Basket Cases
This story was featured in Nikkei Asia here in January 2024.
From a distance it looked for all the world like a giant half-coconut, marooned on the sand. But as I drew closer, I realised that it was in fact a huge basket made from woven bamboo, though I still couldn’t work out what on earth it was doing on this remote beach in central Vietnam. When I finally reached it, I had a peek over the rim and was surprised to find a fishing net and an oar inside - it seemed that what I had stumbled upon was a boat masquerading as a basket.
"They do things differently here" is one of the reasons why I love to travel. Visiting foreign lands shows you just how creative us humans can be in responding to our common needs and dreams. It can also be a valuable safeguard against the groupthink that can set in when you stay in the same place for too long, the risk you run of starting to believe that how things are done there is the best - or even the only - way to do them.
But this time I was not so inspired. Circular boats, or oracles, have long been and gone in both Europe and Asia, most of the world having pretty much agreed on the best shape for a waterborne craft about two millennia ago - and it certainly wasn’t round. I found it a little hard to believe that the Vietnamese had now discovered some new law of physics that overturned this.
They hadn’t. But they had discovered the French. During the colonial era, Vietnam's European occupiers had imposed a tax on boats, one which the locals understandably did not want to pay. But they did still need to go fishing, so they decided to weave giant bamboo baskets to put to sea in instead. Although these floated and were waterproof, the Vietnamese successfully argued to the French that they were quite obviously baskets and not boats and thus should be exempt from any levies.
The success of this ploy is a reminder that it is often hardship that catalyses our most creative moments, the spark of genius ignited only when our livelihoods - or indeed our lives - are at stake. It was a point that had been driven home to me a couple of days earlier as I crawled through the remains of the ingenious network of tunnels that snakes through the countryside north of Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon). They had been dug by the Viet Cong forces during the Vietnam War and used to evade detection, stage ambushes and store supplies. They basically allowed a whole army to disappear underground at will and played a key role in thwarting superior American firepower. That conflict, and the many others that Vietnam has suffered in the last century, seem at least partly responsible for fostering the hardy, creative, and entrepreneurial spirit that permeates so much of the country. A spirit that today helps make the Vietnamese economy the fastest growing in the region.
After asking around near the beach for a while, I met Tung, a generously whiskered 50-something with an impish grin and the patina of someone who has spent a good deal of his life exposed to the ocean air. He agreed to take me out for a spin in his brightly coloured thuyen thung, as the boats are known. As we put to sea, he handed me the oar and then spin is exactly what we did, my increasingly energetic strokes serving only to twirl us around in ever faster circles.
Tung gave a good-natured chuckle as he motioned for me to return the oar. Adjusting his seating position, he reached over the front of the boat and started to perform a kind of gentle, rhythmic soup-stirring of the sea instead. Contrary to all the laws of nature that I was familiar with, this somehow propelled us forwards.
In addition to avoiding taxes, the Vietnamese cite a couple of other advantages that their basket boats have over more conventional vessels: their lightness allows them to stay on top of the waves and so permits fishing in shallower waters, they’re less likely to capsize, and they are much easier to get from sand to sea and vice-versa. So all-in-all a perfect example that, though we may often require urgency and necessity to really think outside the box, the results can be innovative new ways of doing things that bring all kinds of unexpected benefits. As the French probably did not say when they first encountered the thuyen thung, "Vive la difference!"