said the work still challenges him, 12 years into the job, working together with his dad. And at work, I'll call him Sifu. Master. Master, yes. Are you a master already? Yes, I'm also a master.

17:08But on the Chinese mainland, where bamboo scaffolding was never as popular, this knowledge has almost entirely disappeared. It was mostly replaced by metal decades ago. And in 2022, it was banned nationwide for all housing and municipal engineering. Hong Kong is one of the last places on Earth where bamboo scaffolding survives as a living practice, not as a heritage performance, but as the actual way buildings get built. But then came the fire, and the world watched as the towers in Taipo burned, covered in bamboo. The search continues for survivors, and those are horrifying pictures. And police say there are still people trapped inside the building.

17:53There are glimmers of torchlights in some floors. And the bamboo scaffolding on one of the 31-story tower blocks looks to have caught fire and is causing the flames to spread. Being a Hong Konger, it's one of the most horrific things that I have ever... Words can't even describe it. When we come back, the possible end of bamboo scaffolding and what it means for Hong Kong.

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21:32We're back with reporter Julie Blusset. The same day I flew in from Beijing to cover the fire at Wang Fuk court, Timmy So was called in for an emergency meeting at Hong Kong's Development Bureau. It had only been one day since the start of the fire. And I was quite shocked that it comes so fast because the fire is not under control yet. It's just still at the second day of the fire. And it's a little bit shocked. A few months before, Hong Kong's government, under pressure from Beijing, had already begun making local construction companies increase their use of metal scaffolding. The government had cited safety concerns.

22:16although some suspected it was a way for Beijing to bring in more mainland construction workers who are trained on metal. So going into the meeting, Timmy was bracing himself. And once I arrived at the meeting place, there is an agenda on the table, and the agenda title is Roadmap on Adoption of Scaffolding. It was a timetable drafted by the Development Bureau for the complete phase-out of bamboo scaffolding at all construction sites in Hong Kong. The official rationale was straightforward. Metal scaffolding is more fire-resistant than bamboo. The Bureau asked the Hong Kong construction industry to agree to the accelerated phase-out of bamboo.

23:02It was time, they said, to move on. Timmy still spoke up. He resisted the ban, but only briefly. It was already clear that more than 100 people had died in the fire. And so, he says, resistance felt both pointless and almost inappropriate. So everyone, they forgot how bamboo scaffolding builds Hong Kong. And at that time, I was very disappointed, very hopeless. Shortly after that, the phase-out was made public by the Hong Kong government. Bamboo scaffolding would be replaced with metal. Hong Kong's roughly 3 ,500 bamboo scaffolders would be incentivized to retrain to work with steel. But almost immediately, something unexpected happened.

23:55The public pushed back. People began posting videos online trying and failing to set bamboo alight. Oh.

24:10Bamboo has a very high ignition point of at least 260 degrees Celsius, and it is also very difficult to burn. No one was saying that the bamboo scaffolding hadn't caught fire along with everything else in Taipo. It had. The question was whether the scaffolding was what caused the fire to spread. Bamboo's defenders said no, the bamboo only burned after the flames had already spread. Not before. It wasn't the reason the fire got so bad. Instagram accounts ran posts claiming, Bamboo is innocent. And at a makeshift memorial that sprung up near the site of the fire, right next to notes expressing grief for the victims, I saw messages saying, Don't blame the bamboo.

24:55This is actually one of the things that got me so interested in this story in the first place. Like, why did Hong Kongers rush to defend bamboo so fiercely? I put the question to Lo, the Hong Kong engineer. I told him about Ma Meng, the man who defended the bamboo, even as the towers were still burning in front of us. People were so adamant about it, like, no, it's not the bamboo. When the fire is even still happening... The bamboo is still burning at the same time. Why do the Hong Kong people care so much? Why? Why people respond like that?

25:35Can I say the people you met, they're smart. They're smart. They're smart. Yeah, because we lived with bamboo for so many years, right? From our child age, we see everywhere it's bamboo. We love it. The tradition of bamboo scaffolding. That still means something to Hong Kongers. But also, they weren't just defending a construction material for the sake of convention. 168 people died in this fire and thousands lost their homes. People were sad and upset. And Lo stressed to me how eager he and others were to find out what really went wrong. But instead, it felt like the government was using bamboo as a scapegoat, a way to declare the case closed, instead of looking for the real culprit.