Nature's Miracle Material
<TABLE cellSpacing=0 cellPadding=0 width=260 align=left border=0><TBODY><TR><TD width=250>
The world has found almost endless uses for bamboo—including musical instruments. <HR></TD><TD width=10>
</TD></TR></TBODY></TABLE><!--[credit should be given to Carol Bain and Ed Coll]-->
The Chinese in particular have put it to a wide variety of uses. In the Chinese countryside, a person's life, from cradle to grave, can be measured with bamboo. Until recently, doctors often cut umbilical cords with a finely sharpened bamboo knife. Today, Chinese parents rock infants in bamboo cradles, and children play with bamboo toys or blow bamboo flutes. As adults, peasants shape the ground with bamboo tools and, in the spring, may enjoy a feast of bamboo shoots. When one's journey is over, relatives carry the deceased to the grave on a bamboo bier.
"Bamboo can do so much for farmers' daily needs, and all they need to make it work for them is a knife or a machete," says Dr. Jules Janssen, a Dutch civil engineer who has researched bamboo for a quarter century and also lent his expertise to NOVA for "China Bridge."
A Striking Versatility
<HR>Bamboo is many things to many millions of people. Its tensile strength has been compared to steel, and larger varieties have the density of a hardwood. Yet early in their lives, other varieties serve as food for people and certain animals. The plant's colors run from white to a glossy black, though most common varieties are green. Some types grow only an inch or so high; others tower to heights of 120 feet with stalks a foot in diameter.
<TABLE cellSpacing=0 cellPadding=0 width=260 align=right border=0><TBODY><TR><TD width=10>
</TD><TD width=250>
[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, Geneva]The bamboo flute's distinctive sound has been heard all over the world.[/FONT] <HR></TD></TR></TBODY></TABLE><!--[credit should be given to Carol Bain and Ed Coll]-->
Its diversity of attributes has led to bamboo's diversity of uses. "It sounds like a joke, but the list of things bamboo is not used for is shorter than the list of things it is used for," says Janssen, who then offers an almost stream-of-consciousness list of bamboo products. "It's used for firewood, fences for the cattle, heating fuel, a house's walls and roof. Out of it you can make boats, rafts, furniture, veneer, parquet flooring, paper. And then there's the bamboo flute, which you can find practically everywhere in the world." He pauses and then asks, "Is that enough?"
Janssen's point is well-made. The Environmental Bamboo Foundation has printed a bamboo alphabet that lists numerous bamboo uses under each letter. The "A" entry includes the words aphrodisiac, acupuncture needles, awnings, and more; "B" lists bagpipes, books, and brooms; the sole "E" entry is egg cups. Even the rarest initial letters, such as "V" (valiha, a musical instrument from Madagascar), "X" (xylophones), and "Z" (zithers), are covered by bamboo. The only letter that lacks an entry is "Q," and one expects it has more to do with our linguistic limitations than the shortcomings of bamboo.
<TABLE cellSpacing=0 cellPadding=0 width=220 align=left border=0><TBODY><TR><TD width=210>
[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, Geneva]The speed of bamboo growth puts other plants to shame.[/FONT] <HR></TD><TD width=10>
</TD></TR></TBODY></TABLE>
About 1,000 species of bamboo grow throughout the world. Actually a grass, the plant exists naturally on every continent except Antarctica. It has found a niche for itself in sea-level tropics and on 13,000-foot mountain slopes. One of bamboo's less obvious gifts is its root system, which is more highly developed than it is in most other plants and provides strong protection against riverbank erosion, Janssen notes.
With a wide range of colors, shapes, and sizes, the various bamboo species share just one common characteristic: the woody and often strong stalk, called a culm. What makes the culm so extraordinary is its combination of lightness and strength.
<TABLE cellSpacing=0 cellPadding=0 width=260 align=right border=0><TBODY><TR><TD width=250>
[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, Geneva]People have used bamboo for every part of a house, including the roof of this building.[/FONT] <HR></TD></TR></TBODY></TABLE>
Nature's Miracle Material
Bamboo can outgrow any other plant in the world. It is as if its entire lifespan is one enormous growth spurt. To see for himself how fast bamboo can grow, Janssen once marked a stalk while visiting a bamboo plantation. He remembers taking a walk around the plantation and returning again to the marked stalk. "In two hours, it had grown above the mark by a few centimeters," he says. A Japanese scientist once measured what is believed to be the fastest growth rate for any bamboo. A culm of ma-dake, Japan's most common bamboo, grew nearly four feet in one 24-hour day.
<TABLE cellSpacing=0 cellPadding=0 width=260 align=left border=0><TBODY><TR><TD width=250>
[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, Geneva]China's Anlan Bridge was held up by bamboo cables for centuries.[/FONT] <HR></TD><TD width=10>
</TD></TR></TBODY></TABLE>
Bamboo Bridges
<HR>Some of the earliest of all suspension bridges were ones constructed with cables woven from bamboo strips. Throughout their long history, the Chinese have built suspension bridges to span fast-flowing rivers and deep ravines, and the Incas also designed hanging bamboo bridges as marvelous as those of the Chinese, Janssen notes.
In "China Bridge," a team of experts brought together by NOVA constructed a suspension bridge using bamboo cables to hang the draping structure. Cabled bamboo strips once held up the great Anlan bridge on the Min River, which historians consider one of the engineering marvels of the ancient world. The bridge hung from bamboo cables from roughly the third century until 1975, when steel cables replaced the bamboo.
<TABLE cellSpacing=0 cellPadding=0 width=260 align=right border=0><TBODY><TR><TD width=10>
</TD><TD width=250>
[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, Geneva]The suspension bridge built by NOVA's experts featured bamboo cables and a bamboo walkway.[/FONT] <HR></TD></TR></TBODY></TABLE>
The strength of this amazing grass comes from bundles of fibers running the length of the culm and held together by the plant's pith. Rope-makers cut the bamboo into thin strips, weave them together into a rope, and then braid several of these ropes together into a thick and extremely strong cable. Marco Polo, the 13th-century Italian visitor to China, described how fishermen used these extremely tough ropes to tow boats:
From Paper to Prescriptions
<HR>Bamboo has played a less spectacular but perhaps an even more important role in China's development of writing and printing. Long before the Chinese invented paper in the second century B.C., they scratched characters onto slips of green bamboo, and they made books by stringing these slips together with silk strands or sinew. Archeologists recently unearthed one such bundle of bamboo paper, containing over 300 slips, in a 2nd-century B.C. Han Dynasty tomb.
Chinese art and literature abounds with images of and references to bamboo. This humble grass often appears as a symbol of resistance to hardship, because one of the features of many bamboo varieties is that they remain green year round.
<TABLE cellSpacing=0 cellPadding=0 width=260 align=left border=0><TBODY><TR><TD width=250>
[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, Geneva]Most varieties of bamboo stay green all year long.[/FONT] <HR></TD><TD width=10>
</TD></TR></TBODY></TABLE>
Like other woods, the material also can be reduced to paper, and in India, it's still one of the most popular woods for paper-making. The amount of paper one can squeeze from an acre of bamboo typically cannot match the wood available from, say, an acre of pine, but bamboo has its own edge. A culm reaches full growth in a few months and can be harvested in a few years. A pine tree may need two decades to mature.
The versatile grass also has found its way into China's extensive herbal medicinal chest. Doctors use the rhizome of the black bamboo, mixed with other plants, to treat kidney ailments, and they prescribe the plant's secretion, called tabasheer, for coughs and asthma. Tabasheer also serves as a cooling tonic and even an aphrodisiac in Indian, Chinese, and other Asian cultures.
Chinese consider bamboo shoots a delicacy, in part because of the crispness of even the tenderest of shoots. Farmers walk barefoot on the ground to feel for the hard sprouts. To grow softer sprouts, they place a mound of earth on top of the emerging plant so it never encounters light. As desirable as the heart of an artichoke to Westerners, the plant's innermost growing tip is one of the delicacies often reserved for the Chinese market.
<TABLE cellSpacing=0 cellPadding=0 width=260 align=left border=0><TBODY><TR><TD width=250>
The world has found almost endless uses for bamboo—including musical instruments. <HR></TD><TD width=10>
</TD></TR></TBODY></TABLE><!--[credit should be given to Carol Bain and Ed Coll]-->
The Chinese in particular have put it to a wide variety of uses. In the Chinese countryside, a person's life, from cradle to grave, can be measured with bamboo. Until recently, doctors often cut umbilical cords with a finely sharpened bamboo knife. Today, Chinese parents rock infants in bamboo cradles, and children play with bamboo toys or blow bamboo flutes. As adults, peasants shape the ground with bamboo tools and, in the spring, may enjoy a feast of bamboo shoots. When one's journey is over, relatives carry the deceased to the grave on a bamboo bier.
"Bamboo can do so much for farmers' daily needs, and all they need to make it work for them is a knife or a machete," says Dr. Jules Janssen, a Dutch civil engineer who has researched bamboo for a quarter century and also lent his expertise to NOVA for "China Bridge."
A Striking Versatility
<HR>Bamboo is many things to many millions of people. Its tensile strength has been compared to steel, and larger varieties have the density of a hardwood. Yet early in their lives, other varieties serve as food for people and certain animals. The plant's colors run from white to a glossy black, though most common varieties are green. Some types grow only an inch or so high; others tower to heights of 120 feet with stalks a foot in diameter.
<TABLE cellSpacing=0 cellPadding=0 width=260 align=right border=0><TBODY><TR><TD width=10>
</TD><TD width=250>
[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, Geneva]The bamboo flute's distinctive sound has been heard all over the world.[/FONT] <HR></TD></TR></TBODY></TABLE><!--[credit should be given to Carol Bain and Ed Coll]-->
Its diversity of attributes has led to bamboo's diversity of uses. "It sounds like a joke, but the list of things bamboo is not used for is shorter than the list of things it is used for," says Janssen, who then offers an almost stream-of-consciousness list of bamboo products. "It's used for firewood, fences for the cattle, heating fuel, a house's walls and roof. Out of it you can make boats, rafts, furniture, veneer, parquet flooring, paper. And then there's the bamboo flute, which you can find practically everywhere in the world." He pauses and then asks, "Is that enough?"
Janssen's point is well-made. The Environmental Bamboo Foundation has printed a bamboo alphabet that lists numerous bamboo uses under each letter. The "A" entry includes the words aphrodisiac, acupuncture needles, awnings, and more; "B" lists bagpipes, books, and brooms; the sole "E" entry is egg cups. Even the rarest initial letters, such as "V" (valiha, a musical instrument from Madagascar), "X" (xylophones), and "Z" (zithers), are covered by bamboo. The only letter that lacks an entry is "Q," and one expects it has more to do with our linguistic limitations than the shortcomings of bamboo.
<TABLE cellSpacing=0 cellPadding=0 width=220 align=left border=0><TBODY><TR><TD width=210>
[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, Geneva]The speed of bamboo growth puts other plants to shame.[/FONT] <HR></TD><TD width=10>
</TD></TR></TBODY></TABLE>
About 1,000 species of bamboo grow throughout the world. Actually a grass, the plant exists naturally on every continent except Antarctica. It has found a niche for itself in sea-level tropics and on 13,000-foot mountain slopes. One of bamboo's less obvious gifts is its root system, which is more highly developed than it is in most other plants and provides strong protection against riverbank erosion, Janssen notes.
With a wide range of colors, shapes, and sizes, the various bamboo species share just one common characteristic: the woody and often strong stalk, called a culm. What makes the culm so extraordinary is its combination of lightness and strength.
<TABLE cellSpacing=0 cellPadding=0 width=260 align=right border=0><TBODY><TR><TD width=250>
[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, Geneva]People have used bamboo for every part of a house, including the roof of this building.[/FONT] <HR></TD></TR></TBODY></TABLE>
Nature's Miracle Material
Bamboo can outgrow any other plant in the world. It is as if its entire lifespan is one enormous growth spurt. To see for himself how fast bamboo can grow, Janssen once marked a stalk while visiting a bamboo plantation. He remembers taking a walk around the plantation and returning again to the marked stalk. "In two hours, it had grown above the mark by a few centimeters," he says. A Japanese scientist once measured what is believed to be the fastest growth rate for any bamboo. A culm of ma-dake, Japan's most common bamboo, grew nearly four feet in one 24-hour day.
<TABLE cellSpacing=0 cellPadding=0 width=260 align=left border=0><TBODY><TR><TD width=250>
[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, Geneva]China's Anlan Bridge was held up by bamboo cables for centuries.[/FONT] <HR></TD><TD width=10>
</TD></TR></TBODY></TABLE>
Bamboo Bridges
<HR>Some of the earliest of all suspension bridges were ones constructed with cables woven from bamboo strips. Throughout their long history, the Chinese have built suspension bridges to span fast-flowing rivers and deep ravines, and the Incas also designed hanging bamboo bridges as marvelous as those of the Chinese, Janssen notes.
In "China Bridge," a team of experts brought together by NOVA constructed a suspension bridge using bamboo cables to hang the draping structure. Cabled bamboo strips once held up the great Anlan bridge on the Min River, which historians consider one of the engineering marvels of the ancient world. The bridge hung from bamboo cables from roughly the third century until 1975, when steel cables replaced the bamboo.
<TABLE cellSpacing=0 cellPadding=0 width=260 align=right border=0><TBODY><TR><TD width=10>
</TD><TD width=250>
[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, Geneva]The suspension bridge built by NOVA's experts featured bamboo cables and a bamboo walkway.[/FONT] <HR></TD></TR></TBODY></TABLE>
The strength of this amazing grass comes from bundles of fibers running the length of the culm and held together by the plant's pith. Rope-makers cut the bamboo into thin strips, weave them together into a rope, and then braid several of these ropes together into a thick and extremely strong cable. Marco Polo, the 13th-century Italian visitor to China, described how fishermen used these extremely tough ropes to tow boats:
From Paper to Prescriptions
<HR>Bamboo has played a less spectacular but perhaps an even more important role in China's development of writing and printing. Long before the Chinese invented paper in the second century B.C., they scratched characters onto slips of green bamboo, and they made books by stringing these slips together with silk strands or sinew. Archeologists recently unearthed one such bundle of bamboo paper, containing over 300 slips, in a 2nd-century B.C. Han Dynasty tomb.
Chinese art and literature abounds with images of and references to bamboo. This humble grass often appears as a symbol of resistance to hardship, because one of the features of many bamboo varieties is that they remain green year round.
<TABLE cellSpacing=0 cellPadding=0 width=260 align=left border=0><TBODY><TR><TD width=250>
[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, Geneva]Most varieties of bamboo stay green all year long.[/FONT] <HR></TD><TD width=10>
</TD></TR></TBODY></TABLE>
Like other woods, the material also can be reduced to paper, and in India, it's still one of the most popular woods for paper-making. The amount of paper one can squeeze from an acre of bamboo typically cannot match the wood available from, say, an acre of pine, but bamboo has its own edge. A culm reaches full growth in a few months and can be harvested in a few years. A pine tree may need two decades to mature.
The versatile grass also has found its way into China's extensive herbal medicinal chest. Doctors use the rhizome of the black bamboo, mixed with other plants, to treat kidney ailments, and they prescribe the plant's secretion, called tabasheer, for coughs and asthma. Tabasheer also serves as a cooling tonic and even an aphrodisiac in Indian, Chinese, and other Asian cultures.
Chinese consider bamboo shoots a delicacy, in part because of the crispness of even the tenderest of shoots. Farmers walk barefoot on the ground to feel for the hard sprouts. To grow softer sprouts, they place a mound of earth on top of the emerging plant so it never encounters light. As desirable as the heart of an artichoke to Westerners, the plant's innermost growing tip is one of the delicacies often reserved for the Chinese market.
