A whole street, hung with hand-painted umbrellas

Before even entering Bo Sang, what one sees first are the umbrellas — a whole street hung end to end with them, red, blue, painted over with flowers and birds, their colours almost unreal in the January Chiang Mai sun. The air is dry and warm, carrying the faint smell of mulberry paper and paint. The craftsmen beneath the umbrellas do not look up, their brushes drawing line after line on the umbrella faces, the strokes falling almost without a tremor.

Bo Sang is the umbrella village near San Kamphaeng in Chiang Mai, where umbrella-making has gone on for over two hundred years. The ribs are pared from bamboo, the faces sheets of handmade mulberry paper, the patterns all painted on by hand, stroke by stroke. At the January umbrella festival the whole village lays this craft out on the street — but not for show; they make these every day anyway, only in these few days everything happens to be hung out for passers-by to see.

Crouching at one stall to watch a long while. An elderly craftswoman is threading a white umbrella, dozens of fine threads crossing between the bamboo ribs; she can thread them without looking, her fingers as if owning a memory of their own. Done threading, the lacquer applied, she looks up and asks whether one would like something painted on the face.

Watching her dip the paint, her wrist sinking, a line falls onto the umbrella face from start to finish without a single tremor. That is not talent but decades — the same motion she has surely made hundreds of thousands of times, until the body remembers better than the mind. Every craftsman on the street is like this, quietly painting time, stroke by stroke, into umbrella after umbrella.

The paint's smell is faint, mixed with the warm scent of bamboo and mulberry paper sunned all day. She paints unhurriedly, yet each stroke lands steadily, the rim of a petal coming round in an arc smooth as if it had always grown there. The sun slants onto the umbrella face, the fresh-laid colour bright, not yet dry.

She thought a moment, then painted on that small umbrella a flower one could not name. Carrying the still-wet umbrella out of Bo Sang, it is light, light to the point of almost no weight — yet I think you too will understand that that light single stroke took her decades to learn to paint so smoothly, so effortlessly. Some lightness is bought with very heavy time.