When reporter Julie Blussé got on a plane to Hong Kong last November, she thought she was going to cover the aftermath of a disaster. The evening before, she’d seen the images on the news: seven huge residential towers in the Tai Po neighborhood, all part of a complex called Wang Fuk Court, completely engulfed in flames. By the time she landed, twenty hours had passed, and she figured she’d be documenting wreckage.
Instead, the towers were still burning. In a park across from the complex, she met a 73-year-old local named Ma Ming who had watched the fire start, the flames racing up all thirty-two floors so fast that firefighters lost control within twenty minutes. All seven burning towers had been wrapped in bamboo scaffolding for renovations, and the narrative already forming in the news was that the bamboo had fueled the blaze. But when Blussé asked Ma about it, he was adamant: it wasn’t the bamboo. It was the plastic netting draped around the bamboo that caught. With the buildings still burning behind him and nearly three hundred people unaccounted for, it seemed like a strange moment for a careful, almost lawyerly distinction between construction materials. That distinction would turn out to matter enormously.
If you’ve ever seen images of Hong Kong, you’ve seen its bamboo. Entire skyscrapers get fully encased in it, countless stalks enveloping glass office towers like a veil, and it’s as much a part of the city’s identity as its ferries, dim sum restaurants, and neon signs. Even the little plastic miniatures of Hong Kong buildings sold in tourist shops come with bamboo scaffolding attached.
You won’t see anywhere near this much bamboo in the rest of China, where metal replaced it decades ago and most of the knowledge required to build with it has disappeared. In 2022, the mainland banned it outright for housing and municipal projects. 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. Perhaps no city on earth more proudly displays its own upkeep.
There are good reasons the tradition survived here. Hong Kong has little flat land, so the city is extraordinarily dense, its streets narrow and its alleys narrower, and construction in those spaces requires constant adaptation. Bamboo is far lighter than steel, lighter even than wood — it’s technically a grass — so it can be carried and assembled by hand, and cut down to suit whatever space it needs to fit. It doesn’t have to be anchored to the ground, either. A typical bamboo platform often starts at the 65th floor of an office building, shooting straight out of a window with nothing but air underneath. From there two scaffolders working alone can build it out in any shape or direction without ever touching the street below. As one bamboo master put it: wherever a person fits, a bamboo scaffold fits.
Metal scaffolding, by contrast, usually has to be built from the ground up, out of fixed tube lengths, clamps, and standardized parts. On a flat, open site it’s fast and cheap. On a curved facade on a Hong Kong hillside, it becomes slow and expensive, which is why bamboo still accounts for roughly eighty percent of all scaffolding in the city, and why even Hong Kong’s most daring architecture, including an irregularly shaped Zaha Hadid building, went up behind bamboo.
Blussé watched the craft in action in a tiny alley in Prince Edward, where a third-generation scaffolder named Timmy So and his father had come to build a platform reaching an air conditioning unit on the 14th floor, probably the single most common job scaffolders do in a city whose AC units sit crammed into hard-to-reach mazes of pipes and fixtures. Their cart was custom-built by Timmy’s father to slot exactly inside a standard Hong Kong elevator. Strapped into a harness, Timmy stepped out of a window 45 meters up, drilled brackets into the wall, and lashed together a small enclosure that some in the industry call a bird cage while his father handed him poles one at a time, each handoff confirmed by a twist of the bamboo so that nothing ever dropped. Ninety minutes later, the cage was finished, just another piece of bamboo scaffolding floating above one of the city’s busiest neighborhoods, and the alley had gone about its business the whole time. But just because bamboo is easy to work with doesn’t mean it’s easy to learn. Becoming a master takes years of apprenticeship, and the knowledge has been passed down father to son, job by job. Twelve years in, Timmy still calls his father Sifu. Master.
On the second day of the fire, with the towers still not fully under control, bamboo master Timmy was called to an emergency meeting at Hong Kong’s Development Bureau. On the table was an agenda titled Roadmap on Adoption of Scaffolding: a timetable for the complete phase-out of bamboo at every construction site in Hong Kong. The official rationale was straightforward, since metal is more fire-resistant than bamboo, and the government had already begun pushing contractors toward metal months earlier, under pressure from Beijing. Timmy spoke up against the ban, but only briefly. It was already clear that more than a hundred people had died, and resistance felt both pointless and almost inappropriate.
Then something unexpected happened: the public pushed back. People began posting videos of themselves trying, and failing, to set bamboo alight, pointing out that it doesn’t ignite until at least 260 degrees Celsius. Instagram accounts ran posts declaring that bamboo is innocent. At a makeshift memorial near the site, right next to notes of grief for the victims, were messages reading: don’t blame the bamboo. The scaffolding had burned along with everything else. but questions remained as to whether it had also caused the fire to spread, and to many Hong Kongers, the rushed ban looked like scapegoating. In the fire, 168 people died and thousands lost their homes in the fire. Hong Kongers wanted answers, but blaming bamboo looked like a way for the government to declare the case closed instead of finding the real culprit.
The bamboo ban also fits a pattern Hong Kongers have come to recognize since the city was handed back to China in 1997 with a promise of one country, two systems. That arrangement has largely collapsed: since 2021, the city’s government has consisted only of Beijing-approved patriots, and residents have watched the things that made Hong Kong distinct get taken down or demolished, including historic buildings and the city’s iconic neon signs, also in the name of safety.
Under the National Security Law, criticizing the government is a potential crime. After the fire, a student was arrested for calling for an independent investigation and a commentator in his seventies was arrested for criticizing the government’s response. But so far, no one has been punished for defending bamboo, which has made talk of bamboo a kind of coded speech, a way of saying the things that can’t be said out loud.
More than half a year after the fire, no one is blaming the bamboo anymore, including the Hong Kong government. Investigations have instead zeroed in on other highly flammable materials, the styrofoam boards covering the windows and the netting around the scaffolding, just as Ma Ming said on day one. It has also emerged that no safety check ever flagged those materials even though residents explicitly complained about them. Seven people connected to the renovation companies have been charged, but no one from the government has been held accountable, and the bamboo phase-out is moving forward anyway. Classes for new bamboo scaffolders have been cancelled, and the city’s roughly 3,500 bamboo workers are being incentivized to retrain on metal. Timmy, who is 38, assumed he had decades of work ahead of him and a craft to pass on. He still doubts bamboo can ever be banned completely, not as long as there’s an air conditioning unit in a hard-to-reach spot, in a narrow alley, between two oddly shaped buildings, 65 stories up.
Leave a Reply