Bo Sang
Handicraft village where artisans still hand-paint bamboo-and-paper umbrellas one by one.
Location
About this audio guide
This guide to Bo Sang in Chiang Mai traces a craft back to a monk, Phra Inthaa, who legend says brought a paper umbrella home from Burma over a century ago and recognized that every material inside it grew around his own village. It follows how families divided the work of splitting bamboo, beating bark into paper and hand-painting each umbrella, building a trade that once employed over a hundred craftspeople shipping tens of thousands of umbrellas a year. Listen for how the arrival of cheap factory umbrellas changed who still picks up the brush today.
This audio guide was created using AI.
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