Bird tenders are very finicky in selecting bird cages. It is not accidental that they select the cages made by the craftsmen in Vac Village. These cages satisfy their three requirements: durability, beauty and luxuriousness. These criteria have created the brand name of a craft village.
Vac Village or Canh Hoach Village is situated in Dan Hoa Commune, Thanh Oai District, Hanoi. It has traditional crafts, such as making fans, conical hat frames, statues and specifically, bird cages.
The whole commune has four villages, Canh Hoach, Vu Lang, Tien Lu and Phu Tho with 2,340 households of which over 400 households are engaged in making bird cages. Canh Hoach Village alone has over 100 households engaging bird cage building and this craft brings each household an income of 5-10 million VND per month.
Visiting the house of artisan Nguyen Van Nghe in Canh Hoach Village we saw that bird cages were piled up on both sides of the path. Nghe was preparing to pack products to transport to Ho Chi Minh City. He said that the craft of making bird cages in Vac Village has existed for a long time and is passed down from generation to generation. Vac villagers are proud to say that bird cages made there won medals at the exhibitions in Hanoi during the French domination.
To meet the criteria of durability, beauty and luxuriousness the craftsmen in Vac Village must undertake many steps, such as whittling the bamboo splints to make the cage’s bottom and making and decorating the brims and assembling the parts. The bamboo and rattan used to make the cages must be taken from the forests in the northern mountainous provinces, such as Hoa Binh and Cao Bang. The bamboo must be soaked, boiled and fumigated to resist termites and woodworm, using the secret methods of each family. Thousands of splints must be whittled and polished to be straight and have a uniform length. However, Nghe said that a difficult step is to carve the hem of the cage’s brims. Using a little knife, the craftsmen can carve very small decorative patterns such as a poem in Chinese script, dragons, unicorns, tortoises, phoenix’, plants, grass and leaves. It is interesting that the cage makers must have knowledge of the figure and habits of each variety of birds to build cages suitable for the birds.
Coming to Vac Village today people cannot help being astonished with the strong development of this craft village. Bird cages with delicate carved patterns made by the villagers are available in all parts of the country, satisfying the pastime of raising birds of the Vietnamese people.
Source: VNP
