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Crafts in crisis

THE FIRST BOWL is a picture of simple elegance with its strands of meticulously interwoven bamboo. The second is plastic, tinted an unnatural green. To Ngoc Thanh raises the plastic bowl, as if to honour a champion. 'We used to use the bamboo bowls, but you had to throw them out every year,' Thanh says. 'Now we use these.'

Handcrafted bamboo bowls are on the endangered list in Vietnam. So are ceramic pots, ornamental paper, clothing of various materials, ancient musical instruments and countless more unique arts and crafts that are either dead or dying in this rapidly developing country.

Hundreds of villages all over Vietnam have traditionally specialised in one particular craft, usually driven by daily demands, such as washing food. Now the demand is for modern, industrial products, threatening the survival of these villages and their singular crafts.

Thanh, secretary general of the Association of Vietnamese Folklorists, says no one knows how many of these villages have vanished already, but more than 100 are listed as being in danger.

Trieu Khuc, on the outskirts of the capital Hanoi, is one of them. At its peak in the 1930s, virtually all Trieu Khuc residents were craftspeople. They produced more than 20 different items, from silk strings for musical instruments to decorative tassels for hats. Now, only six families in the village of 6,000 people do the three or four surviving crafts.

'Society has no demand any more,' says Giang Nguyen Thai, an artist whose family is among the few still in the business. 'It's very sad.'

At the other end of Hanoi is Lai Phu Ban's home. Ban, 81, says he's Vietnam's only remaining practitioner of kim tien, the making of a golden paper from tree bark. Kim tien paper can be traced back 500 years. It was once used for the royal pronouncements of the old Vietnamese dynasties. Its ornate designs feature dragons flying across clouds, overlaid by Chinese script.

Ban, holding up a 250-year-old sample, says he learned the craft from his family as a child - the way most crafts have been passed through generations. But his own children could see no future in it, and didn't pick it up. He has had discussions with government officials and museum directors about ways to preserve kim tien, but 'it seems the government has no intention of restoring it', he says.

The endangered list, meanwhile, isn't limited to handicrafts. Vietnam's traditional music is also in trouble. One case is the ty ba, a four-stringed mandolin-like instrument shaped like a pear. Its history in Vietnam may go back as far as 1,000 years. Only about 40 Vietnamese can still play it.

One is Pham Thi Hue, who teaches the instrument to 10 students at the Hanoi National Conservatory of Music. She says the problem isn't just the small number of players, but that many new ty ba players are influenced by the Chinese style of playing a similar instrument. Hue says she must fight to ensure students learn the uniquely plaintive vibrato of the Vietnamese style, shaped by the number of frets and the way the instrument is held. 'Sometimes I feel lonely,' she says.

Traditional Vietnamese court music known as nha nhac is in a similar quandary. Recognised by Unesco as a world cultural heritage, nha nhac is being kept alive by a small group in the old royal capital of Hue. Public performances, as with the ty ba, are limited to special events.

Critics say modern influences have fundamentally changed the nha nhac performance style, in effect, negating the tradition. It's this tendency to adapt the old ways to new tastes that may be a more insidious danger to traditional arts and crafts, some experts say.

Vietnam's handicraft villages aren't without their success stories. Almost 300 have recovered by tailoring their products to other parts of the country, tourists and the export market, where they have an exotic appeal.

The village of Van Phuc, near Hanoi, is one example. Its silk-tailoring industry has taken off, and now attracts 10,000 foreign tourists a year. And its number of silk shops has grown from 105 to 136 in just the past three months. The nearby village of Bat Trang, meanwhile, is gaining fame for its pottery products.

In some cases, however, observers say that craftspeople are substituting generic or foreign styles for traditional Vietnamese ones, in the interest of pleasing the market. An image of an American celebrity might replace a Vietnamese cultural symbol such as the buffalo on a piece of clothing, for example.

A recent Hanoi statistics office survey found that 80 per cent of the production households in craft villages near the capital have been continually changing the patterns and colours of their products to meet market demand. 'It's that stretch of time, a sense of tradition and the care of a craftsman that gives an object its soul,' says sociologist Ngo Quoc Dong. Nevertheless, adapting to the times is essential to the economic survival of handicraft villages. The trick is to preserve the cultural integrity of the crafts in the process, as those in the prosperous silk village are credited with doing.

'Many craftspeople can't find the balance between traditional and modern demands,' says Nguyen Van Huy, director of Hanoi's Museum of Ethnology. 'We need to help them to find a market, and to make high-quality products.'

The Vietnamese government's Cultural Heritage Department says it has a plan to do exactly that. Three years ago, a law was passed outlining preservation-minded measures such as documenting and classifying crafts. More than 8,000 cultural festivals often showcasing traditional arts and crafts are held every year across the country. Vietnamese officials also are pushing for Unesco recognition of other performance arts, such as water puppetry, quan ho folk singing, gong performances and epic storytelling.

The department lacks the funds and staff to prop up every threatened handicraft village or art form, however. For those crafts that appear to be irredeemably obsolete, Vietnam's cultural preservation apparatus - museums, universities, specialised institutes - lacks the scope to document them all. The fight for preservation is often left to individuals still practising an endangered craft or interested foreign parties.

As for the general syndrome, Thanh returns to the example of the plastic bowl. His association works hard to help worthy crafts, and the villages that practise them, to survive. These days, Vietnamese people want to use products that are convenient and useful, he says.

'I'm not sad, because life never repeats itself,' says Thanh. 'Vietnam is developing, so it has to pay a price by accepting the loss of outdated things.'

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