Bamboo Hat

30-second overview: Near Longdu Junior High School in Meinong, Kaohsiung, Lin Rongchun began shaving bamboo strips and weaving bamboo hats in his teens, and kept at it for more than sixty years¹. Qionglin Township in Hsinchu was once the stronghold of handwoven bamboo hats in northern Taiwan; every household along the street was piled with makino bamboo and bamboo leaves². At its peak, Kengzi Village in Luzhu, Taoyuan, had thirty households making bamboo hats, producing more than a hundred a day. Later, as the Linkou brick kilns shut down and nearby tea plantations shrank, the number of tea pickers fell too, and demand for bamboo hats dropped directly³. The Hakka "lip ma" of Dongshi, Taichung, uses makino bamboo shoot sheaths for the hat surface and thin strips of black-leaf bamboo for the hat-frame skeleton; even the materials require specialized division and identification⁴. In 2024, the Legislative Yuan passed the third reading of an amendment raising compensation for logging bans on Indigenous reserved land to NT$60,000 per hectare. Eighty-five percent of Taiwan's makino bamboo comes from Indigenous reserved land, meaning even the furthest upstream bamboo supply has entered a structural shortage⁵⁶. A Vietnamese coconut-leaf conical hat imported and sold on PChome costs less than NT$70⁷; the material and labor cost of a handmade bamboo hat is more than ten times higher. Bamboo hats have not disappeared from the fields. What is disappearing are the hands that know how to make them, and the entire supply chain upstream from those hands.

The Couple Beside Longdu Junior High

On March 12, 2017, the blogger zoyo walked into an old house near Longdu Junior High School in Meinong, Kaohsiung, to interview a couple known locally as the "bamboo-hat grandpa and grandma." The grandfather was Lin Rongchun, then in his eighties. He had been weaving bamboo hats since his teens, for more than sixty years by any count; the grandmother, Xiao Manmei, handled the stitching. The two worked on small stools in their living room¹.

The special mold Lin Rongchun used to shape shaved bamboo strips was made of camphor wood. He set the fine bamboo strips around the mold, loop by loop. This was also the method used by the husband-and-wife team in Fenglin, Hualien, whom Hakka TV in 2020 described in its own words as the "few remaining" practitioners locally⁸. The couple in Meinong belonged to the same world. In the footage, Lin Rongchun's thumbnail is visibly scored with marks from the bamboo strips, while a stack of bamboo leaves by Xiao Manmei's hand lies flattened under a wooden board, waiting to be tucked into the hat frame.

Wikipedia's definition of a bamboo hat is very brief: "a broad hat woven from bamboo, conical in shape, made by splitting mature bamboo into bamboo strips for the frame, then attaching layer upon layer of bamboo leaves or bamboo strips and fixing them with silk thread."⁹ That sentence takes ten seconds to write; making one hat takes several hours.

By 2026, verifying whether the Longdu couple are still alive is not easy. Apart from zoyo's 2017 blog post, no mainstream media subsequently followed these craft masters, who were never registered as cultural-heritage preservers. In the same Meinong, not far from Longdu, the Guang Jin Sheng paper-umbrella shop accumulated extensive coverage over two decades because second-generation owner Lin Rongjun put oil-paper umbrellas into a Jolin Tsai music video and an LV product line¹⁰. Whether a craft has a point of contact for a "cultural-creative turn" determines whether it has a continuing news archive. Traditional coarse-work bamboo hats have almost none.

Hat Surface, Hat Frame, Black-Leaf Bamboo Strips: The Anatomy of One Hat

The National Cultural Memory Bank's record of the Dongshi, Taichung Hakka "lip ma" (Dapu Hakka: lib maˇ) divides this plain-looking cone into two parts: the hat surface and the hat frame. The hat surface uses the shoot sheath of makino bamboo, the outer shell peeled from a bamboo shoot, which is flattened, sun-dried, and layered. The hat frame is the skeleton, made with fine strips split from "black-leaf bamboo." Auxiliary materials include cotton thread and bamboo rings; tools include a billhook, strip bridge, and jianmen⁴.

This is not lifestyle packaging. Black-leaf bamboo and makino bamboo differ in elasticity and fiber length. The frame bones and surface leaves use different bamboo species, and the craft master distinguishes them by touch and experience. The difference between a coarse-work bamboo hat and a fine-work bamboo hat is stated bluntly in records from the Kengzi community in Luzhu, Taoyuan: local bamboo hats originated with the Qin and Chen families of Tudigongkeng making coarse-work hats, while the Li family of Chituci made fine-work hats. The two families represented two technical lines³. Coarse-work hats have thicker bamboo strips in the frame, fewer layers, and a larger hat surface, making them suitable for drying grain in the fields. Fine-work hats use denser strips and more processing layers; worn on the head, they are lighter, so tea pickers and long-duration laborers do not strain their necks.

Differences in form are not a romantic matter of local style; they are craft deduced backward from use. The National Cultural Memory Bank data card for a hat held by the Agricultural Machinery Exhibition Hall at National Pingtung University of Science and Technology states plainly that "forms differ according to use and locality"¹¹. A hat for drying grain in the fields can be more than 60 centimeters wide and cannot be used while riding a scooter; a hat for picking tea in the mountains must be one size smaller and more densely made, so rainwater does not drip through the gaps between bamboo strips into the tea basket. Camphor-wood molds themselves come in different sizes. A craft master's household usually has three to five molds, ranging from 1.2 chi, about 36 centimeters, to 1.8 chi⁷.

Stitching the hat is another process. The cotton thread in Xiao Manmei's hand used to be coarse cotton yarn; today it is mostly nylon thread. The reason is simple: nylon does not rot during the rainy season, and the life of a bamboo hat can be extended from two years to five⁸. Traditional waterproofing relies on tung oil, brushed onto the shoot sheaths of the hat surface. Once dry, it becomes a pale yellow, translucent shell. This same process is also used for the Vietnamese nón lá¹², a shared formula across the rice-farming cultural sphere of East and Southeast Asia.

From the Zhushan County Training Institute to the Hakka Public Communication Foundation Documentary: Other Masters Who Must Be Named

To tell the full story of bamboo hats, the Longdu couple alone is not enough. Taiwan's bamboo-weaving craft has a longer trajectory, and it must begin in the Japanese colonial period.

Around 1937, the Taiwan Governor-General's Office established the "Zhushan County Bamboo Craft Training Institute" in Zhushan, Nantou. This marked the starting point of the industrialization of bamboo craft in Taiwan. According to the Taiwan Bamboo Society's "Development Trajectory of Taiwan's Bamboo Industry," although Taiwan has used bamboo for over a century, "industrialization has only existed for nearly 80 years"¹³. National-treasure bamboo-weaving master Huang Tu-shan entered the institute in 1939 at age fourteen to study fine bamboo work; he is one of the few living witnesses who came from that era into the present. Over more than fifty years, he taught more than a thousand students, including Qiu Jinduan, Lin Xiufeng, and Tu Suying¹⁴. The bamboo hat is not an isolated craft; it is one branch of Taiwan's broader bamboo-weaving system. Institutionally, that system has Huang Tu-shan as a main trunk, but in the everyday-utensil branch represented by the "bamboo hat," no training institution comparable to Huang's lineage ever formed.

Moving south to Longqi, Tainan, New Tang Dynasty Asia Pacific Television filmed eighty-six-year-old Grandma Chen Lianqin in 2014¹⁵. Her hands were covered with calluses, yet her movements in making bamboo hats remained nimble; "it takes more than an hour just to complete the preliminary work for one hat." In the same footage, Chen Yuzi says, "When I was little and tending cattle, I peeled [bamboo leaves] for my mother to make them." Longqi, Tainan, is not a Hakka village; it is a Hoklo rural community. Bamboo-hat skills had already been introduced here in the Qing dynasty, and Longqi stood alongside the Hakka villages of Meinong and Qionglin as one of Taiwan's three major coarse-work bamboo-hat production areas. Also in Longqi, Zhang Junbo of the five-generation "Hundred Bamboo Garden" now emphasizes educational experiences rather than production; the park has more than one hundred bamboo species¹⁶. This is another path of preservation: transforming from producer into educator.

Returning north to the Hakka Public Communication Foundation: in June 2022, season two of its documentary Chuan, Chuan filmed the Miaoli couple Wu Jinyun and Xu Baomei, who had been weaving bamboo hats for more than fifty years¹⁷. The next episode in the same series featured the "happy rain-cape man," Zhang Tianfu, who said on camera, "This time will be the last one I make"¹⁸. That sentence is among the most common lines heard in Taiwan's traditional crafts in the 2020s. Farther east in Fuli, Hualien, New Tang Dynasty Asia Pacific filmed Xu Guizhu in 2016, still preserving handmade bamboo-hat skills after fifty years; one hat sold for only NT$150¹⁹. "Because it is the craft my mother left behind, the transmission cannot be interrupted." The Youth Development Administration of the Ministry of Education's "Youth Community Participation Action 2.0" course, "Agricultural Skills: Fashionable Bamboo Hats Worn on the Head," lists Xu Guizhu, "Hat Mom," as the instructor, guiding students from learning about makino bamboo to weaving a traditional bamboo hat by hand²⁰.

Place these names together: Huang Tu-shan, born 1926, Zhushan; Chen Lianqin, born 1928, Longqi; Lin Rongchun, born around 1932, Meinong; Xu Guizhu, born around 1940, Fuli; Wu Jinyun and Xu Baomei, born after 1940, Miaoli. Taiwan's "last generation" of bamboo-hat makers was born in the 1920s to 1940s. Those still alive in 2026 are mostly between eighty-five and one hundred. The rupture in the next generation is not about to happen; it has already happened.

Qionglin, Kengzi, Meinong, Fenglin: A Contour Line Drawn Along Farmland

Qionglin Township in Hsinchu County "was once the stronghold of handwoven bamboo hats in northern Taiwan." These are the original words from the June 2007 issue of Rural and Culture, published by the Council of Agriculture, predecessor of the Ministry of Agriculture. The reporter wrote at the time that every household on the street was piled with makino bamboo and bamboo leaves; elderly people and women bent over piles of leaves, and a few households still squatted among stacks of bamboo hats every day, weaving five or six hats².

The records of the Kengzi Community Development Association in Luzhu District, Taoyuan City, are even more specific: "Before the 80th year of the Republic [1991], most households made bamboo-hat and bamboo products for a living. At the peak, about thirty households in the whole village engaged in handmade production, with daily output reaching more than one hundred hats. But today, because the Linkou brick kilns successively shut down and nearby tea plantations decreased in area (causing a reduction in the tea-picking population), demand for bamboo hats..."³ The passage trails off, because even the association could not continue saying it.

Overlay these places on a map and a strange line appears: Qionglin in Hsinchu; Kengzi in Luzhu, Taoyuan; Miaoli, where Yuanli is known for rush hats and mats, an adjacent industry rather than bamboo hats²¹; Dongshi in Taichung, with its Hakka lip ma⁴; Meinong in Kaohsiung, with the Longdu couple¹; Fenglin in Hualien, where Hakka TV in 2020 reported on a "few remaining" couple⁸. This line almost overlaps with the distribution of Hakka villages in Taiwan. More precisely, however, it is the distribution of "Hakka villages where large-scale farming still continued." Hoklo rural communities also wore bamboo hats in the past. The National Museum of Taiwan History collection item registered as 2002.005.0211, acquired from the Tainan countryside, did not come from a Hakka settlement²². The National Cultural Memory Bank's records of Hoklo and Pingpu Indigenous farming tools both include bamboo-hat forms¹¹; the difference lies only in the degree of fine work and preferred materials.

In other words, labeling bamboo hats as a "Hakka craft" is a strategic metadiscourse of the ethnic revival movement of the 1990s, not historical fact. The reason a few elderly masters still remained in Hakka villages into the 2020s is that agriculture in these places, including tea plantations, rice fields, and brick kilns, lasted relatively late. Hoklo rural communities industrialized earlier and mechanized faster, so the rupture in bamboo hats came earlier as well, leaving no one behind for final documentation.

The Makino Bamboo Supply Break: Starting from Logging-Ban Compensation on Indigenous Reserved Land

The disappearance of bamboo-hat masters is the surface layer. One level further upstream lies the problem: the material they need is no longer being cut.

According to statistics from the Forestry Bureau of the Council of Agriculture, 85% of Taiwan's makino bamboo comes from Indigenous reserved land, mainly distributed in Fuxing District of Taoyuan City and the mountain areas of Jianshi and Wufeng townships in Hsinchu County⁵. On June 4, 2024, the Legislative Yuan passed the third reading of an amendment to Article 6 of the Compensation Act for Logging Bans on Indigenous Peoples' Reserved Lands, raising compensation from NT$30,000 to NT$60,000 per hectare⁶. The legislative intent was to compensate Indigenous landowners for losses caused by environmental-protection restrictions on logging. But makino bamboo is a species that must be harvested regularly to maintain bamboo-forest health. If it is not cut for three years, old culms collapse, new shoots fail to emerge, and the entire bamboo grove is effectively abandoned.

In an opinion piece for the Environmental Information Center, National Central University's Cheng Yang-yi identified the problem as "the more compensation, the more barren." After the increase, landowners became more inclined to collect compensation and not open their land for bamboo harvesting. Traditional Indigenous bamboo-cutting work crews lost their work, while downstream bamboo weaving, bamboo utensils, paper-umbrella ribs, and bamboo-hat frames all lost material at once⁶. A group of young Atayal people organized the Taoyuan Fuxing Makino Bamboo Industry Development Association to advocate the importance of regular bamboo-forest harvesting, while developing experiential activities and the Atayal bamboo-jewelry brand "Qengay" in an attempt to break through²³.

In April 2026, veteran media worker Chen Quanxin wrote in his HakkaNews column, "Seeing the Silent Plight of Bamboo Farmers in Taoyuan, Hsinchu, and Miaoli from the Makino Bamboo Shoot Season": "Every year in late spring and early summer, when shell ginger flowers bloom, it is the season when makino bamboo shoots emerge from the soil..."²⁴. This Hakka Affairs Council advisory committee member described the plight of bamboo farmers in the Taoyuan-Hsinchu-Miaoli production area: output declining year by year, young people unwilling to go into the mountains, and wholesalers' profits squeezed by imports of dried bamboo shoots from China. At the very end of this supply chain is the bamboo strip in the bamboo-hat master's hand.

A rupture in masters + a rupture in bamboo supply = double structural extinction. The Hakka Affairs Council's official list of subsidy programs includes major items such as "Hakka Cultural Renaissance Subsidy Guidelines" and "Subsidies for Promoting a Barrier-Free Public Hakka-Language Environment"²⁵, but it has no comprehensive preservation plan for a concrete craft like bamboo hats. The Ministry of Culture's intangible-cultural-heritage registration for "bamboo weaving" is concentrated on individual artisans such as Lin Xiufeng of Changhua bamboo weaving²⁶ and Lin Huangjiao of Taitung rush weaving²⁷. There are certificates for individual preservers, but no one is preserving the entire supply chain.

People Are Still Teaching: A Living Map of Transmission Sites

Bamboo-hat craft has not been formally registered by the Ministry of Culture as a national-level preservation technique in the way Lin Xiufeng's fine bamboo weaving has, but in the 2020s a few scattered teaching sites still operate. They can be summarized as follows:

• Zhushan, Nantou | Huang Tu-shan Bamboo Weaving Studio: Huang Qixiang, son of master Huang Tu-shan, has inherited his father's craft; the workshop is open by appointment from 09:00 to 12:00 daily¹⁴. The National Taiwan Craft Research and Development Institute also offers hands-on bamboo-weaving classes through its "Bamboo Craft Workshop" and published Introductory Techniques for Weaving Bamboo Objects, by Yang Zongyu and You Kaiting, in 2020²⁸. It is the most complete Chinese-English teaching material for the bamboo-strip techniques needed for bamboo-hat frames.
• Fuxing, Taoyuan | Luma Bamboo Tribe: Young Atayal people formed the Fuxing Makino Bamboo Industry Development Association to preserve bamboo-weaving culture, offer makino bamboo DIY experiences, and work in tandem with the "Qengay" bamboo-jewelry brand²³. The official "Explore the Northern Cross-Island Highway" page positions this community as a representative of "knowing bamboo brings lasting joy"¹³. Elders have a saying: "Where there are Atayal people, there is makino bamboo."
• Dongshi, Taichung | Taichung Branch, Forestry and Nature Conservation Agency: Since 2024, Dongshi Forestry Culture Park has held multiple bamboo-weaving experience courses guided by professional bamboo artisans²⁹. The background is national policy promoting "domestic bamboo material application and forest sustainability," but most course content involves small everyday objects, not complete bamboo hats.
• Fuli, Hualien; Miaoli; Longqi, Tainan: Xu Guizhu, Wu Jinyun and Xu Baomei, and Zhang Junbo of Hundred Bamboo Garden. The first two have received students through Ministry of Education Youth Development Administration programs²⁰, while the latter emphasizes experiential teaching¹⁶. These all represent the model of "last-generation masters + transformation into experiences." This is not true vocational transmission, but a form of cultural buffering.

What must be clearly distinguished is this: as an overall craft, bamboo weaving in Taiwan has the "Huang Tu-shan system" as a main line of transmission, with second- and third-generation craft students visible. But the bamboo-hat branch is the dead end within the bamboo-weaving system that has almost no "next generation" of professional practitioners. The market for bamboo hats was already consumed by imports long ago, and apprentices see no livelihood there. Training institutes, experience courses, and documentaries are all important, but none can replace the fact of "someone making a living from this."

The Economic Truth: What Is a Handmade Bamboo Hat Worth?

Open PChome or the Feebee price-comparison site and search "Vietnamese bamboo hat." You will see 1.4-chi, about 42-centimeter, coconut-leaf conical hats selling for NT$68 to NT$115. Most are coated with glossy oil, can be painted DIY, and are marketed as performance props or children's sun hats⁷. Bamboo-woven hat prices are slightly higher, but still mostly under NT$200; most products labeled "bamboo-woven" are in fact contract-made in Vietnam or China³⁰.

Compare that with handmade costs: one craft master can weave at most five to six hats a day², with labor time starting at ten hours. Materials include makino bamboo, black-leaf bamboo strips, cotton thread, and tung oil. Counting only labor at the minimum basic hourly wage of NT$190 multiplied by ten hours, the wage floor for one hat already approaches NT$400, before materials, mold depreciation, or shipping. After 2020, retail prices for traditional fully handmade bamboo hats mostly fell between NT$600 and NT$1,500 each. The main customers were no longer farmers, but museum collections, television-drama props, traditional weddings, where bamboo hats are given as part of the "matchmaker-thanking gift," and instructors in cultural experience courses.

In other words: the opponent of the handmade bamboo hat is not the Vietnamese conical hat, but the fact that "no one needs bamboo hats". Farmers wear plastic hats, which block sun, can be washed, and cost NT$20 each. Tourists and children wear Vietnamese imports. A museum buys one hat for its collection and leaves it there for twenty years. Those willing to pay NT$1,500 for a handmade bamboo hat are limited to cultural-heritage preservation units, cultural-creative brands using them for wedding photography or cafe decor, traditional performance groups, and a small number of old farmers. The market is too small to support a young person entering the trade.

The Thumb Scraped by Bamboo Strips

Return to the living room beside Longdu Junior High School. The 2017 interview ends with this line: "Grandpa began weaving bamboo hats in his teens, and by the count, it has been more than sixty years."¹ Lin Rongchun did not win awards and was not registered as a preserver of intangible cultural heritage. He was not a national-treasure craft artist. The titles granted by the Hakka Affairs Council and the Ministry of Culture mostly went to a small number of figures, such as Changhua bamboo-weaving artisan Lin Xiufeng²⁶ and Taitung rush-weaving artisan Lin Huangjiao²⁷. He was not on those lists.

But he was at the edge of the field. A bamboo hat he made would be sold to a tea farmer in a neighboring village, used for five or six years, then brought back to him for repair once worn through. After he repaired it, the tea farmer would wear it for another five years. This cycle was never written into any collection database. The National Museum of Taiwan History collection record for its bamboo hat, registration number 2002.005.0211, lists the creator as "unknown"²². This is how most bamboo hats in Taiwan are named in museums: unknown.

They are not truly unknown. It is that no one at the time thought their names needed to be recorded. Bamboo strips were shaved from bamboo, leaves were picked from beneath bamboo groves, cotton thread was bought from a general store, and the master squatted at his own doorway to finish a hat, then sold it to a neighbor who came by. There was no brand, no serial number, no author.

Comparison: Vietnam's Nón Lá, Japan's Sugegasa, and East Asia's Shared Cone

Vietnam's nón lá is likewise a conical bamboo hat, but its form is sharper and lighter, and its surface uses palm leaves rather than makino bamboo shoot sheaths. Vietnam Airlines' official travel guide calls it part of "Vietnamese traditional dress," and its rate of everyday use is far higher than in Taiwan¹². On roadsides in Ho Chi Minh City and Hanoi, women wearing nón lá can be seen every day riding scooters, selling flowers, and carrying shoulder poles; even the áo dài, Vietnamese women's formal dress, is paired with the nón lá³¹.

Where is the difference? Vietnam's nón lá remains an active everyday object, so craft masters have a market and young people have a reason to learn. Taiwan's bamboo hat exited mainstream daily life in the 1980s; the remaining masters are a "last generation," not a "contemporary generation." Japan's sugegasa, woven from sedge grass, is in a situation similar to Taiwan's. In most prefectures, it now appears mainly in traditional festivals, monks' pilgrimages, and Noh stages, while some local governments have listed it as an "intangible folk cultural property" and subsidized apprenticeship-based transmission³². This is the comprehensive preservation framework Taiwan still lacked as of 2026.

The bamboo-hat forms of southern China, including Guangdong, Fujian, and Zhejiang, are closer to the coarse-work bamboo hats of Qionglin and Kengzi in Taiwan. From the perspective of ethnic history, these crafts crossed the Taiwan Strait and took root with Hoklo and Hakka migrants, but in their places of origin they face the same double pressure of mechanization and young people's reluctance to enter the trade. East Asia's conical hats are different tributaries of the same river, and all are now running shallow.

The Final Blow of Climate

In July 2024, Typhoon Gaemi severely damaged the mountain areas of Taoyuan, Hsinchu, and Miaoli. There are no official figures for the area of fallen makino bamboo, but Atayal tribal bamboo-harvesting crews reported during the early-spring bamboo shoot season of 2025 that "the amount of harvested material was 30% lower than in previous years"²⁴. Extreme climate is a fatal blow to bamboo material that must be "mature, straight, and even in fiber." Fallen makino bamboo has damaged fibers and cannot be used for hat frames; it can only become fuel or bamboo shoots.

Aging masters, a shrinking market, a broken raw-material chain, and climate change: these four curves are all bending downward within the same decade. The cone remains, and the frame-making technique remains on cards in museums and memory banks. But the sort of person whose thumbnail is scored by bamboo strips, even the youngest among them is already in their seventies this year.

Further Reading

• Taiwanese Floral Cloth — another craft object that was "Hakka-labeled" in the 1990s, though behind it lies layered shared memory among different ethnic groups
• Taiwanese Tea Culture — the reduction of the tea-picking population directly pulled away the market end for bamboo hats
• Cultural Map of Taiwan's 16 Indigenous Peoples — the source of Yuanli rush hats was Pingpu Indigenous women, not Han people

References