Category Archives: Journal

An engraved bamboo dragonfly is a place card, favour and table decor in one handmade piece — light enough to ship to any venue in the world.

A bamboo dragonfly resting on a fingertip is a centre-of-gravity lesson disguised as a toy. Three hands-on activities for ages 5 to 15.

Most eco-friendly gifts get one polite smile. A balancing bamboo dragonfly gets picked up every day — what makes a sustainable gift actually last.

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. […]