Tweet
Email
Link
Hong Kong
—
Every year, in the middle of summer, hundreds of Hong Kong construction workers and engineers walk up some 200 steps to Ching Lin Terrace in the seaside neighborhood of Kennedy Town.
There, in one of the city’s temples, they gather and pay their respects to Lo Pan, a legendary Chinese carpenter from the Zhou dynasty and patron saint of builders and contractors.
Even in the sweltering heat, workers cram into the tiny temple’s smoke-filled foyer with incense and candlesticks in hand. Bowing several times, they chant slogans in honor of the construction deity’s birthday and pray for a stable year of work.
“I always tell people that Lo Pan is like our Michelangelo. He is a designer, an architect and an engineer,” said Lawrence Ng, president of the Hong Kong Construction Sub-Contractors Association, which represents the city’s waterproofing, metalwork and scaffolding professionals, among others.
“We must pay respects to the workers who came before us, and Lo Pan is our ‘sifu’ (master).”
Worshipping Lo Pan has taken on a particular significance in today’s precarious economy, Ng said.
Since the Covid-19 pandemic, the city has seen a decline in large scale construction projects, leaving many laborers without steady, long-term employment. Among them are the city’s “spidermen” — thousands of construction workers trained in the ancient technique of bamboo scaffolding.
On a slope behind Lo Pan temple is a towering residential building covered in a familiar sight to those who’ve walked Hong Kong’s streets: bamboo poles arranged in a distinct grid-like formation.
The crisscrossed structures, in which each pole is fastened with nylon ties, are ubiquitous across the city’s dense, vertical urban landscape. These scaffolds are erected on skyscrapers, hundreds of feet high, and encased in fabric safety nets forming colorful cocoons of green, blue and purple.
Smaller bamboo contraptions often poke out of windows, or cover air conditioning units and balconies.
Bamboo scaffolding is not only used in the construction of new buildings, but the renovation of thousands of high-rises and historic tenements (“tong lau”) every year.
Popular in Hong Kong for over a century, the technique’s origins in Chinese construction date back to at least the Han dynasty, around 2,000 years ago. The method was also widely used in mainland China until government regulations started calling for steel and aluminum scaffolds, in keeping with international norms, in the 1990s.
Bamboo, however, remained the go-to material in Hong Kong, and has been used to build some of the city’s tallest skyscrapers, like Norman Foster’s HSBC headquarters and parts of the 88-floor International Finance Centre.
Aside from helping develop Hong Kong’s modern structures, bamboo has also played an integral role in building temporary Cantonese opera theaters.
These traditional theaters, made entirely out of the plant, are built on special occasions like the birthdays of local deities or the Hungry Ghost Festival.
Scaffolding has, in turn, become part of the city’s visual language. Being lightweight, customizable and relatively affordable, bamboo stands in stark contrast to its mainstream counterpart, metal.
“Steel is relatively stiff and strong, but it’s less flexible than bamboo,” said Goman Ho, a structural engineer at British engineering firm Arup, who has more than three decades of experience overseeing the development of tall buildings in the city, including the 283-meter (928-foot) tall Cheung Kong Center.
“Bamboo on the other hand, has its own craftsmanship,” he added. “You can build a lot of beautiful scaffolding in ways you’d never think of.”
‘It’s culture we need to maintain’
Whether in traditional or modern construction, handling the long poles requires specific skills and intuition, which can take months or years to achieve.
“Sometimes people spend one, two, three or even four years learning bamboo scaffolding and may not become masters,” said Ho Ping-Tak (no relation), Chairman of the Hong Kong and Kowloon Bamboo Scaffolding Workers Union.
“But with metal, the technical requirements are lower. If you have the strength, you can generally meet the requirements in a much shorter time.”
The largest member of the grass family, bamboo is combustible, susceptible to deterioration and weaker in rain, raising legitimate questions about its durability, Arup’s Ho said.
“We need to find ways to overcome it,” he said of these challenges, suggesting that poles could be coated with epoxy or plastic solution to prevent erosion.
“It’s culture we need to maintain,” Ho added.
But keeping the tradition alive is challenging. The industry comprises an aging workforce –– many, like 78-year-old Leung Siu Wai, among the dozens of senior bamboo scaffold workers paying respects to Lo Pan, are close to retirement. New talent is also lacking, said Ng.
“It’s hard to get young people to enter,” he added. “Young people in Hong Kong don’t want to do physically demanding work, or work that gives them an identity they feel uncomfortable with.”
Discussions on safeguarding the practice resurfaced earlier this year when the Hong Kong government’s Development Bureau announced that 50% of new public building projects erected from March onwards would need to use metal scaffolding to “better protect workers” and align with modern construction standards in “advanced cities.”
The notice sparked concern among some Hong Kong residents, even though the policy will only impact “one or two new building projects” this year, according to statement.
The bureau later confirmed to CNN that only one public project would be affected in 2025. Nonetheless, some residents have taken to social media to lament what they believed to be the beginning of the end of bamboo scaffolding.
“This is your sign to film bamboo scaffolding while you still can,” wrote a Hong Kong videographer in an Instagram post that garnered over 20,000 likes. “Truly one of Hong Kong’s quiet wonders. And soon, it’ll just be part of the past.”
The storied building technique has also been celebrated on the global stage, presented as part of the Hong Kong pavilion at this year’s Venice Biennale –– the world’s largest architecture exhibition.
In May, a sprawling bamboo scaffold was built in the courtyard of Venice’s Campo della Tana, as part of a showcase exploring the diverse and often juxtaposing aspects of public space in Hong Kong, with a focus on threatened heritage.
Its curators said their proposal for the pavilion was finalized in January, two months before the government announced its move to adopt more metal scaffolding in construction.
“We were a bit shocked, to say the least, because we had planned for this without knowing (the government’s announcement) was coming,” said Ying Zhou, an architect and one of the curators.
“So immediately, we were like, ‘Oh what does our thing now say?’ It takes on a whole different kind of importance, especially when we bring it to a place like Venice.”
Eleven bamboo “sifus,” or masters, traveled to Venice to build the structure. Watching them in action, Zhou’s Italian counterparts were, she said, impressed with the way the material was assembled so quickly and precisely –– without much calculation.
“These pre-modern technologies are never recognized in a standardized world, because you have steel, you have concrete, you have numbers that are calculable,” she said.
“And here we have something that even the Italians are like, ‘Oh, we need your structural engineer to certify (it).’”
Thirty-six-year-old Over Chan, a bamboo scaffold worker who builds structures for external repair work, claims that recent industry-wide discussions about fatal accidents on construction sites have prompted more government intervention. (There were 24 deaths related to bamboo scaffolding from January 2018 to August 2025, according to Hong Kong’s Labour Department).
“When I was starting out as a worker, we didn’t even have to wear shirts, but now, we’re required to wear our uniform, have good manners, and so on –– this ultimately allows us to rise above the competition.”
“Bamboo is not unsafe,” Ho, the chairman of the workers’ union, said, emphasizing the importance of workers fastening themselves to the wooden structures.
“It’s fine to use metal scaffolding –– we’re not saying that metal scaffolding is a competing technique, but if (the government) makes an announcement without much explanation…it gives the public the wrong impression that bamboo is unsafe, which has huge implications.”
Hong Kong’s Development Bureau told CNN that adopting metal scaffolding in construction is just one of many ways to improve site safety.
“Provided relevant legislative requirements on bamboo scaffolds and metal scaffolds are fulfilled, both types of scaffolds are safe,” the bureau said in an email, adding that the government has “no intention to phase out the adoption of bamboo scaffolds.”
Many large-scale construction projects in Hong Kong already incorporate a hybrid of bamboo and steel scaffolding, the union leader Ho said, with metal bars fixed to the ground supporting wooden structures higher up.
He estimates that, currently, 80% of scaffolds are created using bamboo, while 20% use metal or a hybrid of materials.
Chan, who remains eager and optimistic about the trade, said he has started taking courses on metal scaffolding to stand out in the workforce, despite his belief that bamboo isn’t going anywhere.
“Over the past few years, there’s been this feeling in Hong Kong about needing to preserve what’s left of the city’s identity,” he said.