Sky-Piercing Bamboo

Sky-Piercing Bamboo

　　The *Tengyue Prefecture Annals* compiled during the Qing Dynasty’s Qianlong era described “the sky-piercing bamboo of Longchuan’s Shanmulong, also known as jointless bamboo…”. The eminent modern scholar Mr. Li Genyuan, in his *Annotations on Maps of Military and Border Affairs in Western Yunnan*, identified it as a “specialty” unique to Longchuan.

　　 　　However, regrettably, the people of Shanmulong do not recognize jointless bamboo; instead, they refer to a type of bamboo that does not fork or branch—commonly known as hemp bamboo—as sky-piercing bamboo.

　　 　　Hemp bamboo gets its name because it is most suitable for stripping to make bamboo fibers used in twisting ropes and weaving straw sandals. But it does have joints. They are just spaced very far apart, some as long as two or three feet. Young hemp bamboo does not sprout branches on the joints, and from a distance, it truly looks jointless—smooth and straight as it stretches from root to tip, pointing directly at the blue sky. Of course, there’s no need to worry about it actually piercing the heavens or skewering the sky dome, but its imposing verticality is no exaggeration. Calling it sky-piercing bamboo is quite fitting.

　　 　　The Lisu people of Husa, on the other hand, call a type of small, thin bamboo—related to what the Han Chinese call matting bamboo—jointless bamboo.

　　 　　This matting bamboo is the little brother of the bamboo family, with the stoutest specimens only as thick as a muzzle-loading gun barrel. It grows up to about twenty feet tall. It thrives in cool, damp, nutrient-rich areas, often growing in clusters of several generations, with fifty to a hundred plants in a clump. This matting bamboo has an even thickness along its stem, with inconspicuous joints—only faint lines that are barely visible until you look closely. It doesn’t branch when young, and even at the top, it only has a few sparse twigs. Its bark is thin and soft; twist the two ends and it naturally becomes a bamboo fiber rope. The nearly non-existent septa inside the nodes are essentially “dissolved” by the twisting, leaving the whole stalk hollow from top to bottom—so much so that it seems genuinely to be a jointless, truly node-free bamboo.

　　 　　Matting bamboo is tough and durable, outlasting even the best rattan fiber in terms of lifespan under sun and rain. It’s said that the famous Husa rattan bridges of olden times were woven from twisted matting bamboo. Mountain vines and rattan fibers rot quickly upon contact with water. Even the smartest person wouldn’t risk their life on them. So using the resilient matting bamboo—dubbed jointless bamboo—for ropes and bridges is truly the “wise choice.”