The Bamboo Hat

30-Second Overview: Near Longdu Junior High School in Meinong, Kaohsiung, Lin Rong-chun has been splitting bamboo strips and weaving bamboo hats for over sixty years, starting from his teens¹. Xianglin Township in Hsinchu was once the capital of hand-woven bamboo hats in Northern Taiwan, with every household piling up curved bamboo and bamboo leaves on the streets². In Lung-chi Village, Taoyuan, at its peak, thirty households made bamboo hats, producing over a hundred daily; later, as the Linkou brick kilns shut down and nearby tea gardens shrank, the number of tea pickers dropped, and demand for bamboo hats plummeted³. In Dongshi, Taichung, Hakka "Hat Mamas" use the sheath of the curved bamboo shoot for the hat's surface and the strips of the black-leaf bamboo for the skeleton, requiring distinct material identification⁴. In 2024, the Legislative Yuan passed the amendment to the Indigenous Reserved Land Logging Ban Compensation Act, increasing compensation to 60,000 NTD per hectare; 85% of Taiwan's curved bamboo comes from these reserved lands—now even the upstream bamboo material is facing structural shortages⁵⁶. A Vietnamese imported coconut leaf hat sells for less than 70 NTD on PChome⁷, while the material and labor cost of a handmade bamboo hat is ten times higher. The bamboo hat hasn't disappeared from the fields; what has disappeared are the hands that know how to make them—and the entire upstream supply chain connected to those hands.

The Couple Next to Longdu Junior High

On March 12, 2017, blogger zoyo entered an old house near Longdu Junior High School in Meinong, Kaohsiung, to interview a couple locally known as "Grandpa and Grandma Bamboo Hat." Grandpa Lin Rong-chun was in his eighties; he had started weaving bamboo hats in his teens, totaling over sixty years. Grandma Hsiao Man-mei was responsible for sewing; the two worked on small stools in their living room¹.

Lin Rong-chun used a special model made of camphor wood to shape his bamboo strips, wrapping the thin strips around the mold circle by circle: this was the technique of a couple in Fenglin, Hualian, described by Hakka Television in 2020 as "the last survivors" in the local area⁸. The couple in Meinong was similar. In the footage, you could see the grooves on Lin Rong-chun's thumbnail from the bamboo strips, while a stack of bamboo leaves lay flat under a wooden board at Hsiao Man-mei's side, waiting to be tucked into the hat's skeleton.

Wikipedia's definition of a bamboo hat is brief: "A wide hat made of woven bamboo, conical in shape, using mature bamboo split into strips as the skeleton, layered with bamboo leaves or strips, and fixed with silk thread."⁹ This sentence takes ten seconds to write, but making one hat takes several hours.

By 2026, it is difficult to verify whether the couple in Longdu is still alive: apart from zoyo's 2017 blog post, no mainstream media has followed up on these masters who were not registered as Intangible Cultural Heritage preservers. In the same Meinong, not far from Longdu, the Guangjinsheng Paper Umbrella Shop has accumulated extensive coverage over twenty years because the second-generation inheritor, Lin Jung-chun, integrated oil-paper umbrellas into Jolin Tsai's music videos and LV product lines¹⁰. Whether there is a "cultural creativity pivot" determines if a craft has subsequent news archives: and for the traditional rough-work bamboo hat industry, there are almost none.

Hat Surface, Hat Skeleton, Black-Leaf Bamboo Strips: An Anatomy of a Hat

The National Palace Museum's Cultural Memory Bank record for the Dongshi, Taichung Hakka "Hat Mama" (Dabu Hakka: lib maˇ) breaks this seemingly simple conical hat into two parts: the hat surface and the hat skeleton. The hat surface uses the sheath of the curved bamboo (the outer shell peeled off the bamboo shoot): flattened, dried, and layered on top. The skeleton is the frame, made from thin strips split from the "black-leaf bamboo" (Wu Ye Zhu). Auxiliary materials include cotton thread and bamboo rings; tools include firewood knives, strip bridges, and sword gates⁴.

This is not just a "wenqing" (literary youth) packaging. Black-leaf bamboo and curved bamboo have different elasticity and fiber lengths; masters use different bamboo species for the skeleton and the surface leaves, distinguishing them by feel and experience. The difference between a rough-work bamboo hat and a fine-work bamboo hat is stated plainly in the records of Lung-chi Community, Taoyuan: local bamboo hats originated from the Qin and Chen families in Tudigongkeng making rough-work hats, and the Li family in Chituku making fine-work hats. The two families represent two technical lines³. The rough-work skeleton strips are thicker, have fewer layers, a larger hat surface, and are suitable for drying grain in the fields; the fine-work strips are denser, have more processing layers, are lighter to wear, and do not strangle the neck during long-term labor like tea picking.

The differences in form are not romantic local styles but craft inferred from function. The hat in the National Taiwan University of Science and Technology Agricultural Machinery Museum collection, as stated in the National Palace Museum's Cultural Memory Bank data card, has "different forms based on use and local differences"[^7]: Hats for drying grain in the fields are over 60 cm wide and cannot be ridden on a motorcycle; hats for picking tea in the mountains are smaller and denser so rain does not drip through the strip seams into the tea basket. The camphor wood models themselves are also size-specific; a master usually has three to five models at home, ranging from chi-er (approx. 36 cm) to chi-ba⁷.

The sewing part is another process. The cotton thread in Hsiao Man-mei's hand used to be coarse yarn cotton; now it is mostly nylon thread, for a simple reason: nylon does not rot in the rainy season, extending the hat's lifespan from two years to five⁸. Traditional waterproofing relies on tung oil, brushed onto the hat surface sheath; once dry, it becomes a pale yellow, semi-transparent thin shell. This oil layer is the same process used in Vietnam's nón lá¹¹, a shared prescription across the East and Southeast Asian rice culture circle.

From the Chushan County Training Institute to the Hakka TV Documentary: Other Masters That Must Be Named

To tell the story of the bamboo hat completely, the couple in Longdu is not enough. Taiwan's bamboo weaving craft has a longer lineage, which must be traced back to the Japanese colonial period.

Around 1937, the Taiwan Governor-General's Office established the "Chushan County Bamboo Craft Training Institute" in Zhushan, Nantou. This is the starting point of Taiwan's bamboo craft industrialization: according to the Taiwan Bamboo Industry Development Context compiled by the Taiwan Bamboo Association, although Taiwan has a history of using bamboo for hundreds of years, "industrialization has only lasted nearly 80 years"¹². National Treasure-level bamboo master Huang Tu-shan entered this training institute at age 14 in 1939 to study fine bamboo work; he is one of the few living witnesses from that era. Over 50 years, he taught over a thousand students, including Qiu Jin-duan, Lin Hsiu-feng, and Tu Su-ying¹³. The bamboo hat is not an isolated craft; it is a branch of Taiwan's entire bamboo weaving system: This system has Huang Tu-shan as its main trunk in terms of institutions, but for the "bamboo hat" branch of daily necessities, no training institution like Huang's was ever formed.

Heading south to Lung-chi, Tainan, in 2014, New Tang Dynasty Asia Television filmed Grandma Chen Lien-chin, aged 86¹⁴, her hands covered in calluses, her movements for making bamboo hats still agile, "taking over an hour to complete the preliminary work of one hat"; in the same footage, Chen Yu-tzu said, "When I was young, I watched cows and peeled (bamboo leaves) for my mother"—Lung-chi, Tainan is not a Hakka village, but a Minnan rural area; here, bamboo hat skills were imported during the Qing Dynasty, standing alongside the Hakka villages of Meinong and Xianglin as one of Taiwan's three major rough-work bamboo hat production areas. Also in Lung-chi, the five-generation inherited "Bai Zhu Yuan" (Hundred Bamboo Garden) run by Chang Chun-po now focuses on teaching experiences rather than production, with over a hundred types of bamboo in the park[^28]: This is another preservation path: transforming from a producer to an educator.

Heading north back to the Hakka Public Broadcasting Foundation. In June 2022, the Hakka TV documentary Chuan, Chuan Season 2 filmed the Miaoli couple Wu Chin-yun and Hsu Pao-mei, who have been weaving bamboo hats for over 50 years¹⁵; the next episode in the same series featured the "Happy Straw Raincoat Man" Chang Tien-fu, who said on camera, "This time I'm making the last one"[^30]: This phrase is the most common refrain in Taiwan's traditional crafts in the 2020s. Further east to Fuli, Hualian, New Tang Dynasty Asia filmed Hsü Kuei-chu in 2016, who persisted in handmade bamboo hats for 50 years, selling one for only 150 NTD¹⁶, "because that was the craft left by my mother, and inheritance cannot be interrupted." The Ministry of Education's Youth Development Agency's "Youth Community Participation Action 2.0" program's "Agricultural Technology Course—Fashionable Hats on the Head" listed Hsü Kuei-chu (Hat Mama) as an instructor, allowing students to start by recognizing curved bamboo and personally weave traditional bamboo hats¹⁷.

Stacking these names together: Huang Tu-shan (born 1926 / Zhushan), Chen Lien-chin (born 1928 / Lung-chi), Lin Rong-chun (born approx. 1932 / Meinong), Hsü Kuei-chu (born approx. 1940 / Fuli), Wu Chin-yun and Hsu Pao-mei (born after 1940 / Miaoli): The "last generation" of Taiwan's bamboo hats were born in the 1920s–1940s; in 2026, most of those still alive are in the 85–100 age range. The gap in the next generation is not imminent; it has already happened.

Xianglin, Lung-chi, Meinong, Fenglin: A Contour Line Drawn Along Farmland

Xianglin Township in Hsinchu County "was once the capital of hand-woven bamboo hats in Northern Taiwan"—this is the original text from the Rural and Culture publication of the Council of Agriculture (predecessor of the Ministry of Agriculture) in June 1996 (2007). The reporter at the time wrote: "Every household on the street piled up curved bamboo and bamboo leaves; the elderly and women were buried in the bamboo leaves, with a few families squatting in the hat piles every day to weave 5 or 6 hats"².

The record of the Lung-chi Community Development Association in Lung-ta District, Taoyuan City is more specific: "Before the 80th year of the Republic of China (1991), most people made a living weaving bamboo hat products. At its peak, about thirty households in the village engaged in handmade production, with a daily output of over a hundred hats, but now due to the successive shutdown of the Linkou brick kilns and the reduction of nearby tea gardens (due to the decrease in tea pickers), the demand for bamboo hats..."[^3]: This sentence ends unfinished because the association itself cannot continue.

Stacking these locations on a map reveals a strange line: Xianglin, Hsinchu; Lung-chi, Taoyuan; Miaoli (Yuanli's sedge hats are a neighboring industry, not bamboo hats)¹⁸; Dongshi, Taichung (Hakka Hat Mamas)⁴; Meinong, Kaohsiung (the couple in Longdu)¹; Fenglin, Hualian (the "last survivors" couple reported by Hakka TV in 2020)⁸. This line almost overlaps with the distribution of Hakka villages in Taiwan: but to be more precise, it is "villages within Hakka areas that were still engaged in large-scale farming." Minnan rural areas also wore bamboo hats in the past; the National Taiwan Museum of History collection item with registration number 2002.005.0211, collected from the countryside of Tainan¹⁹, is not from a Hakka settlement. The National Palace Museum's Cultural Memory Bank records bamboo hat styles for Minnan and Puyuma agricultural tools²⁰; the difference lies only in the degree of fineness and material preference.

In other words: labeling the bamboo hat as a "Hakka craft" is a strategic meta-narrative from the 1990s ethnic revival movement, not a historical fact. The reason Hakka villages still had a few old masters left into the 2020s is that the agriculture in these areas (tea gardens, rice paddies, brick kilns) lasted relatively late: Minnan rural areas industrialized earlier and mechanized faster, so the bamboo hat gap came earlier, and no one was left to make the final records.

The Broken Chain of Curved Bamboo: Starting from Indigenous Reserved Land Logging Ban Compensation

The disappearance of bamboo hat masters is the surface layer. The problem one layer upstream is: no one is cutting the material they need anymore.

Statistics from the Forestry Bureau of the Council of Agriculture show that 85% of Taiwan's curved bamboo comes from Indigenous reserved lands, mainly distributed in the mountains of Fuxing District, Taoyuan City, and Jianshi and Wufeng Townships, Hsinchu County⁵. On June 4, 2024, the Legislative Yuan passed the sixth amendment to the Indigenous Reserved Land Logging Ban Compensation Act in its third reading, increasing the logging ban compensation from 30,000 NTD per hectare to 60,000 NTD per hectare⁶. The legislative intent was to compensate Indigenous landowners for losses due to environmental protection preventing logging, but curved bamboo is a species that must be regularly harvested to maintain the health of the bamboo forest: if not cut for three years, old bamboo falls, new shoots do not emerge, and the entire forest becomes barren.

Chung Cheng University's Zheng Yang-yi pointed out in an opinion piece in Environmental Info Center: "The more compensation, the more barren"—after the increase, landowners are more inclined to take compensation and do not open up for bamboo harvesting; traditional tribal logging crews lost their jobs, and the downstream bamboo weaving, bamboo ware, paper umbrella skeletons, and bamboo hat skeletons all lost their material supply⁶. A group of Atayal young people organized the "Taoyuan City Fuxing Curved Bamboo Industry Development Association," advocating the importance of regular bamboo forest harvesting, and developing experience activities and the "Qengay" Atayal bamboo jewelry brand to try to break through²¹.

In April 2026, senior media person Chen Chuan-hsin wrote in a HakkaNews column, "From the Curved Bamboo Shoot Season, See the Silent Dilemma of Taoyuan-Hsinchu-Miaoli Bamboo Farmers": "Every late spring and early summer, when the peach blossoms bloom, is the season when curved bamboo shoots emerge from the soil..."[^20]: This dilemma of Taoyuan-Hsinchu-Miaoli bamboo farmers, described by the Hakka Affairs Council consultant, sees declining production year by year, young people not going up the mountains, and bulk merchants squeezed in profit by imported dried bamboo shoots from China: the downstream end of this supply chain is the bamboo strips in the hands of the bamboo hat masters.

Master gap + Bamboo material chain break = Double structural extinction. In the list of official subsidy programs of the Hakka Affairs Council, there are major items like "Hakka Cultural Renaissance Subsidy Guidelines" and "Subsidy for Promoting Public Hakka Language Barrier-Free Environments"²², but there is no comprehensive preservation plan for specific crafts like the bamboo hat. The Ministry of Culture's Intangible Cultural Heritage registration for "Bamboo Weaving Craft" focuses on individual artists like Lin Hsiu-feng of bamboo weaving in Changhua²³ and Lin Huang-chiao of sedge weaving in Taitung[^12]: Individual preservation certificates exist, but no one is preserving the "entire supply chain."

Still Teaching: A Living Map of Inheritance Institutions

The bamboo hat craft has not been officially registered by the Ministry of Culture as a national preservation technology like Lin Hsiu-feng's fine bamboo weaving, but in the 2020s, there are still sporadic training sites operating, summarized as follows:

• Zhushan, Nantou | Huang Tu-shan Bamboo Weaving Studio: Huang Chih-hsiang, son of artist Huang Tu-shan, inherited his father's craft. The studio is open by appointment daily from 09:00–12:00¹³. The National Taiwan Craft and Design Center simultaneously offers a "Bamboo Art Workshop" bamboo weaving practical class and published Introduction to Bamboo Vessel Weaving Techniques (by Yang Tsung-yu and You Kaiting, 2020)²⁴, which is the most complete bilingual textbook for the bamboo hat skeleton process.
• Fuxing, Taoyuan | Luchi Bamboo Tribe: Atayal young people formed the "Fuxing Curved Bamboo Industry Development Association," dedicated to preserving bamboo weaving culture, offering curved bamboo DIY experiences, and working with the "Qengay" bamboo jewelry brand²¹. The "Explore North横" official page positions this tribe as the representative of "Knowing Bamboo, Always Happy"[^25]: Elders have a saying: "Wherever there are Atayal people, there are curved bamboo."
• Dongshi, Taichung | Forestry and Nature Conservation Agency, Taichung Branch: Since 2024, the Dongshi Forestry Cultural Park has held multiple bamboo weaving experience courses guided by professional bamboo artists²⁵, against the backdrop of national policy promoting "application of domestic bamboo materials and forest sustainability," but the course content is mostly small daily life items, not complete bamboo hats.
• Fuli, Hualian; Miaoli; Lung-chi, Tainan: Hsü Kuei-chu, Wu Chin-yun/Hsu Pao-mei, Bai Zhu Yuan's Chang Chun-po: The former two connect with experience course students through Ministry of Youth Development Agency programs¹⁷; the latter focuses on teaching experiences²⁶; these are all "last generation masters + experience transformation" models, not true professional inheritance, but a cultural buffer.

It must be distinguished clearly: Bamboo weaving as an overall craft has the "Huang Tu-shan system" as its inheritance trunk in Taiwan, where you can see second and third-generation students; but the bamboo hat branch is a dead end in the bamboo weaving system with almost no "next generation" professionals: because the market for bamboo hats has long been eaten by imported goods, apprentices see no livelihood. Training institutes, experience classes, and documentaries are all important, but none can replace "someone making a living from this."

The Economic Truth: How Much is a Handmade Bamboo Hat Worth

Search "Vietnamese bamboo hat" on PChome or Feebee, and you will see 1 chi 4 (approx. 42 cm) coconut leaf hats selling for 68 to 115 NTD, mostly with bright oil, customizable for DIY, marketed as performance props and children's sun protection⁷. The price range for bamboo woven hats is slightly higher, but still mostly under 200 NTD, and most items labeled "bamboo woven" are actually made in Vietnam or China²⁷.

Contrast this with handmade costs: A master can weave at most 5 to 6 hats a day², with working hours starting at ten hours. Material costs (curved bamboo, black-leaf bamboo strips, cotton thread, tung oil) calculated at the minimum basic hourly wage of 190 NTD times 10 hours, the single hat wage floor is close to 400 NTD: not counting materials, mold depreciation, or shipping. Traditional pure handmade bamboo hats have retail prices mostly between 600 and 1500 NTD after 2020; the main customers are no longer farmers, but museum collections, TV drama props, traditional weddings ("Xie Mei Li" requires giving a bamboo hat), and instructors for cultural experience courses.

In other words: The opponent of the handmade bamboo hat is not the Vietnamese bamboo hat, but "no one needs a bamboo hat." Farmers wear plastic hats (sunproof, washable, 20 NTD per hat); tourists and children wear imported Vietnamese goods; museums buy one hat for collection and leave it for 20 years. Those willing to pay 1500 NTD for a handmade bamboo hat are only cultural heritage preservation units, cultural creativity brands (used for wedding photos, cafe decorations), traditional performance troupes, and a few old farmers. This market is too small to support a young person entering the industry.

The Thumb Scratched by Bamboo Strips

Back to the living room next to Longdu Junior High. The end of the 2017 interview article wrote: "Grandpa started weaving bamboo hats in his teens; calculating it, it's been over sixty years."¹ Lin Rong-chun did not win awards, nor was he registered as an Intangible Cultural Heritage preserver. He is not a National Treasure-level artist: the titles given by the Hakka Affairs Council and Ministry of Culture mostly fall on a few individuals like Lin Hsiu-feng of Changhua bamboo weaving²³ and Lin Huang-chiao of Taitung sedge weaving²⁸; he is not on the list.

But he is by the fields. A hat he made, sold to a tea farmer in the neighboring village, used for five or six years, worn out and brought back to him for repair. He repairs it, and the tea farmer wears it for another five years. This cycle is not written in any collection database. The bamboo hat in the National Taiwan Museum of History collection, registration number 2002.005.0211, has the creator field written as "Unknown"¹⁹—this is how most bamboo hats are named in museums: Unknown.

Not truly unknown, but no one thought it necessary to record the name back then. Bamboo strips are split from the bamboo, leaves are picked up from the bottom of the bamboo grove, cotton thread is bought from the grocery store, the master squats at his own door to finish one hat, and sells it to the neighbor who comes to the door. No brand, no number, no author.

Comparison: Vietnam's nón lá, Japan's Sugigasa, The Shared Cone of East Asia

Vietnam's nón lá is also a conical bamboo hat, but the form is sharper, lighter, and the hat surface uses palm leaves rather than curved bamboo sheaths—Vietnam Airlines' official travel guide calls it part of "Vietnamese traditional clothing," with daily usage far higher than in Taiwan¹¹. In Ho Chi Minh City, on Hanoi's streetside stalls, you can see women wearing nón lá riding motorcycles, selling flowers, carrying loads every day; even the ao dai (formal female attire) is paired with nón lá²⁹.

Where is the difference? Vietnam's nón lá is still an active daily item; masters have a market, and young people have a reason to learn; Taiwan's bamboo hats exited mainstream daily use in the 1980s, and the remaining masters are the "last generation" rather than the "contemporary generation." Japan's Sugigasa (made of sedge grass) is similar to Taiwan's situation; most cities only have traditional festivals, monk pilgrimages, and Noh theater stages still using it; some local governments have listed it as "Intangible Folk Cultural Property" and subsidized apprentice system inheritance³⁰—this is the comprehensive preservation framework that Taiwan lacks as of 2026.

Bamboo hat styles in Southern China (Guangdong, Fujian, Zhejiang) are closer to the rough-work bamboo hats of Xianglin and Lung-chi in Taiwan; from the perspective of ethnic history, these crafts landed and took root across the Taiwan Strait with Min-Hakka immigrants, but in their homeland, they also face the double blow of mechanization and young people not entering the industry—East Asia's conical hats are different tributaries of the same river, now shallow together.

The Last Blow of Climate

Typhoon Gaemi severely damaged the mountain areas of Taoyuan, Hsinchu, and Miaoli in July 2024; there is no official data on the area of fallen curved bamboo, but Atayal tribal logging crews reported in early spring 2025 that the "harvested material volume was 30% less than previous years" during the curved bamboo shoot season³¹. Extreme climate is a fatal blow to bamboo material that requires "mature, straight, uniform fibers"—fallen curved bamboo has damaged fibers and cannot be used for hat skeletons, only as fuel or bamboo shoots.

Master aging, market shrinkage, material chain break, climate change—these four curves bend downward simultaneously in the same decade. The cone is still there, the skeleton technology is still on the cards of museums and memory banks, but the type of person whose thumbnail is scratched by bamboo strips—the youngest among them is already in his seventies this year.

Further Reading

• Taiwan Flower Cloth——A craft similarly "labeled as Hakka" in the 1990s, behind which are the layered memories of different ethnic groups living together
• Taiwan Tea Culture——The decrease in tea pickers directly pulled away the market end of the bamboo hat
• Map of 16 Indigenous Cultures in Taiwan——The source of Yuanli sedge hats is Puyuma women, not Han Chinese

References