Shaping change

For generations, around 70 per cent of the inhabitants of Quảng Phú Cầu, a village near Hanoi in Vietnam, have worked in the production of incense sticks.

They harvest the bark of local trees, which is cut down to size and dyed a vivid fuchsia pink or vibrant red; pink to symbolise the lotus (Vietnam’s national flower), or red for the country’s national flag. Then comes the drying, with great, bright fans splayed in bunches under the hot sun.

Finally, the sticks are coated in incense powder before being packaged up and sold, to be burned during Lunar New Year, Vietnam’s biggest holiday.

It’s an industry that has been thriving – until recently, when new importation rules from a key market and an exodus of young workers to the city saw sales and production plummet.

Manufacturers needed to modernise – quickly. Age-old methods were replaced with machines, which saw production increase twenty-fold. Today, a smaller group of companies, working as a cooperative, produce 50,000 incense sticks a week to sell wholesale to a more localised client base.

It’s a successful pivot for the village of Quảng Phú Cầu, which far from abandoning tradition, has embraced innovation to safeguard its cultural identity – and build a sustainable economic future.

Around the world, communities are fighting to remain culturally rooted and economically resilient. In a landscape of shifting markets, technologies and demographics, protecting traditional skills and practices – which often have a minimal impact on the environment and are deeply community-orientated – will require them to bridge the gap between heritage and progress, just as the people of Quảng Phú Cầu have.

This award-winning photograph is from ‘Life in Colour’, the fourth season of the Hamdan bin Mohamed bin Rashid al Maktoum International Photography Award (HIPA) Archive. The Climate Tribe has partnered with HIPA, leveraging the power of photography to inspire global awareness of sustainability and advance climate action.