Over the past few years, several friends and peers had suggested that I write a book on
building with bamboo. Each time such a suggestion was made, I used to recall the wise
words of a professor who was famous for his lectures. Whenever pressured to write a
book based on his brilliant lectures, he used to decline, saying: “If I present my lectures,
my students will hear also my uncertainties, my doubts, the limits of science; but if I
were to write them down, then these are exactly what would become invisible.”
Then, why did I write this book now? There were some very persuasive arguments
from certain quarters in favor of writing it. One was that the insights and knowledge on
bamboo collected during my 25 years of research, guidance of projects and visits to
bamboo-growing countries all over the world should not be allowed to go unrecorded.
Another was that other areas – timber, for example – too started in a similar way with
one author writing a book while the area was still small enough to be captured by the
efforts of one. Finally, I thought that some information contained in my large collection
of gray literature should be revealed to all interested researchers.
This book has its origin in an e-mail I received in December 1996 from the Hawaii
Chapter of the American Bamboo Society, with an invitation to present a series of lectures
on all aspects of bamboo. An exchange of ideas followed through several e-mails about
the scope of the lectures, the topics to be covered and the time to be spent on each. It
was decided that an emphasis should be laid on bamboo’s mechanical properties, joints
and structures. I spent a considerable part of January-June 1997 preparing lecture
materials and charting out the course.