The Climbing Fern and the Needle: Yan-Lipao Basketry of Southern Thailand

Somewhere in the forested highlands of Nakhon Si Thammarat or Phatthalung, a climbing fern is twisting through the canopy, its stem as slender as a piece of twine. It does not look like much from the outside. The outer husk is coarse, fibrous, unremarkable. But strip that husk away when the plant is still young and freshly cut, and what you find inside is a golden-brown core: smooth, supple, and strong in a way the rough exterior gives no warning of. That inner strip is yan-lipao. What happens to it after the stripping — a sequence of shading, cutting, smoothing, and weaving that can stretch across weeks — is one of southern Thailand’s most demanding and least-visible craft traditions.

What is yan-lipao, and where does it grow?

Yan-lipao belongs to the genus Lygodium, a family of climbing ferns found across tropical Asia. It grows wild in the forests of Thailand’s southern provinces — Nakhon Si Thammarat, Phatthalung, Songkhla, Satun, and further south toward Yala, Pattani, and Narathiwat. The plant climbs by wrapping its fronds around anything vertical it can reach, moving upward through the understorey in the same slow, patient way its preparation later demands of the weavers who use it.

There are two varieties that matter to the craft: a black-stemmed plant and a brown-stemmed one. The brown is preferred — it grows longer, tends to be more uniform in thickness, and produces strips with greater tensile strength. A weaver selecting from a pile of harvested yan-lipao is already making decisions that will determine the quality of the finished piece, long before the needle is picked up.

How is the fern prepared before a single stitch is woven?

The preparation is where most of the labour lives, and it must begin immediately. Yan-lipao dries out quickly once harvested; the outer husk can only be cleanly stripped while the plant is still fresh. Working methodically from joint to joint — the stem kinks at intervals, and breaking the fibre there would ruin the length — the craftsperson peels away the rough exterior and discards the soft pith inside. What remains is a thin, flexible ribbon of golden-brown inner fibre, still damp from the living plant.

These strips are then hung in the shade to dry slowly. Direct sun would make them brittle. The shade-drying preserves the suppleness that makes them workable, allowing the fibre to lose moisture gradually rather than contracting and splitting in the heat.

Once dry, the strips are cut to uniform lengths and drawn, one by one, through a small sharp hole punched into a piece of tin. This step — called chak liad — is the final calibration. As the strip is pulled through the hole, any irregularities in its width are trimmed away; the hole acts as a gauge, producing strips of consistent thickness that will lie flat and even in the finished weave. It is exacting, repetitive work, and it happens before the weaving begins. The craft has layers within layers of preparation that never appear in the finished object.

What does the weaving itself look like?

The frame that gives a yan-lipao basket or bag its structure is typically made from rattan or bamboo — a skeleton that the yan-lipao strips then cover completely. Using a blunt needle to thread the strip in and around the framework, the weaver builds the surface from the base upward, row by row. The strips are packed tightly, one against the next, until the rattan or bamboo beneath is invisible. The result is a surface that feels almost ceramic: smooth, cool to the touch, faintly yielding if you press it, with a warmth of colour that shifts between amber and gold depending on the light.

The traditional objects made from yan-lipao were the objects of a considered daily life: tobacco containers and betel-nut boxes for the household, stemmed trays and covered bowls for the temple, bird cages, and — for those with access to court artisans — fitted bags and containers mounted with gold or silver niello hardware. The combination of humble forest fibre and precious metal finish was not a contradiction but a deliberate statement, a way of elevating the material without disguising what it was.

At the pace this work proceeds, a single bag takes an experienced weaver a full month or more to complete. A skilled craftsperson might produce one or two pieces in that time.

Why did yan-lipao become the material of the royal court?

The craft’s association with Thai royalty traces back at least to the early Ratanakosin period. By the reign of King Rama V, yan-lipao basketry was being actively promoted by Chao Phya Yomarat, the royal governor of Monthon Nakhon Si Thammarat, who saw in the tradition a regional excellence worth preserving and presenting at court. The finely worked bags and containers that came out of Nakhon Si Thammarat’s workshops during this period were fitted with silver and gold niello clasps and handles that marked them as prestige objects — not imports from China or Europe, but something produced in the south of the kingdom itself.

By the mid-twentieth century the craft had contracted significantly, outpaced by machine-made goods and the economic pressures that flattened many regional crafts in the postwar decades. The revival came in the early 1970s, when Queen Sirikit, through the SUPPORT Foundation she established to preserve Thai handicrafts, initiated training programmes and organised purchasing networks for yan-lipao weavers in the south. The craft did not disappear. It contracted to a small number of communities who maintained it through difficult years, and those communities are still the source of genuine yan-lipao work today.

How can you tell a genuine yan-lipao piece from an imitation?

The surface is the first test. Genuine yan-lipao is packed tightly enough that the strips lie flush with one another, and the colour across the surface is uneven in the best possible way — the natural variation between strips means no two pieces are the same amber, the same gold, the same pale honey. Strips that have been artificially bleached or dyed an uniform tone have been post-processed in a way that genuine yan-lipao rarely requires. The material’s own colour, straight from the forest and the shade-drying, is already beautiful.

The second is weight and feel. A properly built yan-lipao piece has heft: the rattan or bamboo frame underneath adds structure, and the tightly packed surface has a slight rigidity that holds its shape. Pieces made from synthetic fibres or machine-woven imitations tend to be lighter and to flex more uniformly, without the slight texture variation that comes from working a natural fern.

For a broader guide to what makes genuinely handmade work from Thailand worth seeking out, the guide to buying Thai handwoven textiles sets out the questions worth asking before a purchase.

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The fern was always in the forest. Someone had to look at the rough outer stem, strip it back to the gold inside, and then find the patience — the months of shade-drying and chak liad and needle-work — to let that interior out. The yan-lipao shoulder bag carries that patience with it: a month or more of careful hands, compressed into an object that will outlast most of what surrounds it.