Twenty-five years ago, on a spring morning at the base of Tây Phương Pagoda, Nguyễn Thị Xoan finished the first bamboo dragonfly that balanced properly on the tip of a chopstick. It had taken her months of trying. A small tourist picked it up, laughed, bought it for a handful of đồng, and walked off […]
The bamboo dragonfly village of Thạch Xá, forty kilometres west of Hanoi — Xứ Đoài craft country, Tây Phương Pagoda above, and the ten workshops keeping the trade alive.
A morning at Liên Xoan, the oldest bamboo dragonfly workshop in Thạch Xá — twenty years, twenty steps, and the hardest bend being the beak.
A bamboo dragonfly that has spent twenty minutes at the bench and a week drying in the village of Thạch Xá now faces one last test: a journey that may cover eight thousand kilometres, three customs regimes, and four pairs of hands before reaching the shelf it was meant for. Most arrive intact. A few […]
You see Tây Phương before you reach it. The pagoda sits on a low hill — Câu Lâu, an unusual shape for the flat countryside around it — and the three layered roofs of its wooden halls emerge from the trees a kilometre or two down the road. It is one of the oldest surviving […]
The road west out of Hanoi runs straight for about thirty kilometres, past paddy fields and the low ridge of the Ba Vì mountains, until the land flattens and the turn-off for Tây Phương appears on the right. Forty kilometres from the Old Quarter, ninety minutes by car, Thạch Xá is near enough for a […]
A bamboo dragonfly that has travelled a long way sometimes arrives slightly out of tune. It leans forward. It tips to one side. It no longer rests, perfectly still, on a fingertip. This is not a defect. It is a small, fixable consequence of a handmade object made in one climate and delivered to another. […]
A bamboo dragonfly does not ask for much. A flat surface the width of a fingertip, a still room, and whatever light is already in the space. It will sit there, beak forward, wings level, for as long as the air is calm. The question most new owners have, after the first five minutes of […]
A dragonfly on a shelf is already a gift. A dragonfly with a name painted on its wing is something else — a gift that holds the giver, the moment, and the person it was meant for, all at once. For fifteen or so additional minutes at the atelier, Nguyễn Thị Xoan will pick up […]
At the atelier, the question comes up often. “Painted, or plain?” A customer stands in front of two shelves — one of dragonflies stripped back to the pale gold of raw bamboo, the other of pieces painted in the folk reds and indigos the village is known for — and is trying to decide which […]