FEATURE: Replicas of luxury items to go up in smoke during Tet

A craftsman makes paper models of luxury villas in Dong Ho village, Vietnam, on Jan. 12. The replicas are burnt by families as traditional votive offerings to ancestors during this week's Tet festival. PHOTO: AFP

Luxury flat screen TVs and mobile phones will all go up in smoke this Tet Lunar New Year as newly affluent Vietnamese burn paper models of the latest modern conveniences for their dead relatives.

In a sign of Vietnam's growing wealth, especially in the big cities, the product range of votive offerings burnt for passed ancestors has shifted from common household items to a catalogue of high-end luxury goods.

Among the latest paper and bamboo replicas meant to make life easier in the afterlife are models of new Japanese scooters, sleek Sony television sets and DVD players, karaoke sound systems and even multi-story family villas.

Under Vietnam's tradition of ancestor worship -- discouraged by the communist government but still widespread -- families at Tet burn these items to ritualistically send them through the smoke to the world of the dead.

"The Honda SH150 and Dylan models are now the favorite scooters for the departed," said craftsman Nguyen Huu Nang, 60, at a paper workshop in Dong Ho, a village outside Hanoi that specializes in making the paper objects, called hang ma.

"People now want more powerful and more expensive motorbikes," he said.

"We also sometimes make luxury cars, but only when we have a special order because a company director or a political leader has recently died," he said.

For centuries Dong Ho, a labyrinth of alleys and red-tiled roofs, has been famed for its traditional woodblock prints, depicting ancient folk tales with natural colors on rice paper to make artwork popular especially during Tet.

But tastes have changed and the number of households making traditional prints has dwindled from 150 in the 1950s to about five.

Today most families -- instead of chiselling woodblocks and mixing colors from indigo leaves and eggshell -- make paper mobile telephones and motorcycle helmets, which recently became compulsory in the world of the living.

Two after starting doi moi (renewal) market reform, Vietnam is undergoing rapid economic and social change, with annual GDP growth rates of more than 8 percent creating a new economic elite.

"In the 1990s people were content to provide quite basic hang ma items, such as bicycles and local currency," writes cultural anthropologist Shaun Kingsley Malarney in Vietnam -- Journey of Body, Mind, and Spirit.

"Ten years later some families are offering motorcycles, refrigerators and even cars, while others prefer to burn copies of the American dollar, which is regarded as a more stable currency than the dong," he said.

Families now upgrading every year, said the Dong Ho craftsman, as he used scissors and a glue gun to turn piles of cardboard -- mostly scrap paper from industrial packaging -- into rows of fashionably red motor scooters.

"The living are enjoying a comfortable life, and they want their dead relatives to feel good, too," he said.

Yet Vietnam, a country of 86 million, remains a developing and mostly rural economy with average incomes below US$900 per year.

The World Bank has praised Vietnam for achieving one of the world's fastest declines in poverty, with the ratio of people surviving on less than a dollar a day falling from 58 percent in 1993 to 16 percent in 2006.

But Vietnam's new wealth has not trickled down to everyone. The boom has fueled double-digit inflation that has made life harder for the poor.

A survey by the state-run General Statistical Office found that the richest 20 percent of households had incomes over eight times higher than those of the poorest 20 percent last year, state media reported.

Monthly surged above 14 percent last month compared with the same month last year and was expected to rise further as shops hiked prices ahead of Tet.

The spiralling prices of food, gasoline and other basic goods have fueled labor unrest, especially around Ho Chi Minh City.

In the year's first 20 days, more than 25,000 workers walked off the job in nearly 40 strikes, demanding higher pay and better conditions, mostly at Taiwanese and South Korean owned textile and shoe factories, the Saigon Times reported.

As Vietnam has industrialized, change has not spared the village of Dong Ho where families in past centuries, when they were not doing artwork, worked farming rice.

"We no longer have enough land to cultivate," said Nang, the craftsman.

Former fields have become industrial parks, and Nang said that at age 60 he is too old, and lacks the qualifications, to work in the factories.

Making the votive paper models is now his best option.

"I have to do something to survive, to support my family," he said.