Basket Cases
This article was published in Nikkei Asia here in January 2024.
It looked for all the world like a giant half coconut, marooned on the sand. As I drew closer, I saw that it was, in fact, a large basket made from woven bamboo, though I still could not work out what it was doing on the beach in a remote part of central Vietnam. Then I peered over the rim, finding a couple of fishing nets and an oar stashed inside. It seemed that what I had stumbled across was a basket impersonating a boat.
The aphorism "They do things differently here" is one of the reasons why I love to travel. It allows you to marvel at how boundless human creativity is in addressing our common needs, hopes and dreams. And that is a useful guard against the groupthink that can take hold when people stay in the same place, 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 known as coracles had been used in both Europe and Asia by earlier generations, but surely as a species we had pretty much agreed the best shape for a boat at least two millennia ago -- and that it wasn't round. Could the rest of the world really have got seafaring geometry quite so wrong? Had the Vietnamese single-handedly discovered some arcane new laws of physics?
No, but they had discovered the French. It turns out that, during the colonial era -- from the mid-19th century to the mid-20th -- Vietnam's European rulers imposed a tax on boats. The Vietnamese did not want to pay it, but they needed to go fishing. So they decided to put to sea in giant bamboo baskets instead. Although these strange creations floated and were waterproof, the Vietnamese managed to convince the French that they were baskets not boats and were therefore tax-exempt.
The success of this tax dodge is a reminder that our most creative moments are often catalyzed by hardship -- they come when our livelihoods, or indeed our lives, are at stake. This 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 south of Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon), which were used by the North Vietnamese Viet Cong forces to thwart superior American firepower during the Vietnam War.
That conflict, and many others that the country has suffered in the last century, seem at least partly responsible for fostering a hardy, creative and entrepreneurial spirit that has made the Vietnamese economy the region's fastest growing in the last year.
After asking around near the beach for a while, I met Tung, a generously whiskered 50-something man with an impish grin and the patina of someone who has spent a good part of his life in the ocean air. He agreed to take me out for a spin in his brightly colored thuyen thung, as the boats are known. As we put to sea, he handed me the oar, and spin is exactly what we did, going round in circles as I attempted to row us forward, with my increasingly energetic strokes serving only to spin us even faster.
That would be useful if you were trying to convince a French colonial official that you were not in a real boat; less so when your primary goal is to go fishing. 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 to perform a kind of gentle, rhythmic soup-stirring. Contrary to all the laws of physics that I was familiar with, this miraculously propelled us forward.
In addition to avoiding taxes, the Vietnamese claim a couple of other advantages for their basket boats. They say their lightness helps them move more naturally on top of the waves, allowing fishing in shallower waters. The baskets are also less likely to capsize and much easier than conventional craft to get from the beach to the water.
It seems we often require urgency and necessity to drive us to think outside the box (or the boat). But the end result is innovative ways of doing things that others will build on in the future, benefiting a far larger swath of humanity than their inventors intended. As the French probably did not say when they first encountered the thuyen thung, "Vive la difference!"