Asia's flying masterpieces

With the arrival of warm weather, take a walk down to Taipei's Riverside Park (河濱公園) to see one of Asia's oldest pastimes -- kite flying. On gusty days at the park, the sky is virtually filled with kites of both Asian and Western design.

One version of history says Italian traveler Marco Polo brought a three-dimensional kite from China back to Europe in the 13th century, and from that point the kite followed two distinct paths of development.

Divorced from the constraints of the pastime's Asian traditions, the kite in the West underwent major transformations over the centuries and has even evolved into the extreme sports of paragliding and hand gliding.

Western kites tend to apply modern materials, such as nylon fabric and carbon-fiber tubes for both the flat and three-dimensional varieties of kite. In contrast, kites in Asia have emphasized a traditional appearance, while exploring the convergence of art and modern technology in the design. Asian kite designers have largely avoided hectic sport incarnations of kite flying, for fear that it detracts from the human aspect of this family-oriented pastime. Furthermore, making a kite by hand is an enjoyable modern family leisure time activity.

Younger generations, however, have tended to favor the more intense experience of flying Western kites.

Asian kite makers for hundreds of years have mostly used the favored regional building material, bamboo, to assemble kites. The reasons are obvious. Bamboo is widely used in the construction of buildings and other structures and can be found almost anywhere in the countryside.

More importantly, bamboo is highly flexible and extremely strong, which makes it ideal for creating practically any shape.

The shape and design of artistic kites vary between countries in Asia, but all retain a human touch, as opposed to mass-produced high-tech products that predominate in the West. Asian kites also typically feature pictures of animals or humans, whereas geometric patterns dominate in Western kites.

Kite designs throughout Asia have typically been hand-drawn. The Japanese, for example, apply bright Ukiyoe (浮世繪), or "floating world," paintings on a square or rectangular tetra kite. Other designs, such as black sparrows or red-crested cranes (丹頂鶴) are widely favored as well.

Some prominent Japanese kite makers favor redwood, instead of bamboo, for their hand-made kite frames and may produce only one or two kinds of kites with exactly the same hand-painted design (never in printed versions) in their lives. Kite makers would keep their trade secrets within the family, passing their skills down to subsequent generations.

Kite flying in Japan is often a team effort with large groups flying a huge kite. There are also kite-flying contests in which employees from a business form a team.

China has long been recognized as the kite's place of origin. Designs have included domestic animals and legendary monsters such as gigantic centipedes, dragons and phoenixes. Records for the length of kites are broken almost every year at the international kite festival in Beijing.

The kite making tradition is so dear to the Chinese that one family, called the Ha Family (哈氏), which has been in the trade for centuries in Beijing, has been forbidden by the Chinese government to sell or teach their trade to foreigners. For the most part, the kites sold to tourists in China can't fly and are only good as decoration.