Bamboo Weaving

Item name and level

Bamboo Weaving appears in Appendix 2, the district-level ICH list, of the third batch of district-level ICH material; the appendix states that the list contains 22 items in total.

The body of the third-batch notice issued by the General Office of the Lishui District People's Government states that malt sugar making, bamboo weaving, the New Village Shrimp Lantern Dance and others, six items in all, were assessed as representative district-level ICH items. Bamboo Weaving is one of the three examples given in that body. The figure of six in the notice body and the figure of 22 items in total in Appendix 2 rest on different documents; this entry reproduces both side by side without merging them into one count.

To be added

The cited sources record the project name only. Still to be added: the selection and treatment of bamboo, the steps of splitting strips and weaving, the shapes and uses of the objects made, the area and the number of generations through which the craft has passed, the bearers, the project number in the third-batch district list, and the guardian unit. Until further sources are found, this entry records no detail of the weaving process.

Scope of searching and two negative results

This is one of the entries with the thinnest sources in this library, so the scope of the searching is set out here so that it is not later mistaken for a search that was never made.

First, there is no gazetteer basis within the range examined. Volume 3 of the Kangxi Gazetteer of Lishui County, in the Treatise on Establishments, records objects under headings such as bridges and ferries, arches and tablets, temples and shrines, and records no bamboo-woven objects; the pieces collected in volume 11, the Treatise on Literature, include no work recording the art of bamboo. The Shunzhi, Qianlong, Wanli and Guangxi editions have an archive status in this library of catalogue-only or link-registered and have not been read volume by volume, so no claim is made that the old gazetteers contain no record; it is said only that none was found in the range examined.

Second, the bamboo-craft material elsewhere in this library must not be merged into this entry. The library holds several pieces recording the use of bamboo weaving in other projects: the Shiqiu Lujia Great Dragon is described as combining "bamboo weaving, paper cutting and carpentry in its body"; the traditional bamboo-weaving craft of Shangzhuang Village, Honglan, is said to have flourished; and the heads and tails of the Xisong horse lantern are "woven from bamboo strips into the shape of a lantern". These belong respectively to the making of dragon lanterns, to village bamboo craftsmen and to the making of horse lanterns. None of them is the "Bamboo Weaving" project of the third-batch district list, and none records its process or line of transmission, so none is introduced here. Should a source specific to the bamboo-weaving craft of Lishui be obtained in future, whether it is the same craft as any of the above must first be settled before it is used in this entry.

Third, the batch year has been filled in, the project number is still to be added. The batch of this entry was given in the front matter as the third district-level batch with the year of publication still to be verified; at the audit of 29 September 2026 it was filled in as 2017 from the document number of the notice relied on here, Li Zheng Fa [2017] No. 197, dated the twenty-second day of the eleventh month of 2017. The three entries of this library that likewise belong to the third district-level batch, namely Dagu, Malt Sugar and Mingjue Pickled Greens, were filled in at the same time, so the four are now consistent and the earlier reason for leaving the wording unchanged no longer applies. Appendix 2 gives no project number, so the project number remains to be added regardless.