As soon as you enter the village of Bor Sang, nine

miles east of Chiang Mai, you see them — hundreds of

them, standing out in the sun to dry and stacked row

upon row on display. Gaily decorated in vivid colors,

with designs of dragons or flowers. These are the famous

umbrellas of Northern Thailand, which have been made

According to local legend, umbrella-making first

began here because a wandering monk passed by on his

travels with a broken 'glot' or special monk's umbrella.

An old villager called Nai Peuak mended it for him, and

thought it would be a good idea if ordinary people as well

as monks could have these useful devices for keeping off

the sun and rain. So Nai Peuak became the first man to

make and sell Bor Sang umbrellas.

Today you can buy them in various sizes in paper,

cotton or silk, for only two or three dollars apiece.

here, and perhaps a few hundred more scattered in other

parts of the north — Lamphun, Lampang and Chiang

Rai. There are two demonstration centers in Bor Sang

where you can watch the umbrellas being made; one of

many.

wife and staunch co-worker a few years younger. They

have been turning out umbrellas for the past twenty

this craft today. In one month the couple can produce

The couple used to be rice-farmers, stopping for four

months every year to produce umbrellas, which earned

them enough extra cash to take them out of the strictly

subsistence-farming level and enabled them to buy the

occasional buffalo. But recently they gave up farming

altogether, and they now work more or less full-time,

seven days a week, in the larger of the two umbrella-

making centers.

In spite of the relatively small number of umbrella

craftsmen in Bor Sang, the competition is quite strong; as

in most trades, the more umbrellas one can make and

sell, the more money one can earn. The veteran crafts-

man just mentioned, proudly claims to be the only one

who can draw accurate pairs of dragons on umbrellas

straight off, without having to make a rough outline first!

Out of this man's eight children, two sons and two

daughters arc continuing in the trade. At least that's

better than none at all — and it should please Thailand's

Ministry of Industry, which is doing its best to keep this

craft going and has organized several training courses in

it.

The framework of the umbrellas is made entirely of

bamboo — the head or "duck-leg", the spokes and the

handle. Simple pole-lathes, of the type used in country

areas the world over, with a springy upper pole, string

stretching from it down to and round the work piece, and

from there to a foot-treadle below, are used to turn all the

circular parts. (Almost identical pole-lathes were used

until not so long ago to fashion the legs of Windsor chairs

in Buckinghamshire, just outside London).

For the paper umbrellas, 'sa' paper is used. The raw

material for this comes from the bark of the paper-

mulberry and other trees. The paper-making is quite a

complex process. The bark is first soaked in water for

twenty four hours, then boiled with wood-ash until it's

soft. After further boiling for another three or four hours,

it is rinsed, pounded and again put in water in large

shallow concrete trays. Next it is stirred and then sieved

onto rectangular metal screens and put in the sun to dry

for twenty minutes, forming the almost wafer-thin paper.

The paper is pasted onto the umbrella frames with a

whitish glue, layer after layer, until it's thick and strong

enough. The glue and paper are carefully smoothed by

hand during each application, until the paper is absolute-

ly taut and even. When everything is dry, the designs are

painted on swiftly and skilfully in oil colours. Each crafts-

man specializes in his or her own particular design —

flowers, dragons or whatever.

Who buys the umbrellas? In the past, it was mainly

Chinese merchants from Chiang Mai City and the

occasional tourists, local and foreign, passing through

the village. But nowadays export orders for the larger

sizes are coming in as fast as the umbrella-makers of Bor

Sang can turn them out — by the tens of thousands