Bamboo Wonders

Kam Tin, once in ten years. A temporary bamboo altar and opera house — five storeys, nearly 3,900 square metres, about 30,000 poles — certified the world’s largest of its kind. Raised for Tai Ping Qing Jiao, used for ritual and Cantonese opera, then taken down. If this craft leaves Hong Kong, we may not see a structure like it again. What the image records is not only size. It is a living room for gods and opera, raised by hand in a New Territories village, large enough to be a world record and fragile enough to vanish. Architecture here is ceremony. Ceremony here is architecture. Both stand only as long as the bamboo, the clan, and the last masters still agree to raise them.