Only a small collection of special bamboo things this month:
- The Asahi Shimbun featured a very stylish bamboo bento box. Further investigation revealed a whole range of them. I know where I’m going next time I’m in Kyoto.
Bamboo bento box
- Couldn’t resist this one: greased bamboo pole climbing. The competition is part of the Naga (India) Hornbill Festival. The Nagaland Post reported that the winner took home the equivalent of about A$270. The poles are nearly 5 metres high.
- Medical texts written on bamboo slips were recently unearthed during construction of a subway in Chengdu, Sichuan province, China. The 920 slips are thought to date from the Western Han dynasty (202 BC- 9 AD). Strips of bamboo were the standard writing material during the Han dynasty.
- More creative bamboo furniture features on Design Boom. This one sells for about A$3,500.
- This unmanned bamboo raft just turned up on the shores of India, near the northern tip of Sri Lanka. Authorities suspect it came from Burma.
- Last month there was a note about the problems of bamboo flowering in Burma. To address a similar problem in India, the Agricultural ministry is set to approve a program to combat bamboo flowering and the expected subsequent rat infestations in Arunachal Pradesh state, in the north-east.
- Korea-based ex-pat bloggers Eat Your Kimchi have a WTF series that featured bamboo salt toothpaste this month.
- If there’s not enough bamboo stuff for you in this post you could look at Design Boom‘s top 10 bamboo designs for 2013. Only a few of them have featured here.